The Book in the Islamic World: The Written Word and Communication in the Middle East.

• Author: Smyth, William

The Book in the Islamic World is a collection of papers given at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. in November of 1989. The papers were part of a conference which was itself part of a series of conferences and expositions the Library has held on the idea of the book in Western and non-Western cultures. The papers in this collection cover a wide range of topics and historical periods and so form a good, if somewhat eclectic, introduction to the subject.

And the topic is a very interesting one, to be sure. There has been a lot of interest of late in not only the subject matter contained in books - i.e., poetry or physics or history - but also in the container itself. Who could read and who could write, and what role did these abilities play in society? And further, what role did the actual technology of reading and writing play? How have the manufacture of paper, the development of printing and - most recently - the use of virtual or electronic "texts" shaped the way we think and act? These questions are particularly interesting in the context of the Islamic world where the notion of the book is so closely bound up with the notion of revelation.

Accordingly, a volume like this one is a welcome contribution. Since it is a collection of conference papers we cannot expect the sort of sustained analysis of Islamic ideas on writing and textuality that those interested in theory would probably like. But some of the authors do touch on theoretical topics. The opening paper by Muhsin Mahdi, for example, puts the discussion into a useful context by drawing our attention to some of the more important social and cultural issues. When, for instance, did literacy rates in the Middle East reach the point that manuscript copying could no longer satisfy the demand for books? Unfortunately, Mahdi does not really have the chance to do more than pose these questions. In another paper, however, Franz Rosenthal considers at greater length the manner in which books were treated in the pre-modern period and the extent to which the Islamic world believed that libraries could encompass human knowledge and experience.

Not surprisingly, we find the most substantial discussion of theoretical issues in Dale Eickelman's paper on education in the modern Arab world. Eickelman considers the connection between rising literacy rates and notions of political and religious identity. How, for instance, would an educated Muslim describe his faith? How would an uneducated...