New Books In Language

In his dense yet delightful new book Palimpsests of Themselves: Logic and Commentary in Postclassical Muslim South Asia (University of California Press, 2022), Asad Ahmad examines in layered detail the textual and commentarial tradition on the discipline in logic in early modern and modern South Asia, while constantly connecting his study to broader Muslim intellectual currents beyond South Asia. Focused on the seventeenth century text Sullam al-‘Ulum (The Ladder of the Sciences) by Muhibullah al-Bihari, Ahmed treats his readers to a journey through the operations, ambiguities, and possibilities of the dizzyingly complex yet enormously profitable landscape of the logic tradition in South Asian Islam. Textually magisterial, historically grounded, and ferociously erudite, this book breaks new and critical ground about an extremely important topic that is yet all too infrequently studied. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim i