The standard narrative of Enlightenment unfolds as a distinctly European drama: Voltaire in his salon, Kant proclaiming sapere aude, the philosophes dismantling medieval superstition. This framing positions the eighteenth century's great debates about reason, authority, and reform as exclusively Western phenomena, with the rest of the world cast as passive recipients of ideas that would eventually arrive through colonial encounter. The historiographical violence of this narrative lies not merely in what it excludes, but in how it structures our understanding of modernity's intellectual origins.

Yet across the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires, parallel conversations were unfolding with remarkable sophistication. Scholars debated the proper relationship between rational inquiry and revealed knowledge. Reformers questioned inherited political arrangements. Philosophers constructed elaborate syntheses that sought to reconcile Greek logic with Islamic theology. These were not derivative movements responding to European influence—chronologically, many preceded the canonical Enlightenment, and intellectually, they drew on independent traditions of rational inquiry stretching back to the medieval Islamic golden age.

Understanding these parallel intellectual movements requires abandoning the diffusionist model that treats European ideas as originals and non-European variants as copies. Instead, we must recognize what might be called contemporaneous intellectual efflorescence—the phenomenon whereby similar social and political pressures across Eurasia generated structurally comparable debates about reason, tradition, and authority. The question is not whether the Islamic world had an Enlightenment, but rather how attending to these debates transforms our understanding of what Enlightenment itself might mean.

The Ottoman intellectual landscape of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed sustained engagement with questions that would be instantly recognizable to students of the European Enlightenment. At the center stood the tension between akl (reason) and nakl (transmitted tradition)—a binary that structured debates about everything from legal methodology to political legitimacy. Thinkers like Kâtip Çelebi had already in the seventeenth century criticized the ossification of Ottoman learning and called for renewed engagement with rational sciences.

By the eighteenth century, these debates intensified around concrete questions of reform. The so-called Nizam-ı Cedid (New Order) reforms under Selim III were not merely administrative adjustments but carried implicit philosophical commitments about the malleability of inherited institutions. Reformers argued that reason could evaluate and modify customary arrangements—a position their opponents viewed as dangerous innovation (bid'a). The intellectual work required to justify reform necessarily involved sophisticated arguments about the relationship between rational judgment and traditional authority.

The tanzimat period beginning in 1839 brought these tensions into sharper relief. Figures like Namık Kemal engaged directly with concepts of natural rights, constitutionalism, and popular sovereignty. Crucially, they did so not by simply importing European ideas but by developing arguments within Islamic legal and theological frameworks. The concept of maslaha (public interest) provided indigenous intellectual resources for justifying reforms that served collective welfare even when not explicitly sanctioned by traditional sources.

What distinguishes Ottoman reform thought from simple Westernization is its internal logic of development. The debates about ijtihad—independent legal reasoning versus adherence to established schools—predated substantive European contact and followed trajectories shaped by Ottoman institutional and intellectual history. When Ottoman thinkers engaged with European philosophy later in the nineteenth century, they did so as interlocutors with their own sophisticated traditions, not as blank slates awaiting inscription.

The ultimately tragic dimension of this history—the empire's collapse and the subsequent marginalization of Ottoman intellectual traditions—should not obscure the genuine philosophical achievement these debates represented. Ottoman reformers grappled with problems that remain central to contemporary political thought: how traditional societies can justify change, what authority reason holds over custom, and whether progress is compatible with fidelity to inherited values.

Takeaway

Reform movements in traditional societies often develop internal intellectual resources for justifying change—the question of reason versus tradition is not uniquely European but emerges wherever societies confront the problem of deliberate transformation.

The School of Isfahan represents one of the most sophisticated philosophical achievements of the early modern period, yet it remains largely unknown outside specialist circles. Emerging in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries under Safavid patronage, this movement produced thinkers like Mir Damad and Mulla Sadra who constructed elaborate metaphysical systems integrating Aristotelian logic, Neoplatonic emanationism, Sufi mysticism, and Shi'i theology. The resulting synthesis—known as hikmat al-muta'aliya (transcendent theosophy)—addressed questions about the nature of being, knowledge, and human perfection with unprecedented rigor.

Mulla Sadra's contribution was particularly revolutionary. His doctrine of al-haraka al-jawhariyya (substantial motion) overturned centuries of Islamic philosophical consensus by arguing that being itself is dynamic rather than static. Existence is not a fixed property but an intensifying process—a position with profound implications for understanding human spiritual development and the possibility of genuine transformation. This represented not merely commentary on Greek philosophy but genuine philosophical innovation.

