Volume 26 of 'Studies in Manuscript Cultures’ publishedManuscript and Print in the Islamic Tradition

5 September 2022

Photo: De Gruyter

In the Islamic world, the transition from manuscripts to print was slow and not unidirectional. Scholars especially from the West have struggled to properly understand this phenomenon. The new volume of 'Studies in Manuscript Cultures' traces how printing found its place in the Islamic tradition.

In the middle of the 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press; in the Islamic world, it took until the middle of the 19th century for this invention to become widely adopted. For a long time, Western scholars were primarily concerned with only one question: why so late? According to the common view, this delay has to be explained by shortcomings on the part of the Muslims: an irrational aversion to Western technology, the fear of ‘defiling’ sacred texts, an undue attachment to calligraphy – these and similar interpretations used to dominate scholarly discussions.

Only recently, these approaches have become subject to criticism because they are based on the narrow premise that technical progress can only be measured by Western standards. From this perspective, all cultures that did not immediately adopt a certain innovation are considered backward. At the same time, the characteristics of these cultures are often neglected. In particular, it has often been overlooked that within the Islamic tradition, printing was for a long time not an attractive alternative with regard to many of the different purposes of writing.

The anthology Manuscript and Print in the Islamic Tradition, the new volume in the series Studies in Manuscript Cultures (SMC), reassesses the long process of the adoption of printing in the Islamic world. Instead of simply asking ‘Why so late?’, it looks at the complex and regionally very different instances of Islamic written culture; from there, the eleven contributions of the volume approach the question of under what conditions printing could be considered a welcome innovation here at all – and why in certain areas and for certain genres of texts manuscripts remained predominant even after the spread of the printing press. ‘The Islamic written tradition incorporated new technologies not simply as a replacement of earlier scribal practices but in dialogue with and alongside established handwritten and calligraphic traditions’, editor Scott Reese, who is the Principal Investigator of the project ‘The Complicated Relationship Between Manuscripts and Print Within the Islamic Written Tradition of East Africa’ at the Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’, writes in the Introduction. ‘While new technologies dominated certain genres, handwriting and calligraphy did not disappear. On the contrary, these new technologies were just as likely to rejuvenate handwriting and calligraphy as displace them in particular arenas.’  

Like all previous volumes in the series, Manuscript and Print in the Islamic Tradition is available as open access; all contributions can be downloaded from the publisher’s website.