Journal of Islamic Manuscripts最新文献

Cambridge University Library holds an Arabic manuscript of The Thousand and One Nights (Ms Qq.106–109). The library records it as entering the collection in 1819 and codicological evidence shows that the manuscript was copied in Cairo in the early 19th century. This paper discusses the complex narrative of its acquisition, including the roles played by prominent travellers and collectors. The significance of the text of the ‘Nights’ and its popularity in England and Europe are also examined as are the factors that made the Arabic text of this work much sought-after at the time. The influence of the contemporary political situation, the conditions of travel in the Middle East, and the individuals involved with the text’s acquisition are described, focusing on those with a Cambridge connection. A detailed analysis of the activities and twists of fate resulting in the acquisition of this particular manuscript are traced in contemporary sources.

In Islamic law, preponderance (tarjīḥ)—a practical method for mujtahids to resolve legal contradictions (taʿāruḍ) between proofs—has been known in the uṣūl tradition from at least the 10th-century jurist al-Jaṣṣāṣ (d. 370/981). Yet, it is in several 17th and 18th-century Arabic and Ottoman manuscripts of Princeton’s Garrett Collection that we encounter summary-like lists labelled “tarjīḥāt al-bayyināt” (“TB s”), which succinctly compile the complex rules of preponderance. Organized into three-columned lists, on loose leaves, as annotations in the margin or separate textual units, the TB s follow a grammatical and visual layout that made them predictable and recognizable for manuscript readers. This paper examines the TB s as a codicological phenomenon, arguing that they served as a shorthand for legal practitioners familiar with evidentiary law and that their presence suggests a broader transformative process of readers’/legal practitioners’ relationship with codices of positive law at this critical moment in the history of Islamic law.

The Bodleian Library hosts one of the most important collections of Arabic manuscripts in Europe but most of them are unpublished or remain widely understudied. This article discusses the Arabic illuminated manuscripts produced in 14th- and 15th-century Egypt and Bilād al-Shām identified in this institution and aims to highlight their production context and material characteristics. The study of these manuscripts also gives an insight into the main phases and codicological features of the arts of the book during the Mamluk period.

This article provides a preliminary handlist of manuscripts that were once owned by the late-Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Qāytbāy (r. 1468–1496). For well over a hundred items currently scattered across the globe, it details the location, author, title, copyist and page length, as well as the link to Qāytbāy. Introducing the list are some precursory observations regarding the languages represented therein, the identity of the copyists involved, the potential role of waqf in the manuscripts’ post-1517 trajectory, and some later forgeries. In the absence of a contemporaneous catalogue, it will allow scholars to form a more balanced picture of Qāytbāy and of late-Mamluk book and cultural history in general, and will help them overcome some detrimental institutionalized divisions.

In the late 18th and first half of the 19th century, print gained a permanent foothold in the Middle East and enabled the mass production of books in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. As a consequence, handwriting gradually ceased to be the primary technology for making books. This article, the second of two, examines the materiality of a selection of Arabic manuscripts mostly made between 1870 and 1930 CE. It shows how scribes not only adapted to the availability of new types of pens or stationery when making their manuscripts, but also that some of them adopted layout choices and paracontent typical of printed books. Tradition and change are both visible in the objects that were analysed, and it is especially against the backdrop of a growing print industry in the Middle East that Arabic manuscript culture’s strengths and its ability to adapt emerge.

The article is written in the framework of provenance research and focuses on the special, mostly precarious situation of Ismaili manuscripts. It sheds light on the history of a group of 42 Ismaili manuscripts, some of them stolen from the famous Hamdani Collection in Surat/Gujarat, India, and the circumstances of their acquisition by the University Library Tübingen between 1970 and 1972. When the manuscripts were acquired, the true origins and disposition of these manuscripts were still completely shrouded in darkness. More than fifty years after these events, I would like to put some pieces of the mosaic together and follow the history of the displaced manuscripts from their place of origin in Surat via Beirut to their final destination, Tübingen. My sources are: Archival material from Tübingen University Archive, dispersed documents, oral and written accounts of contemporary witnesses, further informants—and last not least, the manuscripts themselves.

