In 1980, Joan Gilbert (“Institutionalization of Muslim scholarship and professionalization of the ʿUlamāʾ in medieval Damascus”, Studia Islamica, 1980, 105–34) provided us with a neat periodization of Muslim learning: close to the end of the fourth/tenth century, the madrasa appeared as an institution in the Islamic world. This new mode of transmission of religious knowledge contributed enormously to making the ulama a professional class, in the sense that for their scholarship the ulama could now systematically receive a financial reward for teaching, and thus their scholarship could help them act as breadwinners. Additionally, Islamic knowledge was compartmentalized since an accepted curriculum of teaching and learning came into being, offering a standardized version of what a novice scholar or religious functionary would have to learn to be accepted as such.

The book under review deals with the period prior to this professionalization and institutionalization of Islamic knowledge. The author is interested to discover when and how the ulama came to be known as ulama, acquiring the necessary authority to be accepted as such. Unlike most studies that rely heavily on literary texts (the ṭabaqāt works, or biographical dictionaries, in particular), Brockopp brings in material culture to help analyse the way in which men and women initially interested in knowing all they could know about the new religion slowly but surely transformed into a separate class of Muslims: the ulama. Unlike most studies, this book departs from the central lands of the Islamic world and focuses on the community of Kairouan in North Africa, which happens to offer us the oldest known extant manuscripts.

This book consists of an introduction, five chapters, a conclusion, appendix, bibliography and index. The author's thesis is tightly bound to the definitions he gives us. Prior to the 680s very little evidence exists to suggest an authoritative scholarly community. The thrust of the book's argument is based on non-literary material – inscriptions, architecture, coins, and papyri. Also crucial to the book's argument, and well described in the appendix, are some 30 of the earliest extant manuscripts, 22 of which were used and reliably dated before 300 ah/912–3 ad, produced by savants working in Kairouan.

A basic assumption is that up to the reign of ʿAbd al-Malik (685–705) there was little coherent and sustained ideological unity – scholars who lived and worked between 622 and 680 the author calls “proto-scholars”. The reforms of ʿAbd al-Malik paved the way towards a unified Islam, which only fully crystallized in the third/ninth century. And, the assumption goes on, only a unified Islam can produce a book that fits into what Shawkat Toorawa has dubbed a “writerly culture” that came into existence in that same century. This writerly culture marked the end of oral transmission of religious knowledge and led to the production of real books (as defined by the author), i.e. a text written in a uniform style, passed in its entirety to later generations.

There was not much societal change during the first two centuries of Islam. Those specializing in religious knowledge acted as guides to believers rather than as scholars producing a coherent Islamic worldview. In these centuries, Muslims were a minority and they relied on scholarship drawn from the other two Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Christianity, with noticeable influences from Zoroastrianism. As noted above, the changes introduced by the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik ushered in the move towards a distinct Islamic culture with its own history. The author stresses that any writer, premodern or modern, who assumes a unified conceptualization of Islam prior to the third/ninth century is using an artificial construction.

The book works towards this crucial century when the scholars became “Muhammad's heirs”. Despite the many merits of the book's approach, the author seems to have missed the importance of the inquisition (miḥna) in buttressing the recognition of the ulama as authoritative, a definition the author uses to determine the difference between the proto-scholars and the scholars. Although it is mentioned (including the trials and tribulations of the ulama's hero during the miḥna, Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal) more emphasis should have been given to the failure of the caliphate to attract religious authority to this institution that was competing at the time with the emergence of a socially distinct group of people who considered themselves the inheritors of religious knowledge. The failure of the miḥna ensured that the ulama were now accepted as the bearers of true religious knowledge, rather than the incumbent of the caliphal institution. The emergence of a scholarly class, accepted as authoritative, was primarily the result of the failure of the caliph to become the supreme leader in religious affairs as he was in worldly affairs. Had the author fully incorporated this important factor, we would have had a more complete account of the emergence of the ulama.

This observation should not detract from the merits of the book, and the author is to be commended for introducing us to a different approach with clear definitions so that the reader can follow the book's argument. It is also refreshing that non-literary sources were employed to draw a picture of how people interested in the Islamic faith would develop into a distinct societal class. More than that, this “class” has helped to define what makes a society Islamic or not: it is not the presence of a caliph in a society that determines whether that society is Islamic, but whether there are ulama to be found. Brockopp's book provides us with a convincing narrative on how this group not only came into being, but how its existence helped to develop a coherent Islamic worldview (including the past) that contributed greatly to the transition from an Arab-dominated minority-society to a fully universal Islamic society in the course of the third/ninth century, which turned out to be foundational for the Islamic community.