Why has much of the Muslim world struggled to keep up with the West?

One popular answer comes from the scholar Ahmet Kuru, in his book Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment (2019), published by Cambridge University Press.

Kuru says that Muslim religious scholars blocked the printing press for almost three hundred years to protect their own power. And he says this long delay is the reason Muslim societies ended up with low literacy and fell behind.

It is a neat, easy-to-remember story, and many people repeat it as if it were proven. This essay shows that it is not proven at all.

The argument here rests on two main sources:

• The historian Kathryn Schwartz, who traced where the idea of a “printing ban” actually came from in her pathbreaking 2017 article—”Did Ottoman Sultans Ban Print?”

• A recent book of essays by specialists—Manuscript and Print in the Islamic Tradition, edited by Scott Reese (published in 2022).

• I also briefly use Ahmed El Shamsy’s fascinating book, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (published in 2020).

The essay makes two points:

• First, the ban at the center of Kuru’s case never existed. There is no royal order, no document, and no evidence from the time that the clergy opposed printing. There is only a rumor, and it can be traced back to a single unreliable writer in the 1500s. The documents we do have say the opposite.

• Second, even if printing had been blocked, it would still not explain low literacy. A printing press does not create readers by itself. And readers do not automatically translate to enlightenment.

One of Kuru’s strongest-looking pieces of evidence turns out to rest on something that was never there.

What Kuru Says

Kuru gives a bold reason for why the Muslim world fell behind: the printing press. He says that Muslim religious scholars—known as the ulema—blocked printing for almost three hundred years to protect their power.

Kuru says this delay kept literacy low in the Muslim world for a long time afterward. He traces the modern problem back to “these societies’ three-century-long delay in establishing printing presses” (Kuru, xiv).

He states the cause plainly. Printing, he says, could weaken the scholars’ grip on knowledge: “Printing presses could threaten this monopoly; therefore, the ulema opposed their establishment” (Kuru, 207).

He repeats the point: “The real reason for the Ottomans’ delay in establishing a printing press was the ulema’s opposition, which was rooted in their desire to preserve their monopoly over education and scholarship” (Kuru, 209).

He also says the great Muslim empires skipped printing because their ulema “regarded printing technology as unnecessary, if not dangerous” (Kuru, 183).

To make the clergy the cause, Kuru pushes the other explanations aside. He dismisses the idea that hand-copyists blocked printing to protect their jobs (Kuru, 208). (Before printing, books were copied out by hand, one at a time, by professional scribes.)

He also dismisses the idea that Arabic was simply hard to print. His reason: “the difficulty of converting Arabic letters to set type did not prevent European publishers from printing books with Arabic script” (Kuru, 208).

But here is the problem. The thing Kuru treats as a fact—that the Ottomans were hostile to printing—is not a fact at all. It is a rumor. The late historian, Kathryn Schwartz, traced this rumor back to its source in 2017, two years before Kuru’s book came out. Using her work and a 2022 collection of essays by experts, we can challenge Kuru’s understanding.

Problem #1: No One Can Find the Ban

The orders that supposedly banned printing have never been found. And the very sultans who supposedly issued them kept printed books in their own libraries.

Schwartz starts with the paperwork. She finds “little evidence to support the notion that the Porte maintained a negative view of printing” (Schwartz, 5). (“The Porte” was a common name for the Ottoman government.) Nothing in the Qurʼan or in the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad forbids printing. And when the government dealt with printing, it permitted certain people to print certain books. It never banned the technology itself (Schwartz, 6).

Scholars name four old orders about printing. (An official Ottoman order was called a firman.) The two that supposedly banned printing—from Sultan Bayezid II and Sultan Selim I—are exactly the two that no one can show ever existed.

As Schwartz puts it, “no one has claimed to have seen the firmans of Bayezid and Selim concerning print” (Schwartz, 6). Worse still, those same sultans kept “a wide variety of printed texts on a range of subjects” from Europe in their own libraries (Schwartz, 6). They were collecting the very thing they supposedly outlawed.

Where the Ban Story Came From: a 400-Year Game of Telephone

The ban story was passed down for 400 years. It started with one unreliable writer. Meanwhile, a far better witness—a man who actually lived among the Ottomans—said there was no ban.

The first person known to have written about a ban was a French friar named André Thevet in 1584. He gave no source for the claim (Schwartz, 12–13), and he was not a reliable writer. Scholars who checked his other travel writing decided that “the Thevet account must almost certainly be rejected” (Schwartz, 13).

From that one sentence, the story spread by simple repetition. Each writer copied the one before, like a game of telephone. Joseph de Guignes, a French Orientalist, repeated it in 1787. The priest Cheikho brought it into Arabic writing around 1900. Then the historian Bernard Lewis—yes, that Bernard Lewis— locked it into the textbooks in the 1950s and 1960s (Schwartz, 13–27).

By the time the claim reaches a book like Kuru’s, it looks like a settled fact. But it traces back to one unreliable traveler with no evidence.

A much better witness said the opposite. Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1658-1730) spent about twenty years among the Ottomans. He spoke the language, collected hundreds of manuscripts, and was a printer himself. He flatly denied the ban. The Turks do not print, he wrote, “but this is not, as is commonly believed, because they are prohibited to print, or because their books are unworthy of printing” (Marsigli 1732, quoted in Schwartz, 13).

And here is a twist involving Kuru himself. Kuru actually quotes Marsigli as the source of a well-known figure of 80,000 to 90,000 book-copyists in Istanbul, a number Kuru then calls “obviously misleading” (Kuru, 208n15). Kuru is willing to quote Marsigli and weigh whether he is reliable on one small point. Yet, he says nothing about the bigger point: that this same Marsigli denied the ban outright.

There is one more clue. The experts cannot even agree on what the “ban” supposedly did. Schwartz lists nine different accounts that give nine contradictory versions: a ban on all printing, a ban on owning printed books, a ban only in some languages, a tax scheme, a religious taboo, jealous scholars, and more (Schwartz, 3–4). When nine experts describe an event in nine different ways, it usually means the event never happened, or we do not know for sure if it did.

