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The Interests of the Republic of Letters in the Middle East, 1550–1700

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Sonja Brentjes
Sonja Brentjes
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
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Abstract

The “raison d'être” of this paper is my dissatisfaction with current portrayals of the place and the fate of the so-called rational sciences in Muslim societies. I approach this issue from the perspectives of West European visitors to the Ottoman and Safavid Empires during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I show that these travelers encountered educated people capable of understanding and answering their visitors' scholarly questions in non-trivial ways. The travels and the ensuing encounters suggest that early modern Muslim societies and their institutions, their ways of producing knowledge, the types of their knowledge, and their material resources contributed important elements to various early modern West European approaches to gaining knowledge about nature, history, and politics.

Type
Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1999 , pp. 435 - 468
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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