Medieval and Early Modern Orients: New Encounters
In the context of wider postcolonial and decolonial shifts that have occurred in both critical and popular thought over the past decades, we have seen growing interests in recovering and recentering histories of Islamic civilizations and their shaping influence on knowledge, systems,and technologies that we now associate with the modern world. Whether recognized as the powerful authorities that transformed trade, belief, politics, science, and art in the premodernworld, or as the ‘other’ necessary for Western colonial self-fashioning, as per Edward Said’s formative theorization of them in Orientalism, there is no denying that Muslims and Islamicate societies hold a fundamental place in our (global) past.