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When we think of the classics of Islamic thought today,

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we think in the first instance of works written by the founders of the very schools of theology, law, philosophy, linguistics,

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Sufism and historiography, and by subsequent scholars who shaped these fields through their seminal contributions,

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the out of the bookshops around us eyebrows for hours.

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In my visits to Cairo could be relied on to contain such works.

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But this landscape of relative established classics was not what al-Hassani faced at the turn of the 20th century.

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Far from ubiquitous, these works were scarce and difficult, if not impossible to find.

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Not only had most not yet been edited and printed, but there were few manuscript copies of them,

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and the whereabouts of those few that existed were often unknown.

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Welcome to Middle East Centre Book Talk. The Oxford podcast on new books about the Middle East.

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These are some of the books written by our members, members of our community. All books that our community are talking about.

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My name is a Salmon Anthony and I teach contemporary Islamic studies at the Middle East centre.

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My guest today is Amina Shamsi. He is an associate professor of Islamic Thought at the University of Chicago.

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Ahmed is no stranger to the UK. He completed his undergraduate and master's degrees.

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So as the LSC respectively before heading west to pursue a doctorate at Harvard.

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Since 2010, Ahmed has been based at the University of Chicago. His research is concerned with intellectual history of Islam,

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focussing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and the scholarly culture within their broader historical context.

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His research addresses themes such as a reality, literacy,

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the history and the book and the theory and practise of Islamic law and its important first book, The Canonisation of Islamic Law.

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A Social and Intellectual History,

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traces the transformation of Islamic law from a primarily oral tradition to a systematic written discipline in the eighth and ninth centuries.

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Its second book, The Subject of today's conversation, is similarly a significant contribution to our understanding of Islamic intellectual history.

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It is entitled Rediscovering the Islamic Classics. How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition.

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Welcome to Book Talk. Thank you for having me. It's our pleasure.

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And so just to start this conversation off, I wondered if you could tell us something about how you wrote your book.

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When did it start? What sources were you able to uncover and what countries did the research take you to?

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So part of my formation as a scholar is that I like to browse bookshops in the Middle

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East and spend hours there just looking at the various sections and reading these books.

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And for me, they represented something of a tradition that you could just access and, you know, buy and take home with you.

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And then when I started to think about doing serious research,

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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.

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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?

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And then I became fascinated with the world of manuscripts and manuscript libraries.

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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.

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So they were in terms of numbers, the kind of classical works were much fewer than the more recent works.

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So I saw that these were not the same type of things. They didn't have the same type of books.

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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,

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I just couldn't find any copies. There was maybe one copy somewhere.

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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.

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And everybody seems to be like, oh, yes, everybody talks about love. So, you know, about husbands, Kelkal, Hamam, but only one manuscript.

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And that happens to be in Holland. So that's a strange story.

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So over time, I mean, I did know, as you mentioned, my first book was in the 9th century.

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I started to get the strange feeling that I was trying to both access printed material and manuscripts,

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that I felt that much of our perception had been shaped by people who had edited works,

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and that rather than just seeing directly into the ninth century,

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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.

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And while some of these books were edited by Western Orientalist, I mean, especially in the field of Islamic law.

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That depends from from field to field sometimes, but especially for Islamic law.

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That's basically all editors in the Middle East. And really, I didn't know any of them.

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And so I started to think about them and read about them and kind of pay attention to them.

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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.

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But I had already collected quite a bit of material in libraries.

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And I did research in Egypt and Syria and Turkey and various European libraries and in American libraries.

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You opened with this beautiful anecdote of finding this manuscript and you kind of mis translate the title,

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a manuscript as well, because you think the mother of Shefi or something along those lines.

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And it's of course. I can't remember Shaffi wasn't mentioned in the original title.

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And that's why I think he made a mistake. But it's clear that you said.

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I think at the end of that story that I knew that I would one day write this book.

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So this has been in your mind since your doctorate days, basically.

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And I love the way in which you weaved that personal anecdote and the personal story into something which is actually quite the point

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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.

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These are sort of fashionable term right now that I think you've done a wonderful job informing us about.

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And I look forward to going into that conversation in greater detail as we proceed.

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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

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appetite of European scholars for manuscripts from the Middle East in recent centuries,

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in a sense almost unwittingly contributed to the decline of Middle Eastern libraries.

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And you kind of signal sometimes their practises were quite unscrupulous as well.

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So this was a fascinating dimension for me of a centuries long tradition of Orientalism

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in a preset saidon sense that seems to have been previously largely unknown.

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I wonder if you want to comment on this briefly.

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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,

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you know, countless jokes about the British Museum and what it contains and where it's from, et cetera.

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But for manuscripts that I feel that there's still a lot to be done.

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In fact, there's almost nothing that I could draw on about the idea of where do these things come from.

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And when you look at actual accounts by Orientalists who travelled the Middle East in the 19th century, particularly even 20th century,

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that they removed manuscripts from endowed libraries where they knew that these were endowed libraries, whether these managements were not for sale.

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And they sometimes did it by outright theft, sometimes by bribery.

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Very often there were also laws in effect that you were not allowed to export these manuscripts.

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There was an also another layer of kind of illegality involved in the procurement of these manuscripts.

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But on the other hand, you also signal to give me also signal that sometimes the institutional weakness of these endowments lent

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themselves to those who are the supposed caretakers were in such penury themselves that they would,

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in a sense, resort to selling manuscripts in order to eke out an existence as well.

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Sure. In that sense, it was kind of a perfect storm that you have a period in which you have, on the one hand,

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this explosion of European curiosity, that it's important to keep in mind that it was a different curiosity than you would have today.

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I mean, at that point, you know, early 19th century, people were still looking for the wisdom from the east.

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I mean, they were looking for new information about astronomy or sciences, whatever, to discover new stuff, cutting edge stuff.

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But you had the institutions of Islamic book culture, libraries, et cetera, that were built on a system of endowments and particular.

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I mean, my book is primarily about the Arab Middle East. These endowments were in bad shape at this time period.

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These Arab countries were provinces of kind of non Arab empires.

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And while they endowed libraries in Istanbul, for example, maybe in this Farhana in Delhi or something in a better state,

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the ones in the Arab Middle East were in a much worse state.

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So you had these libraries in Europe that were funded very well, that had very wealthy donors.

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What were the states themselves when investing heavily in individuals that they had money?

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And then you had these institutions where, you know, the endowment that had been found a 200,

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300 years earlier, the librarians wages hadn't kept up with inflation.

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There were still two years to go from the work. And that led to kind of rampant kind of selling out of manuscripts.

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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.

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It could have a mostly in Cairo, the Vira, a library in Damascus where they said, well, look,

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we have to kind of break these endowed libraries and put them together and have them centrally

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stored and have librarians that are paid by the government to make sure that doesn't happen anymore.

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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

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a sense than instrumental now in preserving these manuscript libraries in recent decades,

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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,

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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.

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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,

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whether the Moho Empires is interesting because it leads onto another question that I had seen,

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which was about the way in which in various parts of the world, you allude to scholars from other parts of the Islamic world.

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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.

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So the great polymath of the 18th century. And while most of your work does focus on Egypt and central Islamic lands to Egypt,

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to a certain extent with people like me and others, Syria as well, or Shaan,

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I wonder to what extent you think that the observations that you make about post classical book

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culture and I'm using a term that you use here can be extended beyond the Egyptian context.

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If we were to think about some of these other areas. So I think it's important that, you know,

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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.

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It's a place where it begins as a part and parcel of the kind of modernising state venture.

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Ali, but also there has a liberal kind of press law, which makes it the place where people just come and print books.

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And so it's it's a stage for people from everywhere.

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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.

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I mean, there's European interests, print stuff in Cairo. That's India. Right.

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And so on and so on. So it's it's not like some sort of nationalist Egyptian history, of course.

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And you make that clear to Egypt as a stage yet. But other kind of preprint culture.

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I wanted to. I mean, there are certain universal aspects of this.

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You know, what would I call post classical scholarship?

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And really the reason why I call the post classical way, I think it's apt to call it post classical.

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Is that the classical material just isn't particularly interesting anymore for Moscow right now.

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Kind of. It's not a in other ways that that kind of work.

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You speak of how Ashie, for example. Yeah.

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There's this culture of, you know, secondary commentaries and tertiary commentaries and even quaternary commentary, Sensipar.

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I mean, I call this phenomenon scholasticism, which offers an analogy to European mediaeval history, a history of commentary's,

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a history that kind of an intellectual worldview in which more or less everything that is known is known.

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Things can be explained, can be analysed in new ways and in interesting ways, formulated in interesting new ways.

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But we would kind of know the boundaries of what is knowable.