The political implications of Isfahan philosophy, though less explicit than in Ottoman reform thought, were nonetheless significant. The school's emphasis on the philosopher's capacity to access truth through rational illumination implicitly challenged purely textual conceptions of religious authority. If knowledge could be achieved through disciplined intellectual practice, the monopoly of the ulama over interpretation became less absolute. Some Safavid rulers recognized this potential and patronized the philosophers precisely because their teachings could legitimate royal authority against clerical power.

The School of Isfahan also maintained extensive intellectual networks connecting Safavid Persia with Mughal India and, to a lesser extent, the Ottoman Empire. Mulla Sadra's students carried his teachings eastward, where they influenced subsequent generations of Indian Muslim thinkers. These connected histories—to use Sanjay Subrahmanyam's phrase—demonstrate that early modern intellectual life was characterized by circulation and exchange across political boundaries, not isolation within imperial containers.

What the Isfahan synthesis offers contemporary historians of philosophy is a challenge to narratives that treat the seventeenth century's great philosophical achievements as exclusively European. While Descartes and Spinoza were constructing their systems in Amsterdam and Paris, Mulla Sadra was developing equally sophisticated arguments in Isfahan. The question of why one tradition became globally dominant while the other remained regionally confined is fundamentally a question about power, not about philosophical merit.

Takeaway

Philosophical sophistication is not the monopoly of any single tradition—the seventeenth century witnessed parallel systematic achievements in Isfahan and Amsterdam, and understanding why one became canonical while the other remained marginal reveals more about colonial power than about intellectual quality.

The Mughal Empire under Akbar (r. 1556-1605) witnessed one of history's most remarkable experiments in rational religion. The emperor's sulh-i kul (universal peace) policy, his establishment of the Ibadat Khana (House of Worship) for inter-religious debate, and his eventual promulgation of Din-i Ilahi (Divine Faith) represented serious intellectual engagement with questions about the relationship between reason, revelation, and political authority. Akbar was not simply a tolerant ruler but a theological innovator who questioned whether any single revelation could claim absolute truth.

The intellectual work supporting Akbar's experiments drew on the akbari school of Islamic thought, which emphasized the possibility of direct divine inspiration (ilham) beyond textual revelation. Abu'l-Fazl, Akbar's chief ideologue, developed sophisticated arguments justifying the emperor's religious authority and his capacity to adjudicate between competing truth claims. This was not mere court flattery but serious political theology that engaged with deep questions about sovereignty, knowledge, and legitimacy.

The reaction against Akbar's experiments proved equally significant. Thinkers like Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi developed powerful counter-arguments defending scriptural authority and the necessity of prophetic guidance. Sirhindi's letters articulated a vision of Islamic revival that would influence subsequent movements from the Arabian Peninsula to Southeast Asia. The debate between rational and traditional conceptions of religious authority thus generated productive intellectual conflict that shaped Islamic thought for centuries.

Under later Mughals, particularly Aurangzeb, the pendulum swung toward traditionalism, but the questions Akbar raised never entirely disappeared. The eighteenth-century thinker Shah Waliullah of Delhi attempted a new synthesis, arguing that apparent contradictions between reason and revelation resulted from misunderstanding rather than genuine conflict. His influential work sought to reconcile the different schools of Islamic jurisprudence through reasoned analysis while maintaining scriptural authority.

The Mughal debates about reason and revelation offer a crucial corrective to narratives that portray pre-colonial South Asian Islam as intellectually stagnant. The sophisticated arguments advanced by figures like Abu'l-Fazl and Shah Waliullah demonstrate engagement with fundamental philosophical questions at a level comparable to their European contemporaries. That this tradition was subsequently marginalized under colonial rule—with British administrators preferring to deal with 'traditional' religious authorities—represents not intellectual failure but political conquest.

Takeaway

Religious traditions contain internal resources for rationalist critique—Akbar's experiments and their aftermath show that debates about reason and revelation are not imports from outside but emerge from within traditions grappling with their own tensions.

Recovering these parallel intellectual movements is not an exercise in cultural cheerleading or competitive civilization-claiming. The point is not that the Islamic world 'also had' an Enlightenment, as if European categories remain the standard against which all else is measured. Rather, attention to Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal debates about reason, reform, and authority reveals the inadequacy of narratives that treat modernity's intellectual foundations as exclusively Western.

The implications extend beyond historical accuracy to contemporary relevance. Understanding that rational critique and reform thought have deep roots in Islamic intellectual traditions transforms conversations about religion, modernity, and politics in the present. The false choice between 'Western rationality' and 'traditional Islam' dissolves when we recognize that rationalism has always been part of Islamic tradition itself, contested and debated but never absent.

What emerges from comparative analysis is not a single Enlightenment with multiple local variants but rather a global early modern efflorescence in which thinkers across Eurasia grappled with structurally similar problems. The question for future scholarship is not whether to include non-European thinkers in an expanded canon but how to reconceive the very categories through which we understand intellectual modernity.