What the Documents Actually Say

Every document we have treats printing as allowed and useful, including a ruling from the empire’s highest religious authority.

Only two orders about printing have survived, and both treat it as perfectly fine:

• Sultan Murad III’s order of 1588 protects European merchants’ right to sell “valuable printed books and pamphlets in Arabic” inside the empire (Schwartz, 7).

• Sultan Ahmed III’s order of 1727 gave Müteferrika a license to print. (Müteferrika was the official who ran the first Muslim-owned printing press.)

Sultan Ahmed III’s 1727 order called printing a useful “western technique” and promised that his work “will be a reason for Muslims to say prayers for you and praise you to the end of time.” As Schwartz points out, a government would hardly promise someone eternal religious praise for doing something it saw as a religious sin (Schwartz, 9).

The one religious ruling we have says the same thing. The şeyhülislam—the empire’s highest religious official—was asked whether religious law allowed “this good work” of printing accurate copies of books. He said yes. Because printing can “produce this great benefit,” he ruled, it is allowed, as long as skilled proofreaders are appointed to catch mistakes (translated by Murphy, in Schwartz, 10–11). The empire’s top religious authority gave printing his blessing.

Kuru’s one piece of supporting evidence is that the 1727 license only covered non-religious books—“the printing of non-religious books was permitted” (Kuru, 209). He reads this as the clergy fencing off religion from the press.

But the documents show the limit came from Müteferrika himself, not the clergy. The order records that he was the one who asked to print “dictionaries, history books, medical books, astronomy and geography books, travelogues, and books about logic” (translated by Murphy, in Schwartz, 10). The order “did not address the issue of printing the Qurʼan directly” at all (Schwartz, 10).

It is worth quoting Schwartz in full to clarify this important matter:

Nevertheless, Ahmed’s firman designated what Muteferrika could and could not print along religious lines. Many scholars have emphasized this point, as it is the Porte’s first documented restriction on printing. But while the firman forbade Muteferrika from printing the Islamic canon, it did not state why. This silence has been interpreted as an Islamic resistance to printing, and as a matter of convention. . . . However, an alternative reading of this silence presents itself: that, as a privilege granted to a particular person, the firman did not entitle Muteferrika to publish from the Islamic canon. Whatever the Porte’s reasoning for precluding Muteferrika’s press from printing religious materials, the firman suggested that this proposition began as Muteferrika’s own… (Schwartz, 10).

In summary: Schwartz argues that Ahmed III’s 1727 firman restricted Müteferrika from printing certain Islamic religious works, but the document does not explain why. While many historians interpret this as evidence of religious opposition to printing—note that this is an interpretation— Schwartz notes that the restriction may simply reflect the specific scope of Müteferrika’s own request for permission, i.e., the firman indicates that Müteferrika himself asked to print non-religious material.

Schwartz’s verdict is clear: the order “does not appear to have made Ottoman printing licit. Rather, it represents the effort that Müteferrika expended to promote the work of his press” (Schwartz, 11). Schwartz thinks historians have often mistaken the Müteferrika permit for a general legalization statute. Rather, it was a specific authorization and promotional document for Müteferrika’s particular printing enterprise.

To my knowledge, no surviving Ottoman firman is known that explicitly declares printing legal or illegal throughout the empire. The surviving firmans only regulate or authorize particular printing activities. The absence of a general legalization decree is one reason Schwartz argues that the traditional story of a centuries-long ban followed by legalization in 1727 is not supported by the documentary record.

The First Muslim Printer Argued FOR Printing

The man who started Muslim printing wrote an essay praising it, and the empire’s top judges backed him. He said the real holdup was poor-quality type.

Kuru says Muslims and their scholars saw printing as “unnecessary, if not dangerous” (Kuru, 183).

But the man who actually started Muslim printing said the opposite. Müteferrika opened his very first book with an essay called “The Usefulness of Printing.” He also attached sixteen written approvals from important people, including the empire’s chief judges (Schwartz, 7–9).

Müteferrika’s essay lists ten benefits of printing. It makes books cheap for “students both rich and poor.” It spreads knowledge “in town and country.” It becomes “a foundation for the strength of the Empire.” Printing, he writes, is “a means to enliven and make happy the Muslims” (translated by Murphy, in Schwartz, 8–9). This is not a man sneaking past a taboo. This is a Muslim official selling printing as good for Islam. And the senior judges are backing him in public.

He also named the actual problem, and it had nothing to do with religion. The Arabic books already being printed in Europe were of poor quality. They were “full of misspellings and mistakes,” the letters were “not easily read,” and they had no “semblance of beauty” (translated by Murphy, in Schwartz, 7, 9). So, the first Muslim printer himself said the holdup was bad workmanship. This is the very explanation Kuru waves away.

The Real Reasons: Ugly Type and Too Few Buyers

Early Arabic printing was ugly and hard to read, and there were not enough buyers. These are ordinary, practical reasons. And there are no clerics in either of them.

Start with the type. Printing with “movable type” means lining up hundreds of tiny metal letters by hand to form the words on a page. Arabic is genuinely hard to do this way because its letters flow together and change shape depending on where they sit in a word.

Kuru dismisses this problem, arguing that Europeans printed Arabic anyway (Kuru, 208). The expert Titus Nemeth answers him. Printing, Nemeth says, is “foremost a business … a trade”: to survive, it has to make money and look good enough to read (Nemeth, 24).

Early Arabic type was mostly made by Europeans who did not know the script. It was “wholly unacceptable to readers,” and even Müteferrika’s press produced a result worse than a plain handwritten copy (Reese 2022, 8–9).

This means that the European Arabic books that Kuru points to actually prove the opposite of what he wants. They were not selling in a real market. They were missionary books, paid for by churches, and they were “distributed” rather than “sold,” because nobody wanted to buy them (Nemeth, 36–37).

Readers said as much. The traveler Carsten Niebuhr reported in the 1760s that Arabs “can hardly read books from our presses.” That, he said, is why Müteferrika’s venture “failed of success, and the renegado was ruined by the project” (quoted in Nemeth, 33). Even Suraiya Faroqhi—a writer Kuru himself cites for his copyist figure—blames the slow start on practical things, such as readers finding the European Arabic letters “decidedly unlovely” (Faroqhi, 94–96, quoted in Schwartz, 33). Kuru borrowed her number but left her explanation behind.

Now, the money. Kuru half-admits the real reasons: “the absence of a dynamic bourgeoisie” (that is, the lack of a wealthy merchant class) and a “lack of … demand for new books by a large number of readers” (Kuru, 210). But then he blames even these on the clergy.

The simpler truth is ordinary economics. Müteferrika’s press barely made any money. A visitor in 1732 said its profits were “so small” that no one was likely to keep it going, and it closed when he died (de Saussure, quoted in Nemeth, 32).

Later, government presses printed books that were “multiplied by the press only to be stacked up in warehouses … No-one buys them, no-one reads them” (Poujoulat, quoted in Nemeth, 34–35).

There are no clerics in this story. The problem was simply that there were too few customers.

“Why So Late?” Is the Wrong Question

Asking “why were the Ottomans so late?” treats Europe as the measuring stick. The better question is “why print at all?”

Kuru’s question assumes Europe is the standard, so the Muslim world has to explain why it was “late.”

Schwartz says the question itself is misleading because it judges the Ottomans by Europe’s experience. The Ottomans had known about printing since the 1400s. Their non-Muslim communities were printing from the 1490s. Muslims simply did not feel a need for it because their skilled hand-copyists were already meeting the demand for books.

The leading expert on Müteferrika’s press, Orlin Sabev, finds “no documentary evidence available so far to confirm the allegations that the Ottomans were negatively inclined toward printing” (2014, quoted in Schwartz, 29).

The better question, Schwartz says, is not “why so late?” but “why print at all?” The Ottoman writer Peçevi gave the honest answer. Printing only wins when it is cheaper and faster: “one thousand copies can be printed in less time than copying one volume by hand” (Schwartz, 28).

And that advantage only matters once the printed copy is good enough that people want it.

Problem #2: Late Printing Does Not Explain Low Literacy

Even if printing had been blocked, that would not automatically make a society unable to read. Presses do not create readers by themselves.

Suppose we gave Kuru everything so far. His main conclusion would still not follow. He jumps from printing came late to the conclusion that literacy stayed low, as if presses automatically create readers. They do not.

In fact, the link runs both ways, and Kuru mostly has it backward. A printing press is a business. It needs readers who will buy books. Where few people can read, there is little reason to print at all.

So, low literacy holds printing back at least as much as printing helps literacy. We already saw the early presses fail for lack of buyers. Kuru even admits there was a “lack of … demand for new books by a large number of readers” (Kuru, 210)—but that is just low literacy again. He ends up explaining low literacy with low literacy.

Printing also does not guarantee literacy. By Kuru’s own numbers, Western Europe had the printing press for about 350 years and was still only about 31 percent literate by 1800, up from 12 percent in 1500 (Buringh and Van Zanden, in Kuru, 208n13). With presses everywhere, fewer than one in three people could read. If the press automatically made people literate, that number does not make sense. The Ottoman side of the comparison is shaky too. Kuru’s own note shows experts disagreeing, with one calling another’s figures “implausibly high” (Kuru, 207n12).

And you do not need printing to have readers. The Muslim world had a strong culture of handwritten books, and cheap handwritten pamphlets spread reading without a printing press (Reese, 5–7).

Literacy comes from many things, and Kuru says so himself. He credits Europe’s higher reading rates partly to “the establishment of printing presses,” but in the same sentence also to “access to the vernacular Bible and other texts, and diverse educational institutions” (Kuru, 208). Schools, a religion that pushes people to read, language policy, and city life are the kinds of things that drive literacy. The press is just one ingredient.

The dates do not line up either. The big jumps in Middle Eastern literacy came in the late 1800s and 1900s, with the spread of schools and, in Turkey, the 1928 switch to a new alphabet. They did not come as a delayed echo of a printing press from a century or two earlier.

To be fair, cheap printing can help literacy. It helped in parts of Reformation Europe, where ordinary people suddenly had scripture in their own language and a reason to read. The mistake is not in saying printing matters at all. The mistake is in treating a two-way, on-and-off helper as the single automatic cause and then hanging a theory of decline on it.

There is also no demonstration of “path dependence.” In the literature Kuru cites, path dependence is not just an early event with lasting effects. It is a self-reinforcing mechanism that keeps reproducing the outcome and locks it in. Kuru never identifies one. He gives a starting point (the mid-fifteenth-century press) and an end point (today’s literacy gap) and lets the word “path-dependent” stand in for everything between. And he fails to prove the clergy banned it.

But persistence is not path dependence. A gap that just lasts can be driven by later causes. For example, the absence of mass schooling until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, colonial disruption, language and script policy, book economics, etc. Any of these would keep literacy low, no matter when printing arrived.

Kuru does not apply path dependence. He borrows the word’s authority while committing the very “history matters” hand-waving the concept was built to prevent.

All in all: There was no clerical ban to start it. And even if printing had been blocked, low literacy would not have followed automatically.

What Happened When Print Arrived?

When printing finally took hold, it did not wreck Muslim scholarship. Religious scholars used it to bring their own tradition back to life.

There is one more way to test Kuru’s claim: look at what happened when printing arrived in force.

If the press were truly a threat that the clergy had to keep out, then its spread should have damaged Islamic learning.

The opposite happened. In the 1800s and early 1900s, a group of Arab scholars, editors, and reformers used the new presses—especially the cheap ones in Cairo—to track down, fix up, and print classic Islamic books that had been forgotten or nearly lost (El Shamsy, 2020). Many of these old works survived only in a few fragile handwritten copies, some of which European collectors were busy buying up. Printing rescued them.

Two things stand out:

• First, the people driving this revival included religious scholars themselves—the very class Kuru says feared the press. But they embraced it.

• Second, the historian Ahmed El Shamsy makes the same basic point Schwartz does: the press was, in his words, “a site and a means” of the change, not its cause (El Shamsy, 5). The machine did not do the work by itself; people did. Printing did not lock the Muslim world into decline. When scholars chose to use it, it helped them bring their tradition back to life.

If clerics had blocked printing to protect religion, the last thing we would expect is Muslims eagerly mass-producing their holiest book by machine.

Yet, that is exactly what happened: using lithography. Lithography is a printing method that copies a handwritten page directly off a flat stone, so it keeps the beautiful calligraphy. Lithography barely caught on in Europe. But in the Muslim world, it “was quickly adopted for the large-scale printing of books” (Reese, 10), including printing the Qurʼan itself in the 1800s in India and the 1900s in Nigeria (Stark 2022; Brigaglia 2022).

This sinks Kuru’s theory. The clerics were just as powerful in 1850 as they were in 1750. What changed was the technology: it finally fit the need. Religion did not suddenly relax. A “clerics blocked printing” theory cannot explain why those same clerics presided over a flood of printed Qurʼans the moment the type was good enough.

What Kuru Gets Right

A few of Kuru’s points are correct. But they are far smaller than his big claim, and they actually work against him.

It is only fair to grant Kuru the points he gets right. The gaps in book production and literacy happened. And there was some genuine religious blocking of printing, but it was far narrower than Kuru claims.

The first Ottoman to write this history, Ahmed Cevdet Pasha (1853), reports that for a while after Müteferrika, religious books went unprinted because of resistance from “the adherents of fanaticism”—that is, a fanatical faction (quoted in Schwartz, 17). Kuru’s single strongest example, the blocking of a full Turkish translation of the Qurʼan until 1924, is also true.

But these admissions actually make Kuru’s case weaker, not stronger. The resistance Ahmed Cevdet describes came from a “fanatical” faction, not from the sultans (who licensed and praised printing) or from mainstream legal scholars.

In fact, Ahmed Cevdet says the mainstream legal scholars “did not think it objectionable to print religious books” (quoted in Schwartz, 18). Kuru’s sweeping claim that “the ulema opposed their establishment” gets even this small episode wrong.

The Proof Is in His Footnotes

Check Kuru’s sources, and the case falls apart on the page. His main claim has no source, and the documents he cites say the opposite.

Kuru’s idea is not even original. He inherited it from older reference books. A standard book-history article by Geoffrey Roper says nearly the same thing—that the press “challenged the entrenched monopolies of intellectual authority enjoyed by the learned class (ʻulamāʾ)” (quoted in Schwartz, 32).

And the economist Kuru leans on, Jared Rubin, built his version on the very ban that no one can find. Rubin argues that printing “would have raised the cost of collecting taxes and lowered the ruler’s revenue” (Coşgel, Miceli, and Rubin, quoted in Schwartz, 31). But the clearest problem is in Kuru’s own footnotes:

• Kuru’s main claim has no source. The two sentences that blame the clergy—“Printing presses could threaten this monopoly; therefore, the ulema opposed their establishment” (Kuru, 207) and “The real reason … was the ulema’s opposition” (Kuru, 209)—have no footnote at all. He simply states them as fact.

• The documents Kuru points to say the opposite. His footnotes lead to the 1727 order, the religious ruling, and Müteferrika’s own essay, the very texts that support printing. Kuru is citing evidence against himself.

• Kuru’s “Europeans printed Arabic” source is part of the problem. He leans on Johannes Pedersen’s old book, one of the very works that helped spread the false ban story in the first place (Pedersen, in Schwartz, 33).

• Kuru uses experts for a number, then drops their conclusion. Marsigli denied the ban. Sabev found no evidence of opposition. Faroqhi blamed poor-quality type. And Bloom called the delay “just a brief pause” (Kuru, 208n14). Kuru sets all of them aside.

• Kuru never answers the study that settles it. Kathryn Schwartz’s pathbreaking 2017 article—the one this essay quotes extensively from—takes the ban apart, and it was published before Kuru’s book. But Kuru, despite his abundant citations, never included and addressed Schwartz’s arguments in his book. Why?

  

The printing-press case does not just reach the wrong conclusion. It is built on sources that are missing, misread, or cherry-picked, chosen only when they happen to fit Kuru’s perspective.

Borrowing Trust from a Different Story

Kuru bundles three different claims into one. Two of them are weak or empty and one is solid. The solid one quietly lends its trust to the others.

Part of why Kuru’s argument feels convincing is that he tells three stories at the same time, all under one heading: ‘ulema opposition.’ But pull them apart, and they are very different:

• The first—that the clergy blocked the printing press—has no evidence, as we have seen.

• The second—that the early presses did not achieve much—Kuru actually explains in plain economic terms: “the absence of a dynamic bourgeoisie” and a “lack of … demand for new books by a large number of readers” (Kuru, 210). There are no clerics in that one.

• The third—that late-Ottoman scholars blocked a Turkish translation of the Qurʼan—is true and well documented. Here, Kuru’s sources are solid.

The trouble is that all three are told as one story. By the time the reader reaches the empty press claim, the solid translation claim has already painted a picture of obstructive clergy.

So, the empty claim quietly borrows the trust earned by the solid one. It is a bit like proving one charge in court with strong evidence, then letting the jury assume the other charges are also proven. Separate the three and only the translation story stands on its own.

The printing-press story—the one Kuru’s whole ‘path to underdevelopment’ depends on—is left with nothing under it.

The Bottom Line

Kuru’s strongest exhibit rests on something that was never there.

Kuru’s printing-press argument falls apart at every point. The ban it depends on left no document. No scholar has ever seen it. The best eyewitnesses denied it. And its trail runs back to one unreliable friar. The documents that survive—the two sultans’ orders, the religious ruling, and Müteferrika’s own essay backed by the chief judges—all treat printing as allowed and useful.

The one restriction Kuru reads as clerical control was actually the printer’s own request. The real causes were workmanship and money, which the first Muslim printer named himself.

And Muslims mass-printed the Qurʼan by machine the moment the technology was ready, something a “clerics blocked printing” theory simply cannot explain.

The printing press was meant to be one of Kuru’s strongest pieces of evidence. Measured against the actual record, it is one of his weakest—an argument resting, quite literally, on something that was never there.

References

Brigaglia, Andrea. 2022. “‘Printed Manuscripts’: Tradition and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Nigerian Qurʼanic Printing.” In Manuscript and Print in the Islamic Tradition, edited by Scott Reese, 289–336. Berlin: De Gruyter.

El Shamsy, Ahmed. 2020. Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kuru, Ahmet T. 2019. Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nemeth, Titus. 2022. “Overlooked: The Role of Craft in the Adoption of Typography in the Muslim Middle East.” In Manuscript and Print in the Islamic Tradition, edited by Scott Reese, 21–60. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Osborn, J. R. 2022. “The Ottoman System of Scripts and the Müteferrika Press.” In Manuscript and Print in the Islamic Tradition, edited by Scott Reese, 61–88. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Reese, Scott. 2022. “Introduction.” In Manuscript and Print in the Islamic Tradition, edited by Scott Reese, 1–20. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Schwartz, Kathryn A. 2017. “Did Ottoman Sultans Ban Print?” Book History 20: 1–39.

Stark, Ulrike. 2022. “Calligraphic Masterpiece, Mass-Produced Scripture: Early Qurʼan Printing in Colonial India.” In Manuscript and Print in the Islamic Tradition, edited by Scott Reese, 141–80. Berlin: De Gruyter.

(Note: All mistakes, if any, are mine. I will update this piece as needed, including if new research or evidence affects or changes the conclusions in any way, to correct any mistakes, and to add additional information as new research on the topic progresses.)

I find myself being constantly drawn to the life of Moses Maimonides.

Not only did he live in Islamic times, but his life is full of upheaval, brilliance, and human struggle. The more I learn, the more these details stand out to me.

Below are 10 insights that stayed with me after reading this fascinating book.

1) I am Struck by the World He Was Born Into

What captivates me first is that Maimonides was born in 1138 in Cordoba, at the height of al-Andalus.

Al-Andalus was one of the most advanced intellectual centers in Europe. I picture a place of massive libraries, scientific inquiry, and philosophical debate, where Jewish scholars like his own father, Maimon ben Joseph, were deeply embedded in a wider Islamic intellectual world.

2) I See How Violently That World Collapsed

It all quickly changed with the rise of the Almohads around 1148. They were a reformist and puritanical movement.

Their policies forced Jews and Christians to convert, flee, or face death.

They did not even spare Muslims. They enforced their doctrine on Muslims. Sunni Maliki scholars in Al-Andalus were marginalized, exiled, or forced to adapt.

I imagine a young Maimonides suddenly losing stability, safety, and home, as his family begins years of displacement. Maimonides and his family first moved around southern Spain, then settled in Fez, Morocco, an intellectual center. He studied there and even wrote some works.

He then traveled east and finally settled in Egypt in Fustat (Old Cairo). He stayed there the rest of his life, including under the Fatimid Caliphate, then the Ayyubid dynasty.

3) He Likely Lived as a Crypto-Jew

One of the most interesting details is that Maimonides and his family may have lived outwardly as Muslims while secretly remaining Jewish under different Muslim regimes. This means he was intimately familiar with Islam and Muslim worship.

I find this fascinating because it directly shaped his later legal rulings, especially his argument that one may verbally profess another faith under compulsion while maintaining inner belief.

A question in my mind is whether Maimonides ever really believed in Islam at any point in time while living as a crypto-Jew.

4) I am Amazed by His Teenage Genius

What truly stands out is that, amid instability, he was already writing serious works.

As a teenager—around age 16—he composed the Treatise on the Art of Logic.

I find it incredible that while wandering in exile, he was mastering Aristotelian logic through Arabic philosophical traditions.

Most people struggle to find direction at that age. He was already contributing to intellectual history.

Read more

This one question baffles and shocks many, including many of his former followers.

Qadhi explains why in the short Epilogue of his book, Understanding Salafism: Seeking the Path of the Pious Predecessors, which is hardly 5 pages long.

But why explain all of this at the end of the book, I thought? Perhaps Qadhi wanted to focus on the topic as an (objective) academic rather than a follower of any group. After all, this is his first academic book. He needed to shift away from his prior writings filled with pro-Wahhabi polemics.

Five pages notwithstanding, the Epilogue is a carefully reasoned intellectual and personal account of a transformation that unfolded over decades.

What makes it especially significant is that the author writes not as an outsider critiquing Wahhabism, but as one of its most prominent former advocates in the English-speaking world.

He was someone who taught, defended, and disseminated its doctrines to hundreds of thousands. His “moving on” from Salafism, therefore, is not a superficial shift but the result of sustained theological reflection, historical inquiry, and experience.

I’ve categorized the main reasons why Qadhi moved on from Wahhabism as:

• Doctrinal exclusivism

• A simplistic understanding of early Islam

• Reductionism within Wahhabism-Salafism

• Following the “Qur’an and Sunnah”

• Practical and social limitations

• Extremist tendencies

Doctrinal exclusivism

At the heart of Qadhi’s reassessment lies a deep unease with the doctrinal exclusivism embedded in Wahhabi theology.

One of the most troubling claims for him was the assertion that those who disagreed with a specific Wahhabi understanding of tawhid (the oneness of God) could be guilty of shirk, which is the gravest sin in Islam.

Even when softened by later formulations that such individuals might be “excused due to ignorance,” the implication remained troubling: large segments of the Muslim intellectual tradition were mistaken on the very essence of the faith.

For Qadhi, this was not merely a theological disagreement but a profound intellectual contradiction. It strained credulity to accept that the overwhelming majority of Muslim scholars across centuries—spanning diverse regions and intellectual traditions—could have erred so gravely on such a central doctrine.

This realization planted the seeds of doubt about the internal coherence of Salafi claims to exclusive correctness.

A simplistic understanding of early Islam

Closely tied to this was his growing awareness of the historical complexity of early Islam, which stood in tension with Wahhabi portrayals of a unified and unambiguous past.

Wahhabism often invokes the authority of the salaf—the first generations of Muslims—as a singular, definitive model of orthodoxy.

Yet, as Qadhi’s own research deepened, he came to recognize that these early generations were marked not by uniformity but by a rich diversity of interpretations across theology, law, and practice.

The notion that one modern movement could faithfully reproduce a single, uncontested understanding of the salaf appeared increasingly untenable.

In his view, many Wahhabi positions were not straightforward inheritances from the early Muslims but rather selective reconstructions, retroactively projected onto the past to legitimize contemporary conclusions.

Reductionism within Salafism

This insight led to a broader critique of reductionism within Wahhabism.

He came to see that complex theological and intellectual traditions were often distilled into simplistic slogans or rigid binaries.

Islam, in this framework, risked being reduced to a narrow set of doctrinal disputes—particularly concerning divine attributes or technical theological questions—at the expense of its broader ethical, spiritual, and civilizational dimensions.

For Qadhi, this narrowing of the tradition did not do justice to the depth and expansiveness of Islamic thought.

Following the “Qur’an and Sunnah”

A related concern was epistemological. Wahhabism frequently presents itself as a methodology that bypasses human authority by insisting on direct adherence to the Qur’an and Sunnah—“following the dalil (evidence).”

However, Qadhi came to question whether such a claim was sustainable.

Interpretation of scripture is never a purely neutral act. It is always mediated through human reasoning, linguistic frameworks, and intellectual traditions.

Thus, what is presented as a rejection of scholarly authority is, in practice, a substitution of one interpretive authority for another.

The ideal of unmediated textualism, he concluded, is more aspirational than real.

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The chapter’s focus on the founder of Wahhabism, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, immediately drew my attention, not least because my own understanding of Wahhabism had long been shaped almost entirely by (scholarly and trustworthy) critics.

What intrigued me most, however, was the author himself. Yasir Qadhi was once among the most prominent voices articulating and defending Wahhabi theology in the modern world, but later distanced himself from it.

That trajectory alone raised a series of pressing questions: what did he know then that others did not? And more importantly, what does he now reveal that complicates the earlier certainties?

Years ago, in my twenties, I had engaged deeply—and critically—with Qadhi’s work, even going so far as to devote an entire website to refuting his arguments. That phase of intellectual combat is long behind me, but it left me with a lasting curiosity.

Reading him now, in a more reflective and historically grounded mode, felt like revisiting an old debate with new clarity.

If anyone could offer a nuanced understanding of Wahhabism’s founder, it would be someone who had once stood at the very center of its intellectual defense.

Below are some insights from the book that were ‘aha’ moments.

Insight #1: My understanding of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s extremism was correct

What stood out to me—someone who had written about Wahhabism since the 1990s—in this chapter was, perhaps surprisingly, confirmation rather than contradiction.

Qadhi in this chapter validated an understanding I always had about Wahhabism’s founder.

Qadhi’s careful presentation of primary sources—detailing the theology, use of takfīr, doctrines of al-walāʾ wa-l-barāʾ, and the philosophy of jihad—largely affirmed what I had long believed.

The teachings of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, as presented in this chapter, were indeed rigorous to the point of severity. He did accuse Muslims who disagreed with him of falling into shirk, he did sanction jihad against them, and he did apply classical Islamic concepts in ways that were, at minimum, highly expansive and, at times, unprecedented in their implications. Make sure to see the sources cited.

At the heart of his theology lay an uncompromising doctrine of tawḥīd. Any act that appeared to compromise God’s exclusive right to worship—whether visiting tombs, seeking intercession, or venerating saints—was classified as polytheism. Within this framework, takfīr operated as both a theological and social boundary.

In theory, Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb maintained that only those who knowingly rejected the truth after it had been clearly established could be declared unbelievers. In practice, however, the range of actions deemed polytheistic expanded so widely that vast segments of the Muslim world could fall under suspicion.

Jihad, in turn, was not merely defensive. It became corrective. It became a means of purifying Islam by confronting those who had, in his view, deviated from its essence.

But Wahhabis waged jihad against other Muslims who simply had a different understanding of the issues.

Insight #2: Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab contradicted himself in his works

What complicates this picture—and what Qadhi’s chapter highlights with notable clarity—is the internal tension within Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab’s own writings.

For example, on the one hand, he insists on restraint in takfīr. On the other hand, the historical application of his doctrines suggests a far broader and more aggressive deployment of excommunication.

How are his contradictions to be understood? Several explanations present themselves.

Some later followers argue that accusations against him have been exaggerated or misunderstood. Critics suggest a more strategic duality: a softer tone in writing, paired with harsher realities in practice. Others propose that his views evolved over time, particularly as his movement gained political authority.

Another explanation suggests that he did not see himself as excommunicating Muslims at all, but rather identifying those who only appeared Muslim while in reality embodying polytheism.

I was left with the thought that everyone today—Wahhabis and their critics—may never know the true views of Wahhabism’s founder on a number of issues from his writings because of the contradictions. Nobody has been able to resolve this with clarity. At least this is what the chapter seemed to elucidate.

Insight #3: Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s contradictions reflected the confusion of his later followers

These competing and contradictory interpretations help explain why Wahhabis themselves have often held divergent understandings of their founder.

The differences are not necessarily rooted in bad faith or deliberate concealment. Rather, they reflect genuine tensions within the source material itself. Followers encountered different texts, emphasized different passages, and inherited different interpretive traditions.

In this sense, the contradictions in modern Wahhabi thought mirror the ambiguities present in its foundational writings.

This is important because Wahhabis, especially in the 20th century, who debated and fiercely disagreed with their critics, may have genuinely read only one perspective in Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab’s writings, while critics may have accessed other, contradictory perspectives on the same issue.

It seems few—among Wahhabis and critics—were aware that disagreements may not have reflected lies and bad faith, but simply access to different sources that said different things about the same issue.

Insight #4: Wahhabism was presented as less extreme over time by Wahhabi authorities

The contradictions in Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab’s writings were a revelation to me. But perhaps the most striking insight lies in how Wahhabism adapted over time.

As it became embedded within the Saudi state, it was forced to reconcile its early doctrinal rigidity with the practical demands of governance, diplomacy, and international relations.

This transformation required not a rejection of its founder, but a careful rearticulation of his legacy. Statements that emphasized restraint in takfīr were foregrounded, while more controversial applications were downplayed or reinterpreted.

Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab was increasingly presented by Wahhabi authorities as a reformer within the Sunni tradition, rather than as a figure whose teachings justified widespread excommunication and conflict.

This process did not erase the earlier doctrines. It reframed them. Wahhabism in its modern form retained its theological core while projecting a more moderate and state-compatible image.

Even the word Wahhabism was replaced by the watered-down word Salafism.

Insight #5: Wahhabism’s modern followers learned a softened version of Wahhabism

But adaptation came at a cost. Many contemporary followers, particularly younger ones, encountered a version of Wahhabism that was, in effect, filtered.

They inherited a system of thought that remained strict, but often without full awareness of its more radical origins or the extent of its early confrontations with other Muslim communities.

In this light, an uncomfortable conclusion emerges: It is not always the case that a movement’s adherents best understand its founder. In some instances, those who opposed Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab—who experienced his doctrines as lived realities rather than abstract theology—may have grasped aspects of his project more fully than later generations raised within a moderated framework.

Putting the critics aside, early Wahhabis would scarcely recognize what now passes as their founder’s legacy: a diluted, selective, and arguably distorted reading of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab’s thought.

Final thoughts

Ultimately, Qadhi’s chapter invites a deeper reflection on how ideas evolve and how legacies are reshaped, surely to the surprise and detriment of many Wahhabis today.

For me, it was less a revelation than a confirmation, one enriched by nuance, grounded in sources, and sharpened by the perspective of one who has stood on both sides of the debate.

But why did Yasir Qadhi cease to become a teacher and follower of Wahhabism? This will soon be explained in Part 2. More insights on other parts of the book will be shared in Part 3.

In 2018, I walked into a restaurant in Dakkar —the capital of Senegal in West Africa.

What began as casual conversation with the waiters soon turned to Islam in Senegal.

One of them asked me, almost unexpectedly, whether I knew about the great saint, Shaykh Ahmadou Bamba.

The name sounded familiar, yet I realized I knew almost nothing about him.

It was an embarrassing moment. I quickly wrote the Shaykh’s name down on a small piece of paper and slipped it into my pocket.

At the time, I was in Senegal on a professional assignment studying the project and donor landscape as part of a business development Capture mission ahead of an upcoming bid.

Despite the demands of work, the name stayed with me and kept me awake at night. My internet searches about the Shaykh made me more curious, but hardly quenched my thirst for knowledge. I wanted to learn more about him.

When I returned to the United States a month later, the Shaykh’s name continued lingering in my thoughts. Not long after, I found myself searching for a book on Shaykh Bamba and buying one almost immediately.

The Book

Michelle R. Kimball’s Shaykh Ahmadou Bamba: A Peacemaker for Our Time is both an inspiring and necessary contribution, especially given the scarcity of English-language works on this remarkable Senegalese saint.

Rather than a conventional review, what follows is a distilled reflection. I attempt to share the intellectual and spiritual gems this book offers about a special human being.

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Dr. Abdel Hadi completed his PhD at the University of Exeter, where he focused on Ibn ʿArabi’s views on other religions, including non-monotheistic ones. He is an expert in the field and has lectured internationally.

The structure of the book is straightforward: a foreword, endorsements, and acknowledgements, followed by an introduction, five chapters, a conclusion, and a bibliography, totaling about 300 pages.

Who was Ibn ʿArabi? He was a Muslim mystic, poet, and philosopher born in 1165 in al-Andalus. He became one of the most influential figures in Islamic thought, especially within Sufism. Some regard him as a saint, while others find his views controversial. He traveled widely across the Muslim world, including Anatolia and Mecca, and eventually settled in Damascus, where he passed away around 1240.

The central debate addressed in this book is whether Ibn ʿArabi was an exclusivist—believing only Islam leads to salvation—or a pluralist who saw value in other religions. Dr. Abdel Hadi argues that Ibn ʿArabi’s position is more nuanced. He presents him as an inclusivist: Islam is central, but other religions retain value under certain conditions.

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The book 𝐔𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐒𝐮𝐟𝐢𝐬𝐦: 𝐅𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐚𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐌𝐞𝐜𝐜𝐚, by William Rory Dickson and Meena Sharify-Funk is perhaps, in my view, one of the best books to learn about Sufism.

It is scholarly, yet not overly peppered with complex academic jargon. It is made for the layperson, yet the person who knows about Sufism will still benefit from it.

It is comprehensive and global in scope and encompasses the contemporary and the historical. It reflects vast breadth on the topic across time and space, but does not dilute the important details. Sufficient depth is provided to understand and appreciate the panoply of Sufis, old and new, and their groups, orders, etc. in different times and their intersection with politics and culture.

The authors are also not shy to explain the myriad forms of Sufism that are practiced, including by individuals and groups who would normally not be considered within the confines of traditional Sunni Islam, while also knowing that there were and are Sufis from among the Sh’iah Muslims. The Bektashi Sufi order is one example.

I would describe the book as a decent textbook on Sufism that could be used in universities. The book discusses the pioneers of early spirituality, including Shaykh Abdal Qadir al-Jeelani, Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, Ahmad as-Sirhindi, as well as more recent Sufis like Amir Abdal Kader from Algeria who resisted the French.

Zeroing in on some of what the authors discuss about Sufism in contemporary North America that I found interesting are the Nur-Ashki Jerrahi Sufis who found a home in Manhattan, New York. While Pir al-Din al-Jerrahi who lived in Istanbul founded the Jerrahi branch of the Halveti order in 1704, fast forward to contemporary times and some members of this group ran Masjid al-Farah in New York.

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I finally finished writing a book review of Islamic China: An Asian History by Rian Thum, published by Harvard University Press (November 2025).

Islamic China starts from a surprisingly basic goal: to make Muslims in China stop seeming strange or out of place. For a very long time—even among scholars—the idea of “Chinese Muslims” has triggered quiet disbelief. Are they really Muslim? Does Islam really belong in China?

