"Dominant narratives of Islamic intellectual history have tended to be unkind to the seventeenth century in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Three independent narratives of 'decline'--an Ottomanist, an Arabist, and an Islamist--have converged on deprecating the period as either a sad epilogue to an earlier Ottoman florescence or a dark backdrop to the later Arab 'renaissance' and Islamic 'revival.' Until recently, Ottomanists typically located the heyday of Ottoman cultural and intellectual achievement in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. After the death of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1566, the Empire was supposed to have entered a period of long decline that affected both its political-military fortunes and its cultural-intellectual output. Scholars of Arabic literature and thought were inclined to view the seventeenth century as yet another bleak chapter of cultural, intellectual and societal 'decadence' that began with the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 and only came to an end with the 'Arab awakening' of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries"