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Ahmed El Shamsy, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics. How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition

Boris Liebrenz
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Ahmed El Shamsy, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics. How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2020, 295 p.

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1An increasing consensus among scholars today holds that the “golden age” of “classical” Islamic literary culture was not followed by nearly a millennium of gradual stagnation and steep decline, only to be resurrected in the nineteenth century by a Renaissance (nahḍa) under European influence. The rich literary production of those “dark” centuries is now largely considered creative and vigorous in its own right. In Rediscovering the Islamic Classics, however, Ahmed El Shamsy offers a full-fledged renaissance of the decline paradigm. According to him, a lively, critical, and rigorous curiosity for knowledge among “classical” authors gave way to pedantic formalism, dominated by fossilized repetition, occult sciences, superstitions, and a rejection of book-learning in the “postclassical” period. Beginning in the nineteenth century, several reformers emerge to resurrect the “lost” classical tradition through print and thus establish a textual canon of Islam that since then dominates what scholars read.

2When Shamsy makes a point of emphatically distancing himself from “the nineteenth-century narrative of decline, which dismissed post-classical Islamic thought as a mere lifeless shell” (p. 61), his words ring curiously hollow and apocryphal. He differs from the crudest manifestations of the decline narrative primarily by not subscribing to the myth of the Western genius that the Orient needed to be enlightened. Of course, this is not an inconsequential difference, since it allows Shamsy to forefront a cadre of Arab intellectuals that have not always received the recognition that they deserve. Nevertheless, Shamsy positions the heroes of his book, the men (and occasional women) who tirelessly strove to collect “classical” literature and to disseminate it in print, within an intellectual desert of scholastic pedantry and textual ignorance. To make this claim, he uses his first two chapters to identify the culprits. I will take these first two chapters as the focus of my review.

3In Chapter 1, dramatically titled “The Disappearing Books”, we read about Orientalists and other Western professional thieves who despoil local libraries and scholars of their intellectual riches with a “grave-robber mentality” (p. 19). By the nineteenth century, these Western figures had left those desiring to learn from good classical texts without anything substantial to read. The underlying idea is that the ignorance of post-classical scholars about the really important texts was at least partly a result of their disappearance from libraries and book-markets. Shamsy marshals some highly suspect anecdotes of camel-loads of books carried off by the French expedition (Seetzen, cited on p. 11, n. 12, actually contradicts what is ascribed to him there) or of individuals looking in vain for a copy of classical works. Not finding what one was looking for appears to mean, for Shamsy, that it was stolen rather than inaccessible in some private and uncatalogued library. Indeed, throughout the manuscript age, one could never simply go into a bookstore and pick out the title one desired. Such anecdotes also mean that Western visitors did not have a bird’s-eye view of or full access to everything there was in Cairo or Damascus, as indeed no one is likely to have had.

4The art market then and now is a shady world, and some of the manuscript brokers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries deserve no defense. But Shamsy’s eagerness to paint as villainous behavior what was normal market participation irritates. He highlights the nefariousness of Western manuscript collectors through the wrong assertion that robbing gullible locals of their manuscript treasures “made many of the aforementioned Orientalists wealthy men” (p. 18). His analysis is a gross overrepresentation of their power and impact. By far the largest collections were assembled towards the end of the nineteenth century or even well into the twentieth century, the tradition thus “stolen” when it was already being rediscovered. And most of those late enormous libraries, superior in size to those of even the most successful Western collectors of the seventeenth to nineteenth century, were amassed by collectors from the region, where they remained until today. At the same time, one could argue—and I would!—that the availability of manuscript books in Cairo or Damascus actually increased at the exact time that Western collections grew most, because they became more concentrated, their holdings more institutionalized, access to them more formalized, and their contents better catalogued.

5Chapter 2 (“Post-Classical Book Culture”) shifts its focus to indigenous reasons for decline. Here, the culprit is the ignorance, disinterest, and narrowness of a mindless tradition, one that had to guard against anyone willing to introduce the critical thinking that is seen as part of the “classical” tradition. Two main villains are identified: the madrasa curriculum and Sufism. In the former, “classical” works are sidelined and replaced by commentaries and super-commentaries while direct access to the originals is discouraged. Even if we accepted Shamsy’s description at face value, it bears remarking that the madrasa was not all of literary and intellectual life, and theology and law were not the only fields in which authors could prove to be more than dull glossators of past greatness. More fundamentally, I am not convinced by Shamsy’s assertion that teaching post-classical commentaries inevitably makes for uncritical thinkers. The origin story of Shamsy’s book is his “discovery” of a classical legal text he was previously unaware of (pp. 1‒2; nota bene, not in Berlin, Paris, or London, but in Cairo, a copy of an old manuscript preserved in Istanbul). Yet throughout the book, we do not learn what the post-classical legal tradition would have gained from this text besides historical depth.

