Vehicles of Cultural Identity: Some Thoughts on Maghribi Scripts and Manuscripts in the Mashriq

Abū al-Ḥajjāj Yūsuf Ibn al-Shaykh al-Balawī (527–604 H/1132–1208 CE) was one of the most respected scholars from Almohad Málaga: a prolific author of prose and poetry, a renowned teacher of Arabic literature, grammar, and Islamic jurisprudence, and imām at the congregational mosque of the city. He was also a wealthy and vigorous man: he is recorded to have paid for, and physically contributed to, the erection of 25 mosques and the digging of more than 50 wells in Málaga, in service to the urban community. Before becoming established as a notable in his hometown, however, Ibn al-Shaykh was one of the many Andalusi intellectuals who had travelled to the Mashriq to perform the ḥajj and study under the most prominent scholars of Egypt, Iraq, and Greater Syria. Being a man of action as well as intellect, he fought as a ghāzī against the Castilians under the Almohad caliph al-Manṣūr, and against the Crusaders under Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn (Saladin), thus playing an active role on the two major jihād fronts of the 12th-century Mediterranean.1 During most of the year 562 H/1166-7 CE, Ibn al-Shaykh resided in Alexandria and became a close disciple of the local traditionist Abū Ṭāhir al-Silafī (d. 576 H/ 1180 CE). In his partly autobiographical treatise Kitāb Alif bāʾ li-l-alibbāʾ (“The Book of Alif and Bāʾ for the Discerning”), a pedagogical work completed shortly before his death and dedicated to his son, the Malagan scholar recounts the following anecdote: