Ahmed El Shamsy. Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition
In his formidable account of the transformative power of the written word, Roger Chartier wrote that “If the French of the late eighteenth century fashioned the Revolution, it is because they had in turn been fashioned by books.”1 Following his cue, many studies on book culture in the last two decades have sought to establish links between printed books and revolutions. In the Arab context, scholars have studied the way printing shaped the nahda, or Arab “awakening,” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often articulating the Arab revival as the culmination of Arab translations from European languages, adoption of European genres, and engagement with the modern sciences. More recent scholarship, however, has begun to question this assessment, and to attribute greater weight to homegrown factors. Ahmed El Shamsy’s latest monograph, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition, falls into this latter camp. By unearthing the hitherto unknown Arab editors and intellectuals who used the new technology of the press to save classical books from oblivion, he argues for the emergence of an “indigenous modernity” in the Arabo-Islamic intellectual tradition (p. 171).
Ayşe BAŞARAN
