When we think of the classics of Islamic thought today,
we think in the first instance of works written by the founders of the very schools of theology, law, philosophy, linguistics,
Sufism and historiography, and by subsequent scholars who shaped these fields through their seminal contributions,
the out of the bookshops around us eyebrows for hours.
In my visits to Cairo could be relied on to contain such works.
But this landscape of relative established classics was not what al-Hassani faced at the turn of the 20th century.
Far from ubiquitous, these works were scarce and difficult, if not impossible to find.
Not only had most not yet been edited and printed, but there were few manuscript copies of them,
and the whereabouts of those few that existed were often unknown.
Welcome to Middle East Centre Book Talk. The Oxford podcast on new books about the Middle East.
These are some of the books written by our members, members of our community. All books that our community are talking about.
My name is a Salmon Anthony and I teach contemporary Islamic studies at the Middle East centre.
My guest today is Amina Shamsi. He is an associate professor of Islamic Thought at the University of Chicago.
Ahmed is no stranger to the UK. He completed his undergraduate and master's degrees.
So as the LSC respectively before heading west to pursue a doctorate at Harvard.
Since 2010, Ahmed has been based at the University of Chicago. His research is concerned with intellectual history of Islam,
focussing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and the scholarly culture within their broader historical context.
His research addresses themes such as a reality, literacy,
the history and the book and the theory and practise of Islamic law and its important first book, The Canonisation of Islamic Law.
A Social and Intellectual History,
traces the transformation of Islamic law from a primarily oral tradition to a systematic written discipline in the eighth and ninth centuries.
Its second book, The Subject of today's conversation, is similarly a significant contribution to our understanding of Islamic intellectual history.
It is entitled Rediscovering the Islamic Classics. How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition.
Welcome to Book Talk. Thank you for having me. It's our pleasure.
And so just to start this conversation off, I wondered if you could tell us something about how you wrote your book.
When did it start? What sources were you able to uncover and what countries did the research take you to?
So part of my formation as a scholar is that I like to browse bookshops in the Middle
East and spend hours there just looking at the various sections and reading these books.
And for me, they represented something of a tradition that you could just access and, you know, buy and take home with you.
And then when I started to think about doing serious research,
I was confronted with the fact that not all books I was interested in were printed and some of them had survived, but they were in manuscript form.
And that was the first time when I started to think, well, isn't that strange that some books are printed in some books and are printed?
And then I became fascinated with the world of manuscripts and manuscript libraries.
And the books that I found there were different from the books I was used to in bookshops or in libraries that I printed material.
So they were in terms of numbers, the kind of classical works were much fewer than the more recent works.
So I saw that these were not the same type of things. They didn't have the same type of books.
And in fact, some of the books that I had read them that were familiar to me from every kind of bookshop I've been to in the Middle East,
I just couldn't find any copies. There was maybe one copy somewhere.
And so that idea of how strange is it that seems that there's only one manuscript surviving and now we have these copies everywhere.
And everybody seems to be like, oh, yes, everybody talks about love. So, you know, about husbands, Kelkal, Hamam, but only one manuscript.
And that happens to be in Holland. So that's a strange story.
So over time, I mean, I did know, as you mentioned, my first book was in the 9th century.
I started to get the strange feeling that I was trying to both access printed material and manuscripts,
that I felt that much of our perception had been shaped by people who had edited works,
and that rather than just seeing directly into the ninth century,
we were seeing the ninth century through some sort of filter that we weren't really familiar with or that we weren't aware of.
And while some of these books were edited by Western Orientalist, I mean, especially in the field of Islamic law.
That depends from from field to field sometimes, but especially for Islamic law.
That's basically all editors in the Middle East. And really, I didn't know any of them.
And so I started to think about them and read about them and kind of pay attention to them.
And so it was an interest that kind of grew while I was a grad student. And then I started really sitting down and writing in 2014.
But I had already collected quite a bit of material in libraries.
And I did research in Egypt and Syria and Turkey and various European libraries and in American libraries.
You opened with this beautiful anecdote of finding this manuscript and you kind of mis translate the title,
a manuscript as well, because you think the mother of Shefi or something along those lines.
And it's of course. I can't remember Shaffi wasn't mentioned in the original title.
And that's why I think he made a mistake. But it's clear that you said.
I think at the end of that story that I knew that I would one day write this book.
So this has been in your mind since your doctorate days, basically.
