Literary textbooks in Iraqi secondary schools still use the Arab modernists’ nomenclature “decadent age” to describe the postclassical period. Many Arab modernists have stigmatized that period in the Muslim world, deeming it a stagnant period devoid of any scientific, cultural and literary developments and unable to give birth to innovation. In return, Arab medievalists such as Muhsin Al-Musawi have formulated a counter-argument against the modernists by highlighting the cultural output, specifically, the peak in book manufacturing during that period. One of the premises of Musawi’s counter-argument involves the applicability of the European notion of the “the republic of letters”, ie. a “commonwealth of learners” wherein medieval scholars and artists laid the foundation for the European Renaissance, to the Arab postclassical period. Likewise, an Arabo-Kurdish novelist, Jan Dost, engages with the so-called “decadent age” by tracing the humanist footprints of the post-classical era in his fiction. He depicts the construction of knowledge in vivid scenes, detailing the labor that precedes book inscription and the social and scholarly interactions within the community of calligraphers, ink-makers, book shoppers, etc. I argue that Dost’s portrayal of the large-scale cultural output of this period echoes the European notion of “the republic of letters” and supports the premise of Musawi’s argument against Arab modernists’ assumptions. However, Dost also addresses the question of how to account for separating religion from the construction of knowledge, whereas Musawi does not. Dost’s novels encourage the reader to question why Islamic post-classical output coincided with European cultural production without ultimately producing the same outcomes of success and happiness in many aspects of human enterprise. Although Dost appreciates the corpuses and cultural activity that furnished post-classical scholars with information, he, at the same time, alludes to its failure to cultivate an Islamic or Eastern renaissance, and ascribes this failure to an increasingly narrowed vision of the construction of knowledge, fueled by dogmatic clergy, rigid fanaticism and intolerance in Eastern society. Hence, Dost implies that the cultural output filtered through the lens of religious formalism could not lead to enlightenment.