Islamic Reform and Conservatism: Al-Azhar and the Evolution of Modern Sunni Islam

The famed reform debates at al-Azhar Madrasa in nineteenth-century Cairo, one of the most influential centres of religious study in Sunni Islam, were enormously influential for twentieth-century Islamic thought. Here Indira Gesink offers a revisionist history of these debates over curricular and administrative reforms, and challenges our understanding of the struggle between Islamic reform and conservatism.

It has been assumed that famous Islamic modernists such as Muhammad 'Abduh instigated...