Even mainstream Islamic centers lacked top scholarship in the 1590s

Evidence

It is good for a scholar of Temimi’s caliber to remind us that these texts have their limitations, but is it fair to write off the work of these scribes as worthless? As for hadith literature among the crypto-Muslims, one is forced to the conclusion—and it is hardly a surprising one, given the circumstances under which they lived—that in this field the serious scholarship of the highest order necessary to sustain studies was no longer possible. But then how much scholarship of the requisite degree of accuracy existed in the 1590s anywhere in the Islamic world outside a few favored specialist centers? — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 699

Categorization

• QUESTION: Interesting implicit claim: the Moriscos’ scholarly decline was not exceptional by 1590s standards — worth verifying the state of hadith scholarship in centers like Cairo and Fez at that date.
• SHARE: For a friend who studies early modern Islamic intellectual history — the point that clandestine rural scribes were not uniquely degraded compared to mainstream centers in the same decade.