Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition

Description

The story of how Arab editors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries revolutionized Islamic literature Islamic book culture dates back to late antiquity, when Muslim scholars began to write down their doctrines on parchment, papyrus, and paper and then to compose increasingly elaborate analyses of, and commentaries on, these ideas.

Ahmed El Shamsy is associate professor of Islamic thought at the University of Chicago and the author of The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History.

"Shortlisted for the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize in Middle Eastern Studies" "Rediscovering the Islamic Classics . . . contains fascinating insights, which anyone with even a vague interest in Islam's intellectual history will enjoy."---Usman Butt, Middle East Monitor "Rediscovering the Islamic Classics is one of the most important books that have been published in Islamic studies in recent years. It skillfully and convincingly tells the story of how the printing press transformed access to 'Islamic classics' in the nineteenth and first third of the twentieth centuries; and in doing so, it fundamentally reshapes our perspective on virtually any field of Islamic scholarship."---Johanna Pink, Die Welt des Islams "Not only a story of how Islamic classics were rediscovered, but also a story that invites us to rethink these Islamic classics and the canonizing forces (read: real people) that have shaped them and continue to do so. This story had to be told, and El Shamsy has done so in a most lucid yet entertaining way. . . . I can only recommend everyone to expose him- or herself to it."---Kristof D'hulster, Global Literary Theory "[An] engaging yet pleasantly thought-out book."---Mehraj Din, Religion & Theology