And I love the way in which you weaved that personal anecdote and the personal story into something which is actually quite the point
that you've just made in terms of our academic perception of the field of Islamic studies as a field is shaped by this unconscious bias.
These are sort of fashionable term right now that I think you've done a wonderful job informing us about.
And I look forward to going into that conversation in greater detail as we proceed.
If it's okay, I'm going to sort of. And pick a point from your first chapter where you discuss the way in which the voracious
appetite of European scholars for manuscripts from the Middle East in recent centuries,
in a sense almost unwittingly contributed to the decline of Middle Eastern libraries.
And you kind of signal sometimes their practises were quite unscrupulous as well.
So this was a fascinating dimension for me of a centuries long tradition of Orientalism
in a preset saidon sense that seems to have been previously largely unknown.
I wonder if you want to comment on this briefly.
On the one hand, there is, you know, in recent years that there have been studies done on museums and the collections of museums and,
you know, countless jokes about the British Museum and what it contains and where it's from, et cetera.
But for manuscripts that I feel that there's still a lot to be done.
In fact, there's almost nothing that I could draw on about the idea of where do these things come from.
And when you look at actual accounts by Orientalists who travelled the Middle East in the 19th century, particularly even 20th century,
that they removed manuscripts from endowed libraries where they knew that these were endowed libraries, whether these managements were not for sale.
And they sometimes did it by outright theft, sometimes by bribery.
Very often there were also laws in effect that you were not allowed to export these manuscripts.
There was an also another layer of kind of illegality involved in the procurement of these manuscripts.
But on the other hand, you also signal to give me also signal that sometimes the institutional weakness of these endowments lent
themselves to those who are the supposed caretakers were in such penury themselves that they would,
in a sense, resort to selling manuscripts in order to eke out an existence as well.
Sure. In that sense, it was kind of a perfect storm that you have a period in which you have, on the one hand,
this explosion of European curiosity, that it's important to keep in mind that it was a different curiosity than you would have today.
I mean, at that point, you know, early 19th century, people were still looking for the wisdom from the east.
I mean, they were looking for new information about astronomy or sciences, whatever, to discover new stuff, cutting edge stuff.
But you had the institutions of Islamic book culture, libraries, et cetera, that were built on a system of endowments and particular.
I mean, my book is primarily about the Arab Middle East. These endowments were in bad shape at this time period.
These Arab countries were provinces of kind of non Arab empires.
And while they endowed libraries in Istanbul, for example, maybe in this Farhana in Delhi or something in a better state,
the ones in the Arab Middle East were in a much worse state.
So you had these libraries in Europe that were funded very well, that had very wealthy donors.
What were the states themselves when investing heavily in individuals that they had money?
And then you had these institutions where, you know, the endowment that had been found a 200,
300 years earlier, the librarians wages hadn't kept up with inflation.
There were still two years to go from the work. And that led to kind of rampant kind of selling out of manuscripts.
And it was part of the kind of formation of modern states, modern nation states in the mid 19th century that you have these new libraries found.
It could have a mostly in Cairo, the Vira, a library in Damascus where they said, well, look,
we have to kind of break these endowed libraries and put them together and have them centrally
stored and have librarians that are paid by the government to make sure that doesn't happen anymore.
That's a fascinating aspect of this, which I hadn't thought about quite so much in the sense that the modern state is actually in
a sense than instrumental now in preserving these manuscript libraries in recent decades,
perhaps for over a century or so in certain countries. And yes, I mean, that's that's a transformation, which is also, in some respects,
a sort of ideological shift away from the endowment to the modern state, so to speak, which is a fascinating way to think about this.
But you'll come into that, in a sense, the Arab world becoming a provincial region within a larger empire, whether the contract with the Ottoman,
whether the Moho Empires is interesting because it leads onto another question that I had seen,
which was about the way in which in various parts of the world, you allude to scholars from other parts of the Islamic world.
You mentioned Mauritania, Iraq in the case and whatever else OBD I believe he had Iraqi heritage, but he's actually born in India as well.
So the great polymath of the 18th century. And while most of your work does focus on Egypt and central Islamic lands to Egypt,
to a certain extent with people like me and others, Syria as well, or Shaan,
I wonder to what extent you think that the observations that you make about post classical book
culture and I'm using a term that you use here can be extended beyond the Egyptian context.
If we were to think about some of these other areas. So I think it's important that, you know,
the majority of my book focuses on Egypt as a stage at which print begins in the Arab world and in which it reaches the highest volume.
