Cultures of Taḥqīq between the Mongols, the Mughals, and the Mediterranean

What is it about?

Between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries, a sweeping intellectual movement transformed the world of ideas, characterized by a collective fascination with the following areas of inquiry: neo-Platonic philosophy, historical philology, humanistic translation, artistic expressions of man’s Godliness, the mathematical description of the physical world, and the essentially comparative nature of world religions (to name just the most important of its essential features). And yet, however closely this may seem to match the familiar history of Europe’s path from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, this is not what we are describing, at least not in any traditional way. Instead, ours is a movement with origins much further to the east, in post-Mongol Iran and central Asia, and defined by the Islamic epistemology of taḥqīq.

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