The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction by Muhsin J. al-Musawi (review)

The importance of Muhsin al-Musawi's The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters for the various disciplines tackling Islamic and Arabic knowledge-production is not the originality of its overarching thesis, but its sheer breadth. This work belongs to a decades-long venture of disrupting the early Orientalist stranglehold on the theoretical lenses by which we gauge the Islamic "Orient" and its cultural output. Thoroughly dumbfounded by the outpouring of texts during the mediaeval Islamicate, Orientalists found it promising to register such production, mostly consisting of compendia and commentaries, as signs of uninventive exhaustion. They credited the crushing weight of intellectual and political despotism and identified an endless regurgitation of the old.

This dismissive understanding of a centuries-long process of intellectual life spanning multiple geographic, political, and ethnic domains, facilitated what is now viewed by many as "the myth of Islamic decline" and permitted an erasure which allowed Orientalists to focus on two originary points of Islamic relevance: early contact between "Jews on Horses" (to quote Crone's essentialization of early Muslims) and Hellenic culture; and the modernist Islamic/Arab revival sparked by "contact" with European Enlightenment. The Islamicate was attributed one positive value: being the haulers of Hellenic rationalist-humanism. The Islamic decline coincided with the "point" at which the knowledge was transferred from Muslims to Europeans, who then utilized it to flower a humanist Renaissance and a scientific Enlightenment.

Al-Musawi's work emerges within a decades-long tradition of unearthing the relevance and originality of the medieval Islamicate (alongside the works of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, George Saliba, and Toshihiko Izutsu). Republic of Letters is a dizzying treasure trove encyclopedic in breadth, covering at least seven centuries. Unlike previous works that focused on individuals, times, and genres, Al-Musawi dumbfounds and takes the reader on an excursion of literary riches along the Islamic cultural landscape. These cultural productions represent not only a continuation of a long-standing tradition which emerges under the direction of the Abbasid courts in which textualization represents expansion and centralization of power, but also the emergence of a self-fueling and dynamic "literary-republic" independent of emerging, decaying, or shifting political centers.

Al-Musawi describes this "republic" as the cacophonous rattle of an open market of ideas, tropes, and rhetorical devices, whose vibrancy lies in growing literary networks that in turn facilitate transmission, dialog, criticism, intellectual raids, and contrafaction. Underwriting this dynamism is a shared code that can be seen as a "pervasive Islamic consciousness that takes the Arabic language as its pivotal point" (1).

Chapter 1 of this work attempts to overcome the primary evidence for an Islamic intellectual decline: the collapse of a political center (the Abbasid Caliphate) whose symbolic power, acted as centripetal force unifying cultural production with Arabic as language of both the Qur'an and Court, religion and state. This chapter begins with what should seemingly lead to a natural decline of cultural production: the reign of war and conquest of the Mongolian Tīmūr, as he trampled over an Islamic west. The picture that emerges, however, shows the manifold ways in which intellectuals (such as Ibn Khaldūn, Ibn ʿArabshāh, and al-Taftazānī, whose works spawned intellectual reactions for centuries to come) responded, interacted, critiqued, or used Tīmūr's conquests and devastation of the Islamic world as subject in their theories.

Of interest is the fact that the collapse of an Arab political center, and the subsequent emergence of multiple non-Arab centers, only furthered the deterritorialization of intellectuals whose "republic" had no political center. The texts, assemblies, networks, and extensive travels of these scholars penned the boundaries of the Islamicate within which a dynamic "republic of letters," Arabic and Islam thrived despite instability of political power.

In Chapter 2, al-Musawi provides us with both an early micromodel of the republic of letters as well as the vehicle by which...