It's a place where it begins as a part and parcel of the kind of modernising state venture.
Ali, but also there has a liberal kind of press law, which makes it the place where people just come and print books.
And so it's it's a stage for people from everywhere.
I mean, this East Africans, Zanzibar, who print stuff in Egypt and round people from Somalia and people from, of course, Syria, Iraq and North Africa.
I mean, there's European interests, print stuff in Cairo. That's India. Right.
And so on and so on. So it's it's not like some sort of nationalist Egyptian history, of course.
And you make that clear to Egypt as a stage yet. But other kind of preprint culture.
I wanted to. I mean, there are certain universal aspects of this.
You know, what would I call post classical scholarship?
And really the reason why I call the post classical way, I think it's apt to call it post classical.
Is that the classical material just isn't particularly interesting anymore for Moscow right now.
Kind of. It's not a in other ways that that kind of work.
You speak of how Ashie, for example. Yeah.
There's this culture of, you know, secondary commentaries and tertiary commentaries and even quaternary commentary, Sensipar.
I mean, I call this phenomenon scholasticism, which offers an analogy to European mediaeval history, a history of commentary's,
a history that kind of an intellectual worldview in which more or less everything that is known is known.
Things can be explained, can be analysed in new ways and in interesting ways, formulated in interesting new ways.
But we would kind of know the boundaries of what is knowable.
And we have a limited kind of clusters of texts and commentaries on those texts that we consider.
Right. And so there's a certain traditionalism in it that we kind of we consider that certain what's been bequeathed to us is what really matters.
And also that we don't really venture out and look for books that might have been forgotten or
that matter right out of the tradition that there must be a reason why it fell out of tradition.
Right. You give this fascinating sort of anecdote.
I think it's another Hanni who says something along the lines of you shouldn't publish it in 10 years works because they've been,
you know, discarded for a reason. The tradition has recognised that they don't really deserve it.
I think it was in the beginning. Yes. Yes.
And then, of course, al-Alusi retorts and said, you know, if you take that logic, Shaffer's work is almost gone.
But all this kind of lewd poetry and whatever, you have hundreds of copies.
So that really what that's what you should read and study.
So there there's a certain kind of a problem with tradition and that comes up and that becomes exacerbated through print that you start questioning,
you know, mathematics of cultures have a specific logic went each copy has to be copied by hand.
And so the works that have lots of copies that that show something shows that these words are used,
that they're stargaze, that they have people to study. They've been accepted. You know, this is very often a kind of phrase that's used.
You know, this is this is accepted or this is, you know, looking in Kabul, you know, sometimes they say that sort of thing.
But then the question of what if the tradition itself isn't the thing with its own mind?
You know what? There are books that are really valuable, but I've just been forgotten for whatever reason that might be useful to read.
And and part of this commentary culture is also that there's this lovely anecdote that really brought it home for me, saying in his autobiography,
Alam, where they get taught poetry and his his brother and his friends, they run off to the bookshop to look for commentaries like poetry.
And he said, that's not how I look like he's this blind kid sitting there.
Like, that's not how you read poetry. I mean, you mean the poetry and that kind of idea that there's a there's a fear of I might misunderstand,
like, what is the correct understanding of this text? Right.
Like, I don't have any like a framework or a tradition that explains it, Raymie, that there's a fear of kind of deviance that comes in.
If you take texts throughout these often texts which are not transmitted, you know,
with snow and things like this, but kind of that specific context of of modernity, of, you know,
the challenges of Western political domination, but also this the knowledge and the power that comes with it,
that it attracts people to kind of discovering things in their own tradition.
They don't actually fall out of the tradition. And that was for me, I if I had to say what the main contribution of our book is,
is that I feel that a lot of the scholars of modern Islamic thought or modern Islamic history,
for them, there is kind of modern stuff, I don't know,
people translating Voltaire into Arabic and whatever and doing whatever the modern stuff is or that old stuff.
But to think that there is amongst this all stuff,
there's actually a way of discovering really old classical works that wasn't revolutionary modernising
strategy that we don't see anymore today because we've taken them to be normal and natural.
Oh, I'm sure everybody must have known all these classics, which is not the case.
That that was for me, the really the great grand discovery that in a sense, the epiphany of the book.
And that for me as well. I mean, in a sense, it just suddenly changes the way you see it, the entire tradition, although I mean,
maybe I can mention another very encyclopaedic scholar of our own time is the Mauritanian scholar Mohammed Alhassan with the other.
