Tracing Ibn Ṭūlūn’s Autograph Corpus, with Emphasis on the 19th–20th Centuries

Abstract

Muḥammad Ibn Ṭūlūn is today fairly well known as a historian of Damascus. Yet, his numerous writings cover many more areas of contemporaneous knowledge production and some of those might have been more impactful for his reputation as a scholar. One area that has so far not received much attention is the scrutiny Ibn Ṭūlūn put into the organisation of knowledge within his library, his corpus, and even individual manuscripts. This article attempts one step at closing this lacuna by addressing the contents statements with which Ibn Ṭūlūn prefaced all his autograph manuscripts. It also proposes a methodology for utilising them as sources for manuscript history. Based on four primary case studies, the chapter uses a triad of extraction, recompilation, and reconstruction of manuscripts to assess the current state of multiple-text manuscripts vis-a-vis their original compilations. All four manuscripts ended up in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin by the 1930s. The chapter makes use of a wide array of sources within and without these manuscripts to elucidate their historical trajectories from Ibn Ṭūlūn’s endowed library until their acquisition by Chester Beatty. Specific attention will be paid to their peregrinations in the 19th and early-20th centuries. In particular, early 20th-century photographic reproductions of those manuscripts can shed light on the most recent recompilations and reconstructions of these manuscripts. No survey on the emergence of contents statements in the Arabic manuscript tradition has yet been made. A focus on one author’s autograph corpus thus seems a more promising approach which generates verifiable results. Thus, it appears that Ibn Ṭūlūn’s contents statements were already standardised and would even be expanded by at least one (near-)contemporary.