The Persisting Spectre of Cultural Decline

Abstract

This article examines how historiography has interpreted the development of Muslim scholarship in early modern North Africa. It focuses on the continuing influence of what I call the “decline narrative” on both national historiographies and Western specialist studies. Elaborated in the context of French colonialism and consecrated by nationalist-cum-reformist discourses, the denunciation of the centuries preceding colonial conquest as an epoch of decadence has hardly been challenged. Beginning with the French historian and sociologist Jacques Berque (1910-95), however, there was a vivid interest amongst social scientists in early modern Islamic culture. The main part of the paper will be dedicated to a methodological analysis of some of these works, and, in the concluding section, I will discuss the degree to which the study of the diffusion of Islamic literacy in rural areas may serve as a starting point for a renewed approach to Islamic literature and its social foundations.1