The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands: A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices.

• Author: El Shamsy, Ahmed
• Position: Book review

The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands: A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices. By Konrad Hirschler. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Pp. vi + 234. 65 [pounds sterling], $105.

For a civilization that was founded, according to its own narrative, on the divine command "Read!" (Q 96:1) and that subsequently developed into one of "the world's most bookish societies" (Hirschler, p. 11), there are precious few studies on the premodern history and texture of its written culture. Franz Rosenthal's The Technique and Approach of Muslim Scholarship (1947) and Johannes Pedersen's The Arabic Book (1984) are still standard overall accounts, to which Jonathan Bloom's Paper before Print (2001) now must be added for its unmatched presentation of the premodern book as a physical artifact. More recently, Gregor Schoeler (e.g., The Genesis of Literature in Islam, 2009), Sebastian Gunther (e.g., "Praise to the Book!," JSAI 32 [2006]: 125-43), and Shawkat Toorawa (Ibn Abl Tahir Tayfur and Arabic Writerly Culture, 2005) have published important studies on the emergence and early formation of Islamicate written/writerly culture.

Later periods have, however, received less attention, and it is here that Konrad Hirschler's new book makes an important contribution. The Written Word focuses almost exclusively on the Mamluk period and realm, and it consciously does not deal with scholarly written culture, high literary culture, or the pragmatic literacy of documents or administrative writing. Rather, it seeks to trace a process of textualization and popularization of book culture (p. 5). Hirschler admits at the outset that it is difficult to define popular vs. high culture, and he therefore proposes to "study mechanisms of differentiation that indicate variations in cultural practices" (p. 24). An important distinction for Hirschler exists between ritual and non-ritual reading. The former is constituted by the reading of the Quran (p. 20) and hadith (p. 27) and by the use of books for the purpose of receiving blessings (p. 20). Hirschler excludes the ritual usage of the written word from his study, probably because it does not speak to his textualization hypothesis, but this creates problems, as discussed below.

In chapter one, "Reading and Writerly Culture," Hirschler introduces the theoretical and practical problems inherent in studying reading and literacy cultures. He begins by noting that literacy and illiteracy are not binaries; rather, there is a whole spectrum of literacy, the lower end of...