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And we have a limited kind of clusters of texts and commentaries on those texts that we consider.

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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.

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And also that we don't really venture out and look for books that might have been forgotten or

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that matter right out of the tradition that there must be a reason why it fell out of tradition.

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Right. You give this fascinating sort of anecdote.

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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,

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you know, discarded for a reason. The tradition has recognised that they don't really deserve it.

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I think it was in the beginning. Yes. Yes.

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And then, of course, al-Alusi retorts and said, you know, if you take that logic, Shaffer's work is almost gone.

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But all this kind of lewd poetry and whatever, you have hundreds of copies.

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So that really what that's what you should read and study.

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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,

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you know, mathematics of cultures have a specific logic went each copy has to be copied by hand.

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And so the works that have lots of copies that that show something shows that these words are used,

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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.

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You know, this is this is accepted or this is, you know, looking in Kabul, you know, sometimes they say that sort of thing.

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But then the question of what if the tradition itself isn't the thing with its own mind?

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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.

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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,

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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.

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And he said, that's not how I look like he's this blind kid sitting there.

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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,

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like, what is the correct understanding of this text? Right.

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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.

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If you take texts throughout these often texts which are not transmitted, you know,

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with snow and things like this, but kind of that specific context of of modernity, of, you know,

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the challenges of Western political domination, but also this the knowledge and the power that comes with it,

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that it attracts people to kind of discovering things in their own tradition.

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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,

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is that I feel that a lot of the scholars of modern Islamic thought or modern Islamic history,

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for them, there is kind of modern stuff, I don't know,

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people translating Voltaire into Arabic and whatever and doing whatever the modern stuff is or that old stuff.

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But to think that there is amongst this all stuff,

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there's actually a way of discovering really old classical works that wasn't revolutionary modernising

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strategy that we don't see anymore today because we've taken them to be normal and natural.

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Oh, I'm sure everybody must have known all these classics, which is not the case.

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That that was for me, the really the great grand discovery that in a sense, the epiphany of the book.

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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,

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maybe I can mention another very encyclopaedic scholar of our own time is the Mauritanian scholar Mohammed Alhassan with the other.

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And I remember listening to a lecture of his once where he basically described the tradition.

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It can't remember the exact Arabic word he used to describe it,

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but he basically says something along the lines of, well, let's allow anyone to help us and allow us.

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And the knowledge that people need is sometimes sort of concealed and then revealed just by the vicissitudes of history.

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He suggested, for example, that he must honour the book.

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Even Mullard, which is this enormous, you know, considered to be the largest, must never be compiled.

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Basically, it's completely disappeared or perhaps there are certain citations here and there.

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And then in later centuries, perhaps someone rediscovers a just or a selection of readings of a Hadith.

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And that can actually provide a kind of, you know, from his perspective, working within the Islamic tradition,

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in a sense, provide means of accessing a knowledge that was once lost, but that is now needed in this time.

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And in a sense, it's God unveiling something. Not in it, not in a cursory sense, always leave it.

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And so, you know, there is that kind of sense,

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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.

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But I think it's great to sort of put that front and centre in a book like yours.

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I think it's very helpful in many respects.

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I didn't want to to kind of give the impression that there was like 300 years in which nobody thought about classical works.

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Right. But I mean, even, you know, I made the experience myself in lockdown now that if the library isn't accessible anymore,

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there's just practical things that that you just can't go and just take all the stuff down and work with it.

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And if you have even just practical decline of availability of works, it has an effect on what your scholarship includes.

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You know, if your own scholarship doesn't include these works and the next generation,

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as the next nation always does, is like, what do I need to learn? What do I need to know to be educated?

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Oh, you know, I need to know those specific commentaries. I don't know all that old stuff, you know.

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Right. Right. Right, right. You know, maybe there's a few opinions by Atterberry that we need to memorise or that we didn't.

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Right. Fourth hand. All right. We don't read it. We read that whole thing anyway.

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Doesn't exist probably anymore. Sure. I mean, somebody like most other Zebedee.

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Who was who was travelling all over the place and who clearly had enormous memory and was able to.

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I don't know. I mean, some people have that ability to kind of take all these pieces of information, put them together.

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But it's very tiring to do.

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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,

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but you don't have a good secondary library. And then you go back to your Western institution that has a good scholarly library.

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It does not manage to pass on scripts. That is difficult today. Go and have so much digital access.

