On Sensibilities and Shamsy’s “Rediscovering”

Abstract While Shamsy’s Rediscovering the Islamic Classics importantly traces the events and individuals involved in the rise of print culture in the Arab world, particularly in an Egyptian context, and, even more tellingly, throws light on how Muslim reformers used this culture to reintroduce long forgotten classical Islamic works – a process which they deemed crucial in view of what they felt was a very problematic postclassical status quo and through which they substantially transformed the then hegemonic intellectual tradition – one is left with a lingering sense that a vital dimension of this transformation, namely the underlying change in sensibilities with which this transformation is associated, needs to be more thoroughly scrutinised. These sensibilities speak to new notions of time, the nature of knowledge and the purpose of life engendered by modernity, which cannot be extricated from the intellectual transformations being discussed.