And I remember listening to a lecture of his once where he basically described the tradition.
It can't remember the exact Arabic word he used to describe it,
but he basically says something along the lines of, well, let's allow anyone to help us and allow us.
And the knowledge that people need is sometimes sort of concealed and then revealed just by the vicissitudes of history.
He suggested, for example, that he must honour the book.
Even Mullard, which is this enormous, you know, considered to be the largest, must never be compiled.
Basically, it's completely disappeared or perhaps there are certain citations here and there.
And then in later centuries, perhaps someone rediscovers a just or a selection of readings of a Hadith.
And that can actually provide a kind of, you know, from his perspective, working within the Islamic tradition,
in a sense, provide means of accessing a knowledge that was once lost, but that is now needed in this time.
And in a sense, it's God unveiling something. Not in it, not in a cursory sense, always leave it.
And so, you know, there is that kind of sense,
even amongst a scholar working within the tradition of that contingency of what we have access to, which you don't hear it very often.
But I think it's great to sort of put that front and centre in a book like yours.
I think it's very helpful in many respects.
I didn't want to to kind of give the impression that there was like 300 years in which nobody thought about classical works.
Right. But I mean, even, you know, I made the experience myself in lockdown now that if the library isn't accessible anymore,
there's just practical things that that you just can't go and just take all the stuff down and work with it.
And if you have even just practical decline of availability of works, it has an effect on what your scholarship includes.
You know, if your own scholarship doesn't include these works and the next generation,
as the next nation always does, is like, what do I need to learn? What do I need to know to be educated?
Oh, you know, I need to know those specific commentaries. I don't know all that old stuff, you know.
Right. Right. Right, right. You know, maybe there's a few opinions by Atterberry that we need to memorise or that we didn't.
Right. Fourth hand. All right. We don't read it. We read that whole thing anyway.
Doesn't exist probably anymore. Sure. I mean, somebody like most other Zebedee.
Who was who was travelling all over the place and who clearly had enormous memory and was able to.
I don't know. I mean, some people have that ability to kind of take all these pieces of information, put them together.
But it's very tiring to do.
I mean, even today, you know, doing my research sometimes I hadn't problem that you are in the Middle East and you're looking at manuscripts,
but you don't have a good secondary library. And then you go back to your Western institution that has a good scholarly library.
It does not manage to pass on scripts. That is difficult today. Go and have so much digital access.
But to think about the things that premodern period, I mean, even for those who who had an interest, it was difficult.
I mean, I think in so many respects this idea of, you know, is Dhiab, so speak like having that capriciousness that I think is like,
what does A, B, the oil McCraney some of these sort of post classical figures,
but who in essence you sort of suggest exemplify this encyclopaedic learning or an attempt to maintain that sort of standard,
even through a culture which in a sense doesn't quite value that anymore?
You know, I think that's illustrative.
And I think you do signal this, including in remarking your conclusion that a little in a moment that the time isn't a uniform time.
It's not sort of like, yes,
there are certain themes that you consider to be present as deserving the label of scholasticism and post classical book culture.
But there are these kind of fascinating figures.
And in a sense, your homing in on some of these fascinating figures, particularly the latest stage when they are the people who unearthed these texts.
I wanted to sort of talk a little bit about, you know, this point that you make between this kind of you could say almost an Orientalist
narrative in the pejorative sense of decline vs. the attempt by a lot of scholars,
you know, of our generation. And, you know, I think the previous generation now who are basically trying to push back against those sorts of problems.
And so, you know, your conclusion, you actually are very careful to highlight that there's.
Kind of unfortunate, but largely superficial alignment of your narrative with the so-called intellectual decline
narrative against which many of these countries have been pushing for some time now.
And I thought that your conclusion quite carefully balanced the desire between
trying to avoid reinforcing the triumphalism of the kind of Eurocentric scholarship
while recognising that there were indigenous voices of reform that existed that
recognised serious deficiencies in what you've called post classical culture.
And I wonder, I mean, this is a question that I grapple with just any sense. How do you balance this sort of desire in this new literature?
Or how do you strike the right balance between trying to correct for issues of Eurocentrism,
which I think you are quite conscious of throughout your work, but also correcting for the overcorrection, so to speak.
So what would you say to someone like myself? I mean, on the one hand, I think it's always helpful to be really precise.
And the enemy of I mean, the antidote to stereotypes and generalisations shouldn't be just the opposite generalisation of stereotype,
but it should be precision. So, you know, if we if you take a word like decline, there are things that you can quantify and where there is a decline.
