Projekt

The goal of this project is to produce the first book-length study of the adoption of printing by Muslim scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the influence that this new technology had on the very definition of the Islamic tradition. The new medium permitted scholars to open up the rarefied realm of manuscript texts to a broad audience through edition and publication. But the wave of published editions of medieval works that followed did not simply reveal the premodern intellectual heritage; it created it. The scholars' selection of works to edit and popularize and the ways in which they went about the work of editing were guided by competing religious and sociopolitical agendas, each embodying a particular vision of religious authority and the nature of Islamic scholarship. The dynamic produced by the rivalry among the agendas of scholastics, classicists, Orientalists, neo-traditionalists, and reformists gave rise to what both Muslims and non-Muslim scholars of Islam today have come to consider the "classical tradition" of Islam.

• Prof. Dr. Ulrike Freitag

  Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO)
  Berlin
  

• Prof. Ahmed El Shamsy, Ph.D.

  The University of Chicago
  Dept of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
  Division of the Humanities
  Oriental Institute
  Chicago
  USA