How come the Middle Eastern world didn't undergo a "Muslim enlightenment" period, similar to the Christian enlightenment period in Western Europe?

First we need to recognize that this is an out and out counterfactual question which will not have a satisfactory answer. Explaining causality is difficult enough, explaining something as complex as why an entire intellectual movement didn't happen is impossible.

That being said I think I can point to the discussion of some things that might be pertinent. Unfortunately a good amount of this post, perhaps even a majority, will be about the European enlightenment which is not a specialty of mine, so if any of our European historians want to chime on any mistakes I make please do.

With that being said, let's answer a few preliminary questions:

What was the European enlightenment?

The Enlightenment refers to a period in roughly the 18th century. It takes its name from the cultural, political and intellectual legacy of the period in which, as the name would suggest, self-identified virtues of "enlightenment" were given cultural force: reason, liberalism, liberty, limited government, religious toleration.

On the one hand, while we can quite clearly identify a lot of Good Things that came out of the enlightenment, it was hardly an unblemished success. While we often think of "Science" as a good in and of itself, 18th century scientism also gave us the very un-scientific practice of scientific racism. At the same time that Thomas Jefferson was writing about how all men were created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with, among other things, liberty, Jefferson was also a slave owner. The age of Rousseau was also an age of absolute monarchy. And so on.

On balance however we take these positions as enlightened not only because they form a jumping off point for modern liberalism, modern science, and so on, but also in contrast to what came before.

Why did Europe undergo an enlightenment?

The time period between when Luther publishes his 95 Theses in 1517 and the end of the European Wars of Religion is a pretty disastrous time period all around. In the 30 Years War in the German states you have territories that lose 30-40% of their population. They're closely followed in death toll by the French Wars of Religion. Then you have the English civil war which entailed not only battlefield slaughter but the political upheaval of regicide as well.

What's more, even after the worst of the violence subsides by the end of the 1817th century, it's clear that intellectually Europe is still in a bit of chaos. Once the edifice of the Universal Church is torn down, there is nothing obvious in Christian religion that could replace it. This was true even in Catholic Europe, which was changed, I won't say as much as the reformation, but to a very great extent by the counter-reformation.

All of that being said, it's clear that if we go with our earlier definition of what the enlightenment was, it's clear that the intellectual pre-cursors of the enlightenment come out of or are a reaction to the reformation. Whether it's the science of the Baconian method, the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, the state system and religious "toleration" of the Peace of Westphalia, we can see the Enlightenment as a reaction to a particular set of circumstances that came out of the tumult of the reformation and the wars of religion. i.e. Locke's toleration is only necessary if you have such an intense multiplicity of conflicting viewpoints that they are in need of toleration (also remember that Locke's toleration did not extend to atheists and Catholics).

What was going on in the Middle East?

Well, frankly, nothing like that. The mass internecine religious slaughter that was going on in Europe had no parallel in the Islamic world. Certainly Islam was incredibly diverse in its practices during this period. The advent of Sufi orders in the later middle ages and their spread meant that practically the entire male urban population of the Islamic world may have been members of a particular "tariqa" Sufi order, of which there were thousands. But all of this was perfectly orthodox. "Toleration" of a basic kind was baked in the cake, even if it was not raised to a cultural or intellectual virtue as with Locke. In other words, Muslims were more tolerant of their differences with other faiths than Christians were of one another in this period, but they did not pat themselves on the back and say "look how tolerant we're being to the Dhimmis." It was just the law.

Ok but surely something had to change over time in reaction to Europe, no?

Oh definitely. Islamdom was not ignorant of what was going on in Christendom. Let's look at one concrete outcome of this time period, the European scientific revolution and the Military Revolution (which is itself a controversial idea, but let's discuss it as-is).

The Ottomans (I'm more familiar with them than I am with the other gunpowder empires, the Safavids/Qajars and the Mughals but I believe this would apply equally) took an approach to scientific development that I think is more pragmatic than most 21st century people might think would be possible.

So for instance, they were perfectly happy to adopt the latest and greatest scientific developments in military hardware. But they also successfully suppressed the advent of the printing press in the Arab world for 300 years.

Now, if you're a technological determinist you might end the story right there. It's hard to imagine the Enlightenment, which involved such an enormous volume of discourse, without the advent of the printing press to facilitate that discourse. Imagine if The Social Contract had to be hand copied and disseminated with the permission of the state. It's impossible.

I, personally, am not a technological determinist but it nonetheless strikes me as obvious that there were technological developments in Europe, like the printing press, that when combined with proximate but diverse states that allowed some degree of press freedom (e.g. the Netherlands for England) that allowed for cultural developments that are hard to imagine in the absence of those specific factors.

How did the Middle East/Islamic world react to the Enlightenment?

Well, it's interesting. Absent the printing press and a systematic market for translation of European texts, these ideas, to my knowledge, did not disseminate during the period of the Enlightenment itself (at least in the Arab world, I'm less familiar with Turkish discourse, it's possible that the intellectual life of Istanbul may have been different than that of Cairo).

It's therefore almost hilariously ironic (given 200 years of temporal distance) that the ideas of the enlightenment were unavoidably introduced into Middle Easter and Islamic history in the most unenlightened way imaginable: at gunpoint.

Specifically, when Napoleon decides in 1798 to take the French revolution global and invades Egypt, he does so on the basis of liberating the Egyptians from the Mamelukes, introducing them to the Rights of Man and bringing them all of the intellectual, cultural, scientific and political fruits of the enlightenment (at least ostensibly. In reality Napoleon probably just wanted a route to India.) Moreover, they paid far more than lip service to these ideas. Napoleon brought with him the Commission des Sciences et des Arts which included what we would today describe as linguists, botanists, ethnologists, geographers, artists, chemists, engineers, historians, archaeologists, etc. etc. They found the Institut d'Egypte and eventually publish the monumental Description de l'Égypte. Bonaparte brings with him the first Arabic language printing press. Upon landing he announces the ideological intentions of his campaign in enlightenment terms.

The best (indeed, to my knowledge, the only full-length) native Egyptian reaction we have to this is the chronicle of al-Jabarti. Jabarti was a bonafide member of the religious scholarly elite establishment in Egypt. What did he think of all this?

Well, first of all, he was savvy enough to see that Napoleon's statement to the Egyptian people of his intentions was unbelievably patronizing and cynical. In that declaration, Napoleon stated:

O ye Qadis, Shaykhs and Imams; O ye Shurbajiyya and men of circumstance tell your nation that the French are also faithful Muslims, and in confirmation of this they invaded Rome and destroyed there the Papal See, which was always exhorting the Christians to make war with Islam. And then they went to the island of Malta, from where they expelled the Knights, who claimed that God the Exalted required them to fight the Muslims. Furthermore, the French at all times have declared themselves to be the most sincere friends of the Ottoman Sultan and the enemy of his enemies, may God ever perpetuate his empire!

Jabarti (rightly) recognizes this for the opportunism that it is:

As for his statement ‘and destroyed there the Papal See’, by this deed they have gone against the Christians as has already been pointed out. So those people are opposed to both Christians and Muslims, and do not hold fast to any religion. You see that they are materialists, who deny all God’s attributes, the Hereafter and Resurrection, and who reject Prophethood and Messengership.

On the face of the French Revolutionary claims of Egalite, Jabarti found the claim to be ridiculous:

His saying ‘[all people] are equal in the eyes of God’ the Almighty, this is a lie and stupidity. How can this be when God has made some superior to others as is testified by the dwellers in the Heavens and on the Earth?

I'm running out of characters in this post so I'll continue in a Part II.

edit: typos