The French campaign in Egypt and Syria (1798–1801) led by Napoleon Bonaparte, as my generation of students of Arabic literature have been taught, jolted the Arabic-speaking territories of the Ottoman Empire out of decline. The foundation myth of the modern Arabic world, if we may thus describe the complex of Arabic narratives of nation-building and modernization, tells the story of Arab cultural and literary Nahḍa as the happenstance of two parallel but separate intellectual movements: Westernization and classicism. There is, however, next to no traffic between the two movements. Concrete details are few and far between. Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition offers a timely and much needed intervention in the narratives of Nahḍa and the revival of Arabic classics. It does so in two significant ways: it offers concrete details of the so-called “post-classical” culture of inḥiṭāṭ in the nineteenth century; and of the process of revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focused on how nahḍawi figures transformed manuscripts into books and reinvented the Classical Arabic intellectual tradition.

Chapters 1, “The disappearing of books”, and 2, “Postclassical book culture”, flesh out the culture of decline from the perspective of book history. Chapter 1 tells the story of the European hunt for and purchase, perhaps even theft, of Arabic manuscripts and how libraries and learning centres in Egypt, the Levant, and even Istanbul, including al-Azhar, came to be depleted of their collections. “The book drain to Europe”, Ahmed El Shamsy shows, sums up the Orientalist adventures, foreshadows the “Decline of traditional libraries”, and also anticipates the “Emergence of modern libraries” in the Middle East in the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 explains the postclassical cultural milieu that allowed the book drain to Europe to happen: the turn to scholasticism and esotericism. Teaching texts replaced original works in education and scholarly endeavours, and esotericism, which locates truth in experience rather than learning, further turned believers away from books, until a new generation of scholars who witnessed the Oriental Library in Europe and returned to build modern libraries in their homelands now modelled what they saw in Europe.

This rebuilding, of both the library and the classical tradition, coincided with the arrival and proliferation of print, which is the subject of chapter 3, “The beginnings of print”. Of course, the postclassical teaching texts were the first to be published, but the new Muslim scholars, especially those who had spent time in Europe, such as al-Ṭahṭāwī (1801–73), would lobby for Arabic classics to be printed, including Ibn Khaldūn's Muqaddima. Shamsy brings attention for the first time to the instrumental role a new class of “correctors” (muṣaḥḥiḥ) played in Arabic book publishing. These were the prototypes of the “editors” (muḥaqqiq), the subject of chapter 5, “The rise of the editor”, who identified and prepared classics for publication based on “a host of enduring institutional and methodological developments” (p. 123), including systematic collection of manuscripts in specialist libraries, and comparing manuscripts in the production of print editions. It was this new print culture that made it possible for “A new generation of book lovers” (chapter 4) not only to collect the newly printed classics and read them, but also to effect “Reform through books” (chapter 6) by, for example, privileging the classics over postclassical teaching texts in education and scholarly debates. Chapter 7 then situates “The backlash against postclassicism” in a transnational network of book collectors: “a network of like-minded scholars residing across the Middle East in Egypt, the Levant, Iraq, the Hijaz, and Yemen, as well as beyond it, in places such as India and the Maghreb” (p. 173). These scholars, despite their diverse backgrounds and divergent ideological positions, collaborated in finding hidden manuscripts and bringing them to light. More importantly, they posed a serious challenge to esotericism.

The story El Shamsy tells is more than the emergence of a modern book culture and the rediscovery of Arabic classics. It is above all an intellectual history of the Islamic Middle East that is informed by El Shamsy's interest in Islamic thought, his familiarity with Orientalism, and his extensive research in Arabic book history. This history is incomplete without Orientalism. The revival of Arabic classics is entangled with Orientalism from the outset, as we have seen here, but this entanglement extends beyond the nineteenth century. Muslim scholars have been and continue to be “members” of transnational networks that include Orientalists in Europe and the USA. In the eighteenth century, as Alexander Bevilacqua demonstrates in The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), Orientalists collaborated closely with Muslim scholars in their collection, translation and exegesis of the Quran, as well as their understanding and interpretation of Islamic history. In Rediscovering the Islamic Classics, El Shamsy shows how Muslim scholars were initially inspired by Orientalists in their programmes and methods of cultural reform and management of tradition but later responded to their understanding and assessment of Arabic classics, culminating in “fierce debates over philology and critical method” in the early twentieth century, and the development of indigenous philological methods and textual criticism (chapter 8, “Critiques and philology”).

Moving away from postcolonial binaries and engaging with the idea of intercultural entanglement have made it possible for El Shamsy to go beyond the national frame and write a complex history of the Arabic intellectual traditions in the modern age. The fortunes of Arabic classics are determined by individual actors, whether vociferous intellectuals or silent correctors and editors, as well as the circulation of books and bodies of knowledge across transnational networks of European and Middle Eastern scholars. This history, as El Shamsy narrates it, is a series of intercultural dialogues – between past and present, East and West – which gave shape to the Arabic classics, as we know them today. As such, it not only fills the lacunae left in the prevalent discourses on the Nahḍa but also provides a much-needed corrective.