Skip to search
Skip to main content
Catalog
Help
Feedback
Your Account
Library Account
Bookmarks
(
0
)
Search History
Search in
Keyword
Title (keyword)
Author (keyword)
Subject (keyword)
Title starts with
Subject (browse)
Author (browse)
Author (sorted by title)
Call number (browse)
search for
Search
Advanced Search
Bookmarks
(
0
)
Princeton University Library Catalog
Start over
Cite
Send
to
SMS
Email
EndNote
RefWorks
RIS
Printer
Bookmark
Rediscovering the Islamic classics : how editors and print culture transformed an intellectual tradition / Ahmed El Shamsy.
Author
El Shamsy, Ahmed, 1976-
[Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/Created
Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2020.
Description
x, 295 pages : illustrations, 24 cm
Details
Subject(s)
Publishers and publishing
—
Egypt
—
Cairo
—
History
[Browse]
Islamic literature
—
Publishing
—
Egypt
—
Cairo
—
History
[Browse]
Editors
—
Egypt
—
Cairo
—
History
[Browse]
Book collectors
—
Egypt
—
Cairo
—
History
[Browse]
Summary note
"Historians have traced the traditions of Islamic scholarship back to late antiquity. Muslim scholars were at work as early as 750 CE/AD, painstakingly copying their commentaries and legal opinions onto scrolls and codices. This venerable tradition embraced the modern printing press relatively late-movable type was adopted in the Middle East only in the early nineteenth century. Islamic scholars, however, initially kept their distance from the new technology, and it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the first published editions of works of classical religious scholarship began to appear in print. As the culture of print took root, both popular and scholarly understandings of the Islamic tradition shifted. Particular religious works were soon read precisely because they were available in printed, published editions. Other equally erudite works still in scroll and manuscript form, by contrast, languished in the obscurity of manuscript repositories. The people who selected, edited, and published the new print books on and about Islam exerted a huge influence on the resulting literary tradition. These unheralded editors determined, essentially, what came to be understood by the early twentieth century as the classical written "canon" of Islamic thought. Collectively, this relatively small group of editors who brought Islamic literature into print crucially shaped how Muslim intellectuals, the Muslim public, and various Islamist movements understood the Islamic intellectual tradition. In this book Ahmed El Shamsy recounts this sea change, focusing on the Islamic literary culture of Cairo, a hot spot of the infant publishing industry, from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As El Shamsy argues, the aforementioned editors included some of the greatest minds in the Muslim world and shared an ambitious intellectual agenda of revival, reform, and identity formation. This book tells the stories of the most consequential of these editors as well as their relations and intellectual exchanges with the European orientalists who also contributed to the new Islamic print culture"-- Provided by publisher.
Bibliographic references
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents
The disappearing books
Postclassical book culture
The beginnings of print
A new generation of book lovers
The rise of the editor
Reform through books
The backlash against postclassicism
Critique and philology.
Show 5 more Contents items
ISBN
9780691174563 ((hardback))
0691174563
LCCN
2019028879
OCLC
1114271934
Statement on language in description
Princeton University Library aims to describe library materials in a manner that is respectful to the individuals and communities who create, use, and are represented in the collections we manage.
Read more...
Other views
Staff view
Ask a Question
Suggest a Correction
Report Harmful Language
Supplementary Information
Other versions
Rediscovering the Islamic classics : how editors and print culture transformed an intellectual tradition / Ahmed El Shamsy.
id
99125173032406421