Intellectual mobility and urban institutions in the transregional knowledge ecosystem of Islamic civilization

This study examines Islamic civilization as a historically layered knowledge ecosystem shaped by intellectual mobility, urban institutions, and transregional knowledge circulation. Moving beyond celebratory “Golden Age” narratives and decline-based interpretations, the study adopts a qualitative historical synthesis informed by connected history, historical sociology, and thematic coding of major secondary scholarship. The analysis clarifies that “transregional modernity” is used in a limited analytical sense: it refers to historical parallels in connectivity, institutional complexity, textual circulation, and cosmopolitan exchange, not to a claim that Islamic civilization caused European modernity. The findings show that translation, commentary, teaching, manuscript circulation, and institutional patronage transformed inherited knowledge into new intellectual traditions; that scholars, students, jurists, physicians, Sufis, merchants, and pilgrims connected diverse regions through travel, correspondence, pilgrimage, and educational networks; and that mosques, madrasas, libraries, hospitals, courts, markets, and waqf-supported foundations provided the material and social infrastructure for preserving and transmitting knowledge. The study further highlights regional and temporal variation across Abbasid Baghdad, Mamluk Cairo and Damascus, al-Andalus, the Persianate world, Ottoman-Safavid-Mughal contexts, and Indian Ocean networks. It concludes that Islamic civilization is best understood not as a static cultural formation but as an adaptive and institutionally embedded configuration of knowledge practices.