‮ المستخلص ‬‎

‮حظي التراث الجغرافي العربي بالاهتمام والعناية على امتداد التاريخ الإسلامي، باعتبار تعلّقه بالمجال المكاني؛ أحد عناصر صناعة الخبر التاريخي إلى جانب عنصر الزمان، ثم المتسبب بالحدث؛ بشرياً أم طبيعياً. وتسارعت في الغرب عجلة البحث في هذا التراث ونشر أصوله وترجمتها إلى اللغات المختلفة منذ النصف الثاني من القرن التاسع عشر، ولم يبذل في البلاد العربية ما يكافئ ذلك، وبقي تقريب هذا التراث للدارسين والقراء يستند على اجترار ما أنجزه بعض المستشرقين؛ بطبعه مصوَّراً أو بإعادة صفّ حروفه. وفَتَرت عناية الغرب بهذا الحقل من حقول التراث، ولم تتغير عناية العرب! ومن بين المؤلفات الجغرافية العربية التي لم تنل حظّها من البحث والدراسة والتحقيق، الكتاب المنسوب لابن سعيد المغربي، والذي تكرر في ثناياه النَّقل والإحالة على كتاب عنوانه الجغرافية لابن فاطمة، مما تحاول هذه المقالة بيانه. ولا تهدف هذه الدراسة لمناقشة نصوص ابن فاطمة الجغرافية وإخْضاعها للفحص العلمي أو بيان مدى مصداقيتها بقدر ما تَهدف إلى إبرازه كجغرافي ضاعَ تراثُه والسعي للكشف عن هويّته والاقتراب منه.‬‎

In the late 18th and first half of the 19th century, print gained a permanent foothold in the Middle East, enabling the mass production of books in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. Consequently, handwriting gradually ceased to be the primary technology for making books. This contribution, which is published in two parts, examines the metadata of roughly 1,200 Arabic manuscripts that were created between 1820 and 1930 and which are now kept in German libraries. As a first foray into this field of study, it will show what subjects remained popular in manuscript form and which ones were replaced by print. To this end, the evidence gained from the manuscript corpus will be compared to bibliographic data from Egypt, the biggest centre of Arabic printing in the 19th century, to learn where, how, and why the evolving print industry appears to have superseded manuscript culture.

The Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ wa-khullān al-wafāʾ (Epistles of the Brethren of Purity and Loyal Friends), copied in Baghdad in 686/1287 and kept in the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul, is known for its double page frontispiece, headed by the names of the authors and the book title, and painted with an image of debating scholars surrounded by luxurious architecture [Fig. 1]. The copy features diagrams and tables and is of interest for the study of medieval manuscript traditions of the Rasāʾil. This article re-examines the codex, expanding observations and insights into its history. It discusses the function of the frontispiece, which has been perceived as an authors’ portrait in the succession of pre-Mongol Arab book painting, but is unique among known Rasāʾil copies. Reviewing the text on the double page and considering that the Rasāʾil was an anonymous book, we argue that the frontispiece advertised a particular opinion and reference regarding the authorship, visualized and emphasised through the medium of the figural image. Situating the copy in the scholarly book production of early Ilkhanid Baghdad under the Persian Juwaynī governors from early Ilkhanid Iran, the article examines how that time and place are referenced in the painting. Extending the question to the unknown patron and his milieu, it discusses figures with portrait-like faces presenting a book as possible references to the Juwaynīs. We suggest to see the novelty of the painting not only in its style and close text-image relation, but in its function as editorial statement and in the layered references. These evidence a concept of visual commentary on both history and present, that has been argued for Ilkhanid painting of northwest Iran, but was used here several decades earlier in Baghdad.

The present article traces the history of multiple private and state archives in Daghestan. Such collections bear imprints of competition between particular individuals and factions. As we shall see, various parties exploited the cultural resources available to them in order to project their subjectivities onto the textual and material evidence. Shifts in cultural values and fashions, together with transformations in language use and an ongoing struggle for personal and communal representation, contributed jointly to the formation of multi-layered discourses on the past. If we are to make sense of our sources, therefore, we must engage with a multitude of competing discourses that have privileged one type of historical view over others, thereby shaping the contours of the body of available material, and rendering information lacunae not just unavoidable, but themselves reflective of past events. Colonialism and coloniality are not alone in having helped configure the power structures that we find manifested in state archives. In fact, much of the competition, marginalization, and careful selection took place even before the transfer of documents to imperial institutions.