There is much that the ʿulamāʾ of the eastern Islamic lands shared, in terms of their conceptions of the scholarly tradition and of the practices constitutive of it, with religious scholars elsewhere and, despite the transformations they have undergone since the nineteenth century, many of these conceptions and practices have continued to characterise their scholarly culture. What are these practices? In what directions did they evolve during the centuries and in some of the regions with which this volume is concerned? How was the sense of a tradition, and of religious authority, articulated through them? These are among the questions this broad overview of the Islamic scholarly culture, and of those contributing to it, seeks to address.

The ʿulamāʾ’s scholarly endeavours during much of the period which is the subject of this volume have often been viewed as a ‘sterile commentarial literature’; and it is not just Western scholars of an earlier generation but also Muslim modernists and Islamists of colonial and post-colonial Muslim societies who have often concurred with this judgement. The ʿulamāʾ’s own rhetoric during these centuries often did much to lend credence to the view that members of this scholarly culture were but a pale reflection of incomparably superior predecessors. The comment of Mullā ʿAlī al-Qārī (d. 1014/1605) – a scholar of ḥadīth and law from Herat who later settled in Mecca – concerning a famous ḥadīth report which promises a religious revival every hundred years was not atypical.