Said Aljoumani and Konrad Hirschler: Owning Books and Preserving Documents in Medieval Jerusalem: The Library of Burhan al-Din (Edinburgh Studies in Classical Islamic History and Culture.) xii, 394 pp. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. ISBN 978 1 47449206 5.

Abstract

The work under review is a valuable contribution to two burgeoning sub-fields in the history of the pre-modern Middle East: the history of the book and the history of archival practices. The authors have already made important contributions to these fields, including studies of the Damascus Ashraf ī ya madrasa library and the library of Ibn ʿ Abd al-H ā d ī , a fifteenth-century Damascene scholar. If the first study focused on a large institutional library and the second dealt with the library of a well-known scholar of Prophetic tradition ( ḥ ad ī th ), this third instalment in the trilogy is concerned with the library and estate of a minor scholar who lived in fourteenth-century Jerusalem. The library is known to us through a series of court documents from Jerusalem assembled after Burh ā n al-D ī n ’ s death in 1387. The documents in question form part of a corpus known as the Ḥ aram documents because they were discovered in the Islamic Museum located in al-Ḥ aram al-Shar ī f in Jerusalem. The vast majority of these 950 documents pertain to the tenure of one Sh ā fi ʿ ī judge in Jerusalem who was accused of misappropriating funds from pious endow-ments, leading to an investigation. They were first catalogued by Donald Little and previously utilized by Huda Lufti for a study of Jerusalem society in the fourteenth century and by Christian Müller to study judicial practice. There are quite a few estate inventories in this corpus of documents, but the documentation of Burh ā n al-D ī n ’ s library, including an extensive inventory that the authors call a sales booklet, is unique. The authors point out that this is the earliest library in Greater Syria for which we have detailed documentation. Burh ā n al-D ī n is an interesting figure precisely because he would otherwise be unknown