Ahmed El Shamsy, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 312; 27 b/w illus. $35.00 cloth.

A revew of Ahmed El Shamsy's study of the social and intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the Levantine regions, Egypt, and Iraq, in the 19th and 20th centuries. The book's argument emphasizes, first, the scarcity of witnesses of classical works in modern Arab libraries, due to a decreased interest in these texts in the postclassical period. Also fundamental to the book's argument is its analysis of the renewed interest in these texts that began in the modern era, in coincidence with and profiting from the introduction of typographic printing in the Arab world.