Ahmad Khan
Universität Hamburg
Islam in an Age of Print: Editors, Antiquarianism, and a Republic of Letters
This presentation examines personal letters between editors in the Middle East and Indian subcontinent. These letters document the ways in which editors in different regions of the Islamic world fostered close relationships through a fusion of ideas (Sunni Islam), institutions (publishing houses), professions (editors), and visions of history (medieval texts and their authors). This presentation seeks to show how antiquarianism -- defined here as the art of locating, studying, correcting, editing, and publishing medieval texts -- had a profound impact on 19th and 20th century Islam.
Ahmad Khan is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at Universität Hamburg, where he is writing a second monograph on the social and religious history of the early Islamic empire. In 2014-15, he was appointed Lecturer in Islamic Studies and History at the University of Oxford. His dissertation at the University of Oxford, Faculty of Oriental Studies examined the role that discourses of heresy played in the formation of medieval Sunni orthodoxy from the 8th to 11th centuries. The dissertation will be published as a monograph in 2018. In 2012, he was awarded a one-year fellowship at Princeton University, where he developed a second research project on the history of editors and publishing houses in the Middle East and Indian subcontinent. This led to the publication of a book, which he co-edited, entitled Reclaiming Tradition: Modern Interpretations of the Classical Islamic Heritage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and two separate articles on editors of medieval texts and connections between publishing houses in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.