caa a22 4500 38806529X CHVBK 20180307125131.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199901 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0041977X00017560 doi S0041977X00017560 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0041977X00017560 Zaman Muhammad Qasim Brown University Commentaries, Print and Patronage: hadīth and the Madrasas in Modern South Asia [Elektronische Daten] [Muhammad Qasim Zaman] Recent work on the impact of print on Muslim societies has been much concerned with debating how conceptions and structures of religious authority may have been altered, and a new era of religious change inaugurated, through this technology. It was only in the nineteenth century—the latter half of that century in case of the Indian subcontinent—that print came to be wholeheartedly embraced by the Muslim religious élite as a vehicle for the effective dissemination of their ideas. Some scholars have emphasized the role of print in enabling the ՙulam¯' to reach wider audiences than could ever be conceivable in a manuscript age. Though print threatened to undermine the age-old styles of person to person transmission of knowledge, and conceptions of authoritative transmission associated with those styles, what the ՙulamā' gained was not only a new, effective, and—compared to the costs of the manuscript age—relatively inexpensive medium to reach and influence new audiences, but also access to religious classics which were hitherto available only to a select few, but which would now undergird new movements of revival and reform in their societies. While acknowledging these aspects of the impact of print, other scholars have seen the adverse effect of print on ‘traditional' religious authority to be the more noteworthy. Precisely because religious classics were now accessible, often through translations into the vernacular, the special claims of the ՙulamā' as the guardians and authoritative interpreters of religious texts came to be disputed. As Francis Robinson has put it, ‘Increasingly from now on any Ahmad, Mahmud or Muhammad could claim to speak for Islam.' Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1999 Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies Cambridge University Press 62/1(1999-01), 60-81 0041-977X 62:1<60 1999 62 BSO https://doi.org/10.1017/S0041977X00017560 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0041977X00017560 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Zaman Muhammad Qasim Brown University NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies Cambridge University Press 62/1(1999-01), 60-81 0041-977X 62:1<60 1999 62 BSO CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge