SMC 26

This volume explores and calls into question certain commonly held assumptions about writing and technological advancement in the Islamic tradition. In particular, it challenges the idea that mechanical print naturally and inevitably displaces handwritten texts as well as the notion that the so-called transition from manuscript to print is unidirectional. Indeed, rather than distinct technologies that emerge in a progressive series (one naturally following the other), they frequently co-exist in complex and complementary relationships – relationships we are only now starting to recognize and explore.

The book brings together essays by internationally recognized scholars from an array of disciplines (including philology, linguistics, religious studies, history, anthropology, and typography) whose work focuses on the written word – channeled through various media – as a social and cultural phenomenon within the Islamic tradition. These essays promote systematic approaches to the study of Islamic writing cultures writ large, in an effort to further our understanding of the social, cultural and intellectual relationships between manuscripts, printed texts and the people who use and create them.

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FrontmatterI

ContentsVII

Introduction1

Part I

Overlooked: The Role of Craft in the Adoption of Typography in the Muslim Middle East 
21Titus Nemeth

The Ottoman System of Scripts and the Müteferrika Press  61
J.R. Osborn

The Official Urge to Simplify Arabic Printing: Introduction to Nadīm’s 1948 Memo  89
Kathryn A. Schwartz

Muḥammad Nadīm’s 1948 Memo on Arabic Script Reform: Transcription and Translation 97
Mahmoud Jaber, J.R. Osborn, Kathryn A. Schwartz and Natalia K. Suit

Part II

Calligraphic Masterpiece, Mass-Produced Scripture: Early Qur’an Printing in Colonial India141
Ulrike Stark 

Cermin Mata (‘The Eyeglass’): A Mid-Nineteenth-Century Missionary Journal from Singapore  181
Holger Warnk

'The Ink of Excellence’: Print and the Islamic Written Tradition of East Africa  217
Scott Reese

Early Ethiopian Islamic Printed Books: A First Assessment with a Special Focus on the Works of shaykh Jamāl al-Dīn al-Annī (d. 1882)243
Alessandro Gori

Printing and Textual Authority in the Twentieth-Century Muridiyya 271
Jeremy Dell

'Printed Manuscripts’: Tradition and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Nigerian Qur’anic Printing 289
Andrea Brigaglia

Technology and Local Tradition: The Making of the Printing Industry in Kano  337
Sani Yakubu Adam

Indices357

Contributors373