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But to think about the things that premodern period, I mean, even for those who who had an interest, it was difficult.

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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,

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what does A, B, the oil McCraney some of these sort of post classical figures,

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but who in essence you sort of suggest exemplify this encyclopaedic learning or an attempt to maintain that sort of standard,

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even through a culture which in a sense doesn't quite value that anymore?

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You know, I think that's illustrative.

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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.

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It's not sort of like, yes,

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there are certain themes that you consider to be present as deserving the label of scholasticism and post classical book culture.

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But there are these kind of fascinating figures.

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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.

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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

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narrative in the pejorative sense of decline vs. the attempt by a lot of scholars,

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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.

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And so, you know, your conclusion, you actually are very careful to highlight that there's.

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Kind of unfortunate, but largely superficial alignment of your narrative with the so-called intellectual decline

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narrative against which many of these countries have been pushing for some time now.

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And I thought that your conclusion quite carefully balanced the desire between

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trying to avoid reinforcing the triumphalism of the kind of Eurocentric scholarship

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while recognising that there were indigenous voices of reform that existed that

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recognised serious deficiencies in what you've called post classical culture.

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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?

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Or how do you strike the right balance between trying to correct for issues of Eurocentrism,

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which I think you are quite conscious of throughout your work, but also correcting for the overcorrection, so to speak.

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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.

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And the enemy of I mean, the antidote to stereotypes and generalisations shouldn't be just the opposite generalisation of stereotype,

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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.

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I mean,

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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.

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I mean, it's just numbers. You might just see a number, lower number.

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Similarly, you can look at American whatever American economic dominance in 1945 and today and you can see a decline.

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Clearly, there is a decline produced 50 percent of all goods in the world and 45.

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Right today it does. I don't know how many. Seven percent. That's right.

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But the I think the problem of the narrative of decline is that nothing happened.

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Nothing worth thinking about or nothing of any kind of happened that I think

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that we don't we don't use that for the United States or for Great Britain,

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which declined. But we use it for kind of post classical.

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Middle East would like it, but it's not like that. There were just. You know, smoking opium pipes lying right out you.

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Right. So you can't take a look. You have to kind of re-establishes.

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Oh well, we don't have to. We don't have to talk about that period. Right. All right.

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But at the same time that there's a kind of knee jerk generalisation of saying, oh,

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look, no, here I give you a list of books that were written in this time period.

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So it was a it was flourishing. If you're not looking at what the books are about or if you say, oh, look,

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they were studying these rational signs, it's look, there's all these citations.

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Masters of the rational sciences without saying, OK, what were is it interesting that in this time period,

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esoteric sciences were categorised as rational sciences.

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So animal Horoho was considered to be a rational science.

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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,

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which is saying things like the state is bad or the kind of iron cage of rationality is bad.

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But the Middle East didn't have that. So it becomes like the opposite of the West.

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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.

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So look how how this is solving the problems of the current West.

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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,

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but actually not what was at stake, you know.

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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?

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And we accept this in European intellectual history, that in the early 20th century,

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like physics on atom level or quantum physics like that, it was something where all these young geniuses flocked to.

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And then in the later parts, you have the DNA is that comes biology or,

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you know, not computer science or something like that that raised these moments.

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That chain not like, oh, you know, Muslims love books, look like a Jahad loved books.

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That's true. Right. But, you know, you have very different stories told in the 18th century, for example, in the 17th century.

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So it's important to keep, you know, that there's a history.

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It's not just all the just the previous the premodern Muslim world, that it's just like one arena that's changing.

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There's a history there. And I think precision is the antidote to lazy generalisations either way.

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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,

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because so much of our field is still,

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in a sense, trying to correct for, you know, issues that existed in 19th century scholarship and early 20th century scholarship.

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A lot of which we're building on. And we've benefited a great deal from some of the great scholars of those periods.

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But they also brought a lot of, we could say, ideological baggage.

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And I think there is an increasing consciousness, however.

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I mean, in our own time and sometimes I think it can become as I say, it's an overcorrection.

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The suggestion that ideology is inescapable on some level and there needs to be position in scholarship as well as a consciousness.

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I think of that element. And your book does a wonderful job.

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And I think laying down and documenting and giving facts and figures, presenting a compelling history.

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And this is something that scholars will continue to sort of struggle with in some respects.

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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,

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as well as a recognition of the way in which indigenous sort of actors viewed their own activities.

