This book is an intellectual history dealing with an aspect of Arab-Islamic culture. The first question one must thus raise is with regard to the meaning and nature of intellectual history. What are its main characteristics and central disciplinary concerns? Intellectual history is interdisciplinary in nature and as such intellectual historians do not work on the assumptions of a shared specific method. According to Kelly, primary topics of inquiry include: philosophy, literature, language, art, science and other disciplines, and each has its own tradition of historical inquiry. Intellectual history thus lacks one overriding concern. In terms of hermeneutics it is not really a discipline, but rather a point of view within a discipline, which is history, and the intellectual historian is to ‘explore those areas of the human past in which decipherable traces, usually written or iconographic, have survived, and then to give contemporary meaning to these traces through the medium of language’. Modern Arab-Islamic intellectual history is similarly a multi-disciplinary area of inquiry rather than an autonomous academic discipline, and as such it is not immediately clear with what conceptual tools it is best handled. In fact, traditions and blueprints of practice which suggest ways of proceeding are scarce. Abu-Rabi‘'s observation in 1996 remains true today: ‘methodological studies of modern Arab/Islamic thought are rare, and, in many instances, are only partially adequate’.