6The second indigenous culprit is post-classical Sufism, which ostensibly rejected books wholesale in favor of esotericism, a phenomenon dubbed here as “the falling prestige of book-learning” (p. 41). Shamsy even diagnoses a “spread of esotericism from Sufism to all other fields of learning” (p. 49). One could come away from this dismal account with the impression that receiving prophetic wisdom in a dream, antinomian Sufism, the reliance on horoscopes, or a critical attitude towards book-learning were all uniquely post-classical phenomena. They are not. Furthermore, for many, one had to master true book-learning first before reaching the stage where one could supersede it. This was not a hermeneutical framework in which anyone could simply claim anything or where everyone just stopped reading.

7We can also sense obvious limitations to these claims when they are applied to figures like ʿAbd al-Ġanī al-Nābulusī (pp. 51‒52), whose sizable library, not analyzed here, was available as an endowment at his grave and in whose entourage, we find several noted bibliophiles and industrious copyists. While illiterate Sufis certainly existed and found a following, learned Sufis did read widely, loved books as much as anyone, and could actually argue based on different textual and esoteric traditions depending on the circumstances. Shamsy also singles out the widely distributed handbooks and commentaries as prime exhibits for the intellectual stultification that he diagnoses. Their existence supposedly discouraged reading original works and “produced a self-contained referential universe” (p. 35). But can it be right to equate a preponderance of material for beginners with a lack of interest in the more advanced literature, one that did not need to be available in such great numbers?

8The implicit contradictions of this account (the post-classical period is both marked by a fetishization of book-learning and a rejection of it) shows what a complicated case it is to argue for or against a general cultural decline, not to mention how to date it. Because culture and learning are complicated and conflicted phenomena, their interpretation rests to no small degree on the valuations of the interpreter. “Decline” in one city, institution, generation, or field of learning does not preclude blossoming in another. The book is light in (and occasionally outright ignoring) recent advances in actual book history. What texts were available or read is gauged from anecdotes of frustration by those who could not get their hands on something, not by studies of surviving catalogues, endowment deeds, or manuscript notes. Among the most confounding statements is the bold insinuation that there was no knowledge at all of al-Ġazālī’s critique of philosophy in the post-classical intellectual desert! Just because one Russian Orientalist couldn’t find a good teacher for al-Ġazālī in twentieth-century Bukhara and probably embellished his frustration (pp. 34‒35) does not mean that the author’s work was unknown everywhere throughout a “postclassical” millennium. Of course, it can well be argued that some of the works we have come to regard as fundamental or exemplary in many fields were in fact not widely read. A major case presented throughout the book is that of Ibn Taymiyya (other examples are less convincing and Shamsy simply assumes they were forgotten). Indeed, it is not a shocking fact that certain texts fell in and out of fashion, were considered superseded by later authors, or were never widely appreciated before their modern success. But does that mean that people were not connected to a tradition because that tradition had been stolen or rejected?

9I am neither equipped nor inclined to defend the intellectual profile of “postclassical” literature, but I would mark Shamsy’s treatment as superficial cherry-picking. For example, given that Shamsy is a specialist of law, and because he positions it as “the central Islamic discipline” (p. 40), one would have expected an analysis of the Ottoman era’s most influential thinkers of this field in the Arab provinces, like Ibn Nuǧaym, al-Ramlī, al-Ḥaṣkafī, Ibn ʿĀbidīn, and many more, names we hardly ever encounter in this book. Few of the aspects on which Shamsy’s analysis rests are particularly well researched. Overcoming this would have involved a thorough analysis of what was really circulating in manuscript form and where (through library catalogues, ṯabats, and manuscript notes), along with an in-depth study of what was taught in which institutions and through which networks (through biographical dictionaries). It would also have to distinguish a madrasa-curriculum for the many from private studies and intellectual currents. It would have to be based on thorough studies of the many existing commentary traditions in different regions, at different times, and in many fields. None of this is done in this book at any depth. Therefore, while Shamsy’s own account often remains superficial, it is not this fact per se that is questionable, but rather his misplaced confidence in his conclusions.