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And I think sometimes when ideology or concerns about it can suppress almost the voices of indigenous actors,

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that's something that we all need to be conscious about. It's something that we need to be careful and thoughtful about.

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The last question that I have is about a figure who is in many respects quite

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controversial in our own time and was a bit of a controversialist in his own time.

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To be fair that in Chapter seven you discuss the mum look a polymath,

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even tinier as a scholar, and emerges, as you put it, as a model of broad addition.

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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.

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But you also point out how he had been neglected by post classical culture.

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And just for clarity, you kind of designate his classical culture as being the 16th to 19th century, roughly.

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And I'm curious to know why the reformists you studied and used the term reformist as a descriptive.

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They were in an effort very self-conscious to reform their societies and their educational cultures.

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Why these reformists singled out in Tamia as a model of broad intellectual erudition,

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given the considerable roster of polymaths found throughout Islamic history?

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What do you think was for then special about India?

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I think various elements of his work or his character, features of his writing that were particularly attractive to these reformers.

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The first one is something that I already kind of.

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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,

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one of the main challenge was this idea that there is this one thing, caucus Aslam,

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which is identical to the kind of a kind of an amorphous tradition which you can either take or you can leave.

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And it consists of various parts. And so the question of how do you void this weight of tradition?

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How do you step out of it, critique parts of it, selecting, writing without having to, for example,

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just become a convert to Western rationalism or the right Western intellectual fashions of the day?

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And what in Timir showed is that he was himself somebody who is difficult to categorise.

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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,

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you know, when you read the tale as early, you know, super intelligent person, but he doesn't tell you who he has read.

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I mean, hardly ever as he mentioned that or who he is.

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He cites something he cited and he's not actually cited, like he's kind of Plato. I mean, loves modern day.

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Well, many lies imply slightly different level. Macchi, for example. It rhymes, Madina.

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You take sections from it. Doesn't mention it. So it's right. There's one thing on the other hand.

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So a study that somebody did just looking at the much smaller photograph of him, it.

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So it's just one large work, but just not all of the work.

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And he cites 500 works and this collection explicitly who the person is citing from what whatever.

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And so he kind of he paints for you not this amorphous tradition, but, you know,

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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,

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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.

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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.

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Like that doesn't exist anymore. Like, right.

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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,

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philological method, you know, epidemic already criticises for the historicity of al-Hassani Husain Mosque in Cairo.

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Right. Right. Documents he claimed that they had buried there. The head of Hussein and Interm.

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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.

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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.

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I mean, what's really we're only starting to be published in nineteen hundred read late,

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but it's something that can stand in its own mythological ways and that is kind of actually theologically rigorous in that sense.

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And so for different groups, he can serve as a model in different ways.

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It's not just one specific way.

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If you're particularly objecting to, let's say, shrine culture, which was a kind of basically universal concern of reformists today, of course.

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Right. We consider that primarily like a concern of hard core kind of jihadis who want to destroy those shrines.

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But it was generally an issue of kind of modernisers are saying, look, this know, people make these as quick.

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I I am figures that have control over the weather and the harvest fertility of women and this kind of thing.

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People were embarrassed about this. Show was a source of embarrassment for many people.

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So said, OK. We actually have an indigenous scholar who already in the 14th century criticises this.

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So he has something for a wide range of reformists.

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So this is really interesting that what you mentioned about trend culture as well.

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No, I'm not familiar with the sort of secular literature specifically on this.

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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?

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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,

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Jonathan Brown talks about this in his discussion on Hadiths that even Mohammed said custodies is begins to recognise.

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Actually, there are certain types of hadith.

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We should point out, as weak because they are an embarrassment considering sort of modern sensibilities and some.

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But at the same time, I suspect that, you know, that sort of shrine culture would have, in a sense,

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in the way that you describe this classical culture of burgeoned in that period

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in a way that might not have existed on such a widespread scale before.

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And it would be wonderful if the scholar were to actually it's a lot to trace

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through the literature that to actually do what we can to illustrate that that was,

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in fact, the case. But it does seem to be suggested, by the way, in which you stoicism becomes quite important,

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I think, in the way that you portrayed this and you present a very compelling narrative.

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That's what I can say. And we'll be definitely grappling with this very long to come.

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And, you know, I can only thank you for working on this book.

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And as we come to a close, I just want to let everyone know that I've been speaking to the author.

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H.M.S. about his recent book, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics. How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition.