Rediscovering Islamic heritage

The past two centuries have witnessed major intellectual interactions, many of which were not echoes of Western writings and modernity culture, but rather a rich harvest of extracting precious forgotten heritage books and reprinting them, sparking debates on various issues of history, literature, and jurisprudence, and opening wide doors to understanding the dimensions of Islamic culture, its history, and sciences. Today's reader has a closer connection and broader knowledge of heritage books than a reader who lived in Arab cities three centuries ago. In that time, the book markets and the bookbinders' shops did not contain "Tafsir al-Tabari," nor "Muqaddimah Ibn Khaldun," nor "Al-Umm" by Al-Shafi’i, among many others. The book in our hands is about the history of books, about the journey of forgotten manuscripts to public libraries, and about rediscovering Islamic heritage; but its content is truly broader than that. It is also a chronicle of the intellectual, social, and institutional transformations that accompanied this rediscovery, as well as an enjoyable historical document filled with interesting stories of the network of people and actors who participated in this journey—collecting and extracting hidden heritage treasures, correcting and authenticating manuscripts, establishing and developing traditions of investigation and printing, and debating the contents of this heritage and the methodological stance towards it.