I mean,
like the number of books in libraries in Cairo over the number of working madrassas in Cairo declined from the 16th century to the 19th century.
I mean, it's just numbers. You might just see a number, lower number.
Similarly, you can look at American whatever American economic dominance in 1945 and today and you can see a decline.
Clearly, there is a decline produced 50 percent of all goods in the world and 45.
Right today it does. I don't know how many. Seven percent. That's right.
But the I think the problem of the narrative of decline is that nothing happened.
Nothing worth thinking about or nothing of any kind of happened that I think
that we don't we don't use that for the United States or for Great Britain,
which declined. But we use it for kind of post classical.
Middle East would like it, but it's not like that. There were just. You know, smoking opium pipes lying right out you.
Right. So you can't take a look. You have to kind of re-establishes.
Oh well, we don't have to. We don't have to talk about that period. Right. All right.
But at the same time that there's a kind of knee jerk generalisation of saying, oh,
look, no, here I give you a list of books that were written in this time period.
So it was a it was flourishing. If you're not looking at what the books are about or if you say, oh, look,
they were studying these rational signs, it's look, there's all these citations.
Masters of the rational sciences without saying, OK, what were is it interesting that in this time period,
esoteric sciences were categorised as rational sciences.
So animal Horoho was considered to be a rational science.
I mean, that's just an important kind of thing to put out there that is slightly different, but also kind of current way of thinking about it,
which is saying things like the state is bad or the kind of iron cage of rationality is bad.
But the Middle East didn't have that. So it becomes like the opposite of the West.
But in the positive, in a positive way. That's they. Right. They they didn't have whatever they had all these ecstatic ways of knowing.
So look how how this is solving the problems of the current West.
So I think, you know, for me, it's important to understand history is not in a kind of melodramatic sense of it's either was good or bad,
but actually not what was at stake, you know.
What did it mean to be an educated person in the 17th century as compared to the 10th century as compared to the 20th century?
And we accept this in European intellectual history, that in the early 20th century,
like physics on atom level or quantum physics like that, it was something where all these young geniuses flocked to.
And then in the later parts, you have the DNA is that comes biology or,
you know, not computer science or something like that that raised these moments.
That chain not like, oh, you know, Muslims love books, look like a Jahad loved books.
That's true. Right. But, you know, you have very different stories told in the 18th century, for example, in the 17th century.
So it's important to keep, you know, that there's a history.
It's not just all the just the previous the premodern Muslim world, that it's just like one arena that's changing.
There's a history there. And I think precision is the antidote to lazy generalisations either way.
Right. I think I mean, this is something which I think scholars in our field will have to grapple with for a good period of time,
because so much of our field is still,
in a sense, trying to correct for, you know, issues that existed in 19th century scholarship and early 20th century scholarship.
A lot of which we're building on. And we've benefited a great deal from some of the great scholars of those periods.
But they also brought a lot of, we could say, ideological baggage.
And I think there is an increasing consciousness, however.
I mean, in our own time and sometimes I think it can become as I say, it's an overcorrection.
The suggestion that ideology is inescapable on some level and there needs to be position in scholarship as well as a consciousness.
I think of that element. And your book does a wonderful job.
And I think laying down and documenting and giving facts and figures, presenting a compelling history.
And this is something that scholars will continue to sort of struggle with in some respects.
But I think you've painted us a very persuasive picture of how it could be done in a way that maintains a sort of a fealty to an empiricist dimension,
as well as a recognition of the way in which indigenous sort of actors viewed their own activities.
And I think sometimes when ideology or concerns about it can suppress almost the voices of indigenous actors,
that's something that we all need to be conscious about. It's something that we need to be careful and thoughtful about.
The last question that I have is about a figure who is in many respects quite
controversial in our own time and was a bit of a controversialist in his own time.
To be fair that in Chapter seven you discuss the mum look a polymath,
even tinier as a scholar, and emerges, as you put it, as a model of broad addition.
Now you argue that his reputation as an extremist and you are not alone in this, that his reputation as an extremist in recent decades is undeserved.
But you also point out how he had been neglected by post classical culture.
And just for clarity, you kind of designate his classical culture as being the 16th to 19th century, roughly.
And I'm curious to know why the reformists you studied and used the term reformist as a descriptive.
They were in an effort very self-conscious to reform their societies and their educational cultures.
