Khaled El-Rouayheb is a Professor of Islamic Intellectual History in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, Massachusetts. He specializes in Arabic and Islamic intellectual history, especially in the period from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries. He is the author of Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 (2005) and Relational Syllogisms and the History of Arabic Logic, 900-1900 (2010). He is also co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy (with Sabine Schmidtke, 2016).

• Part I. 'The Path of the Kurdish and Persian Verifying Scholars': 1. Kurdish scholars and the reinvigoration of the rational sciences; 2. A discourse of method: the evolution of ādāb al-bahth; 3. The rise of 'deep reading'; Part II. 'Saving Servants from the Yoke of Imitation': 4. Maghrebi 'theologian-logicians' in Egypt and the Hejaz; 5. The condemnation of 'imitation' (taqlīd); 6. Al-Hasan al-Yūsī and two theological controversies in seventeenth-century Morocco; Part III. 'The Imams of Those Who Proclaim the Unity of Existence': 7. The spread of mystical monism; 8. Monist mystics and neo-Hanbalī traditionalism; 9. In defense of wahdat al-wujūd.

'A labor of admirable erudition, this book by Professor Khaled El-Rouayheb establishes a new standard for the intellectual history of Islam in general and for Ottoman intellectual history in particular. By focusing on the hitherto unexplored technical arguments of the textual traditions and by deftly placing them within the larger systems in which they developed, the author goes far beyond previous studies of Ottoman intellectual history that concerned themselves primarily with the social, cultural and legal locations of ideas. The history of ideas has finally taken center stage in Islamic studies as the guiding principle of intellectual history. This is pioneering work.' Asad Q. Ahmed, University of California, Berkeley