The Lives of Books in the Ninth Century

The Arabs used writing as a tool for recording speech for centuries before the emergence of Islam in the seventh century C.E. It was not until a century and a half after Prophet Muhammad’s death, however, that an Arabic literature of purposefully authored books (as opposed to notes, letters, and contracts) began to develop. Drawing parallels with findings in biblical studies, scholars such as Norman Calder have claimed that the Arabo-Islamic book culture remained rudimentary and fluid for further century and a half, characterized by widespread manipulation and false attribution of texts. This paper builds on previous efforts to challenge this hypothesis by examining the history of one seminal work, Kitab al-Umm by al-Shafi'i (d. 820). The rich evidence regarding the composition and transmission of this text that can be gleaned from the work itself as well as from other sources reveals the existence of a highly sophisticated written culture already in the ninth century. This culture possessed a clear and unambiguous model of individual authorship and placed a high value on the accurate transmission of written texts. As a consequence, Muslim scholarship was remarkably successful in safeguarding the integrity of individual texts against the perils inherent in a manuscript culture.