Why these reformists singled out in Tamia as a model of broad intellectual erudition,
given the considerable roster of polymaths found throughout Islamic history?
What do you think was for then special about India?
I think various elements of his work or his character, features of his writing that were particularly attractive to these reformers.
The first one is something that I already kind of.
Hinted at a little bit earlier, is that in his writing, you don't get the feeling that there is this amorphous tradition, these modernist reformers,
one of the main challenge was this idea that there is this one thing, caucus Aslam,
which is identical to the kind of a kind of an amorphous tradition which you can either take or you can leave.
And it consists of various parts. And so the question of how do you void this weight of tradition?
How do you step out of it, critique parts of it, selecting, writing without having to, for example,
just become a convert to Western rationalism or the right Western intellectual fashions of the day?
And what in Timir showed is that he was himself somebody who is difficult to categorise.
I mean, who is himself doing this kind of work to the orthodoxy of his own day and who does this with his cards on the table in the sense that,
you know, when you read the tale as early, you know, super intelligent person, but he doesn't tell you who he has read.
I mean, hardly ever as he mentioned that or who he is.
He cites something he cited and he's not actually cited, like he's kind of Plato. I mean, loves modern day.
Well, many lies imply slightly different level. Macchi, for example. It rhymes, Madina.
You take sections from it. Doesn't mention it. So it's right. There's one thing on the other hand.
So a study that somebody did just looking at the much smaller photograph of him, it.
So it's just one large work, but just not all of the work.
And he cites 500 works and this collection explicitly who the person is citing from what whatever.
And so he kind of he paints for you not this amorphous tradition, but, you know,
the various forms and how they relate to each other and groups that have died out that he's read because he's I mean,
he has read so much that issues that he has read. And so, in a sense, he could also be a guide for you into the tradition.
So, Zebedee, he basically reproduces in 10 years at the Murphy solitarily years because, you know, Temi talks about what he liked to see or whatever.
Like that doesn't exist anymore. Like, right.
You have somebody who can give you a tour of this and you know that there is part, of course, like the kind of historical method,
philological method, you know, epidemic already criticises for the historicity of al-Hassani Husain Mosque in Cairo.
Right. Right. Documents he claimed that they had buried there. The head of Hussein and Interm.
You're just like. Has it just a normal historical criticism? Well, I mean, there's no evidence that this is the head of Hussein.
And, you know, people say that there is there. So it's something that you can take up in the 19th century or early 20th century.
I mean, what's really we're only starting to be published in nineteen hundred read late,
but it's something that can stand in its own mythological ways and that is kind of actually theologically rigorous in that sense.
And so for different groups, he can serve as a model in different ways.
It's not just one specific way.
If you're particularly objecting to, let's say, shrine culture, which was a kind of basically universal concern of reformists today, of course.
Right. We consider that primarily like a concern of hard core kind of jihadis who want to destroy those shrines.
But it was generally an issue of kind of modernisers are saying, look, this know, people make these as quick.
I I am figures that have control over the weather and the harvest fertility of women and this kind of thing.
People were embarrassed about this. Show was a source of embarrassment for many people.
So said, OK. We actually have an indigenous scholar who already in the 14th century criticises this.
So he has something for a wide range of reformists.
So this is really interesting that what you mentioned about trend culture as well.
No, I'm not familiar with the sort of secular literature specifically on this.
One thinks of both Christians who work, which is more about mediaeval, Kyra, that it's fascinating that you will see is the term embarrassed?
You know, people are starting to become embarrassed about this sort of thing. And I'm reminded that even someone like Mohammed Saeed in custody,
Jonathan Brown talks about this in his discussion on Hadiths that even Mohammed said custodies is begins to recognise.
Actually, there are certain types of hadith.
We should point out, as weak because they are an embarrassment considering sort of modern sensibilities and some.
But at the same time, I suspect that, you know, that sort of shrine culture would have, in a sense,
in the way that you describe this classical culture of burgeoned in that period
in a way that might not have existed on such a widespread scale before.
And it would be wonderful if the scholar were to actually it's a lot to trace
through the literature that to actually do what we can to illustrate that that was,
in fact, the case. But it does seem to be suggested, by the way, in which you stoicism becomes quite important,
I think, in the way that you portrayed this and you present a very compelling narrative.
That's what I can say. And we'll be definitely grappling with this very long to come.
And, you know, I can only thank you for working on this book.
And as we come to a close, I just want to let everyone know that I've been speaking to the author.
H.M.S. about his recent book, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics. How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition.