Professor Khaled El-Rouayheb, Leverhulme Visiting Fellow at CRASSH for 2015-2016, delivers the second of his Leverhulme lectures.

This lecture will trace the emergence of a novel ideal of “deep reading” among Ottoman scholars of the seventeenth century. Medieval Arabic-Islamic educational manuals tended to focus on student-teacher relations and the acquisition of knowledge through listening. In the seventeenth century, Ottoman scholars articulate a new ideal of the acquisition of knowledge through “deep reading”. This development would seem to be related both to the increasing importance of the rational and instrumental sciences, and to the Ottoman examination system of the seventeenth century.