Rian Thum’s answer, from the very first pages, is simple and firm: this sense of surprise is not natural. It is something historians created by the way they wrote history.

The book’s central claim is that being both Muslim and Chinese was ordinary for centuries. It was not exotic, not contradictory, and not something that needed constant explanation.

What makes it feel unusual today is that most histories of Muslims in China have focused on the extraordinary—rebellions, crises, reform movements, and arguments about whether Islam fits China—while ignoring the far larger world of everyday (ordinary) Muslim life.

Thum turns the lens around. Rather than extraordinary events, Thum asks what most Muslims in China actually did day to day: how they prayed, studied, learned Arabic or Persian, followed legal manuals, copied texts, visited shrines, and taught their children.

Much of this life was so ordinary that it did not leave the kinds of dramatic sources historians usually prefer. But it is precisely this “ordinary Islam,” Thum argues, that tells us the most.

This also explains why Thum is critical of what he calls “origin-thinking”: the obsession with where Chinese Muslims supposedly came from. Scholars repeatedly ask whether their roots lie in Arabia, Persia, or Central Asia, as if Muslims who have lived in China for over a thousand years are still newcomers. Origin stories mattered, Thum shows, but when overemphasized, they quietly revive the idea that there is a “real Islam” somewhere else.

Islam is something people made and passed on

To show this ordinariness, the book introduces a wide range of Chinese Muslim figures.

One of the most important is Ma Mingxin, a Chinese Sufi who traveled far beyond China to study Islam and then returned with new devotional practices. After his death, his followers kept his teachings alive mainly through chanting and ritual. History here is not just written. It is repeated, heard, and embodied.

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I just read a fascinating book.

After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Medieval Islamic World, by Marc D. Herman—published in August 2025 by the University of Pennsylvania Press—dives into a really big question in Jewish history: once revelation ended, how did Jewish law keep going?

Medieval Jewish thinkers all agreed the Torah came from God, but they disagreed (sometimes fiercely) over how much law was given at Sinai and how much was later developed by rabbis.

These debates didn’t happen in isolation. They happened right in the middle of the Islamic world. Yes… Jewish scholarly prosperity in the Islamic world actually happened.

Societal Embeddedness

Most medieval Jews lived under Muslim rule. They spoke Arabic, wrote in Judeo-Arabic, read Muslim books, and debated Muslim thinkers.

Differences in beliefs aside, they did not hate Arabic but embraced it as the scholarly lingua franca of the time.

As Muslim scholars struggled with questions about authority, interpretation, and law after the prophecy, Jewish scholars faced similar problems and often used the same intellectual tools.

One of the book’s key points is that Jewish thinkers were not passive borrowers.

The Islamic world offered many competing ideas about law and authority, and Jewish scholars actively chose among them, mixing these approaches with their own rabbinic traditions.

This is why, according to the author, ideas like “symbiosis” (as S.D. Goitein would have it) or “influence” (as many academics say) to describe the Jewish-Muslim relationship don’t quite work.

Jews and Muslims were also not sealed-off civilizations trading ideas across a border (as Bernard Lewis would surmise).

They were living in the same society, thinking in the same language, and arguing inside the same intellectual space. Islamic intellectual culture wasn’t something Jews swam toward. It was the water they were already swimming in, alongside Muslims, Christians, and others.

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It’s encouraging to see more books on Islam appearing today.

Perhaps current global events are prompting many readers to think more carefully about Muslims —who they are, how they live, and how their histories intersect with those of others.

In that sense, John Tolan’s Islam: A New History from Muhammad to the Present arrives at the right moment.

I genuinely enjoyed reading this book.

It is clearly written, accessible without being simplistic, and grounded in serious scholarship.

For readers new to Islam, it offers a broad, readable introduction that avoids sensationalism and tries—often successfully—to situate Islam within the wider currents of world history rather than treating it in isolation. That alone makes it a valuable contribution.

But some who are new to Islam may still feel a little overwhelmed by the many names and dates mentioned.

The thematic approach, while useful in many ways, may also confuse sequential clarity.

One of the book’s strongest features is its treatment of the premodern period, especially its emphasis on the interconnected histories of Muslims, Christians, Jews, and other communities.

Older works often underplayed this complexity. Seemingly small details—such as Muslim rulers having Christian wives, for example—help open up a much richer, more human picture of Islamic history.

The book offers many such examples, which I’ll leave readers to discover for themselves.

Where I felt a bit less convinced was in the promise of “newness.” This may reflect my own familiarity with the field, as scholars such as John Esposito, Sayyid Hossein Nasr, and others have long addressed many of the misconceptions the book seeks to correct.

The author explains that the “new” lies in presenting advances in academic scholarship from the past 30–40 years in an accessible way for non-specialist readers.

This is an important and worthwhile goal. At the same time, it means the book largely reflects how Islam is understood within academic scholarship rather than how it is understood from within Muslim interpretive traditions themselves.

For some readers—particularly those who question aspects of the historical-critical method, for example—this perspective may feel somewhat limiting.

Despite this, I found the book engaging and valuable. A few passages especially prompted further reflection.

Early on, the author writes, “The Quran gives contradictory information about [Jesus’s] death.”

He then adds, “We have seen that the newborn Jesus speaks of the day of his death and ‘the day I am raised to life again (Q 19:33),’ which seems an allusion to the Christian doctrine of Christ’s resurrection.”

From a traditional Islamic interpretive perspective, this reads Christian theology into the Qur’anic text. Classical Sunni exegetes understood Jesus’ death as occurring after his future return, an interpretation that preserves internal Qur’anic coherence.

Elsewhere, the book briefly discusses “The Satanic Verses.” Since this account has long been rejected by Sunni Muslims as apocryphal by the Muslim scholarly consensus, its inclusion in a book aiming to dispel misconceptions raises questions.

The author notes that al-Tabari documented the Satanic Verses report, though documenting a narration is not the same as endorsing its authenticity, a distinction that may not be obvious to general readers.

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