10The book sees the same decline on the institutional side, as Ottoman-era madrasas and libraries were marked by “mismanagement, neglect, and theft” (p. 23). Shamsy is right to probe the socio-economic foundations and limitations of literary and cultural developments. The infrastructures of education and book-production play a major role in determining what means there were for learning and textual dissemination. Yet we find here a one-sided account of the shortcomings of Ottoman madrasas painted against too rosy a picture of everything that came before. Shamsy notes the example of the Mamluk Maḥmūdiyya Library, which was founded with 4,000 volumes, of which only 58 were still in situ five centuries later. I know of no “classical” library that would have survived intact for that long. Yes, educational reformers of the twentieth century looked back in horror on their early studies and were instrumental in establishing institutions better suited for their times. But would they have been so satisfied 500 years earlier?

11These two chapters, about a quarter of the whole, are unfortunately the foundation of a book that otherwise has much to offer. They are the distorted historical backdrop to the emergence of printing which Shamsy then presents in rich detail. The strength and importance of this book lay in the fact that Shamsy gives some admirable scholars and thinkers their due when they had been previously overlooked or dismissed, e.g., as “mere” editors.

12Shamsy works out well the frustration of several reformers with the old ways of teaching. He also does a very good job illustrating the personal networks that connected reform-oriented scholars, intellectuals, editors, and printers across the Islamic world from India to North Africa. This allowed them to share information, manuscripts, and their copies. What this created was an unprecedented access to texts that Shamsy presents as the rediscovery of a lost tradition. But I doubt whether these “classics” ever formed such a neat tradition of accessible and interrelated texts. In this sense, we should ask ourselves if they actually resurrected a tradition or rather created a new one. One reason why Shamsy is able to muster so many anecdotal references to illustrate “postclassical” decline is the flexibility of what “classical” and “postclassical” actually mean. At one point he offers that his post-classical period is “so called because its central feature was its sidelining of the classical textual corpus” (p. 7). He can thus freely include and exclude authors and sources as he sees fit. When suitable, al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505) was of course a classic (p. 191), while at other times much earlier authors are already post-classical. And when towering and influential intellectuals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries actually show everything that Shamsy expects from a good classical scholar, they are exceptions. Towards the end of his work, Shamsy actually offers a much more nuanced, indeed a compelling assessment of the post-classical period (pp. 237‒239), one that would likely surprise those who have read through his preceding account.

13There are points on which Shamsy and I wholeheartedly agree: He states that “we would do well to keep in mind the contingency of this largely print-defined body of classics” (p. 240). Indeed! But Shamsy is doing more: He is judging the past by that very same canon of printed classics. And he thereby misjudges the efforts it took to keep a manuscript tradition running, the gargantuan task that the production of a multi-tome manuscript represented, not to mention its preservation. Commentaries and handbooks were an indispensable means to keeping such a tradition neatly at hand, not to subverting it. And not finding a work in the eighteenth or nineteenth century—apart from the illusion Shamsy presupposes, namely that it could easily be found in the “classical” world of manuscripts—is not a sign of previous disinterest. Things get weeded out or submerged in a textual corpus that has been growing rapidly for centuries.

14My critique does not mean that the change was not real: The main point that Shamsy wants to bring across, the deeply consequential nature of print as one of several elements in the creation of modern institutions of learning and the formation of a shared literary horizon across several Islamic societies, is a valid one. Of course, print technology changed the game. Previously, the meticulous search for good manuscripts, philological diligence, great expenses, all usually resulted in the production of one copy. Now, the same efforts could yield hundreds and thousands. The impact of a single dedicated scholarly endeavor multiplied manifold and crossed boarders at greater ease. The misconceptions I see in this book, for the most part, are not its invention. Shamsy finds many eloquent sources to speak for him. His digging is admirable and his account well written. Any reader will benefit tremendously learning about the reformers, editors, and printers that many of us have previously not regarded as the vibrant and important personalities and thinkers that they were. But Shamsy exclusively channels the perspective of reformers who wanted to paint the past tradition they overcame in the darkest possible hue. It is their memories, their letters, their complaints that we hear.

15Despite what I consider to be significant weaknesses of this book, especially in the first two chapters and their general outlook, a reader will not only learn many details about important actors during a crucial period of change in the Arabic world but also benefit from the intellectual challenge this book poses. Shamsy dares us to critically reevaluate a narrative that many in the field have come to accept over the past decades, namely the rejection of a model of golden age and decline as well as an unquestioned emphasis on the intellectual vigor of the age of compendia and commentaries. To what extent his sweeping assertions are well founded will be for future studies to show.

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Boris Liebrenz, « Ahmed El Shamsy, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics. How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition »MIDÉO [En ligne], 39 | 2024, mis en ligne le 13 novembre 2023, consulté le 15 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/mideo/9193

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