This article examines how historiography has interpreted the development of Muslim scholarship in early modern North Africa. It focuses on the continuing influence of what I call the “decline narrative” on both national historiographies and Western specialist studies. Elaborated in the context of French colonialism and consecrated by nationalist-cum-reformist discourses, the denunciation of the centuries preceding colonial conquest as an epoch of decadence has hardly been challenged. Beginning with the French historian and sociologist Jacques Berque (1910-95), however, there was a vivid interest amongst social scientists in early modern Islamic culture. The main part of the paper will be dedicated to a methodological analysis of some of these works, and, in the concluding section, I will discuss the degree to which the study of the diffusion of Islamic literacy in rural areas may serve as a starting point for a renewed approach to Islamic literature and its social foundations. 1

中文翻译：

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持续的文化衰退幽灵

本文探讨了史学如何解释了现代北非早期穆斯林学术的发展。它着重于我所说的“衰落叙事”对国家史学和西方专家研究的持续影响。在法国殖民主义的背景下进行阐述，并在民族主义和改革主义的论述中奉献，几乎没有人质疑殖民统治之前几个世纪的decade废。然而，从法国历史学家和社会学家雅克·伯克（Jacques Berque，1910-95）开始，社会科学家对早期现代伊斯兰文化产生了浓厚的兴趣。本文的主要部分将致力于这些方法中某些方法的方法论分析，并且在总结部分中，我将讨论对农村地区伊斯兰识字传播的研究可以作为在何种程度上以全新的方式研究伊斯兰文学及其社会基础的起点。1个