Making Falsafa in Modern Egypt

Angela Giordani

“Making Falsafa in Modern Egypt” is an intellectual and institutional history of a phenomenon in colonial-national Egypt known to participants and observers as the “Islamic philosophy revival.” At the helm of this “revival” was an intellectually and politically diverse group of local scholars—shaykhs trained at Cairo’s venerable al-Azhar mosque-university as well as philosophers and Arabists with doctorates from the Sorbonne and Cambridge—united by a commitment to rehabilitating the legacies of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and other classical masters of the philosophical discipline known in Arabic as falsafa. My dissertation excavates the archive of this little-studied Egyptian revivalist movement to offer a situated intellectual history of the production, diffusion, reading, and uses of the Arabo-Islamic philosophical tradition in modern global thought. In so doing, I...