Download PDF | Konrad Hirschler - A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture_ The Library of Ibn Abd al-Hādī-Edinburgh University Press (2022).
702 Pages
Introduction
This is the story of a man and his books in late medieval Damascus. The story will take us up the slopes of Mount Qasyiin, to the west of the walls of the Old City, and into the home of Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi (d. 909/1503).! Born in c. 840/1437, he was a scholar of some, but in no way outstanding, local importance: even though he wrote several hundred ‘books’ (many were rather booklets), his contemporaries and successive generations hardly studied them. The vast majority of his books have not even once been copied in the course of the last 500 years. While we normally hunt for the autograph of a work, in his case it is the exact opposite: the autograph is the default mode in which we encounter his books. Yet, Ibn “Abd al-Hadi left us something that is exceedingly rare for the medieval and early modern Arabic lands, namely a substantial document on book ownership. ‘This is a catalogue (fthrist) of the books he endowed in his late fifties for his own benefit and that of his offspring — books that ultimately ended up in the library of a madrasa, an institution of higher learning. The present study is centred on this shabbylooking book list of fifty-eight folia, which sits today on the shelves of the National al-Asad Library in Damascus. Here, Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi itemised several hundred books with almost 3,000 titles (most of the books he owned contained numerous booklets that had once been stand-alone objects).* His ehrist is thus, in terms of titles, the largest extant documentary book list that has come down to us for the pre-Ottoman Arabic lands.
This frhrist allows us to ease the door open to see the cultural practices of book production, book ownership and book transmission in late medieval Damascus from a new angle. The act of endowing one’s books had been a well-established practice for centuries and there is nothing unusual at all about it. That this man and his books are nevertheless worthy of a book-length study is not because he or his books would be of outstanding importance or would have paradigmatic value: there were none of the great texts of Arabic/Islamic philosophy, theology or medicine on his shelves. In addition, Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s book collection no longer exists. The library in which his books were sitting for some 400 years was dissolved in the late nineteenth century and his case is thus one of the many medieval and early modern ‘ghost’ libraries that are not extant. Yet, Ibn “Abd al-Hadi’s book endowment deserves to be discussed in such detail because his case — in contrast to so many other medieval book endowments — is surrounded by an outstandingly dense documentation that goes well beyond the fthrist. This dense documentation provides a unique insight into the main question driving this book: what was the social and cultural significance of owning and endowing books in the late medieval period?
That Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s endowment can be studied in such detail to tackle this question is very much down to him being an obsessive writer. He loved to put anything and everything down on paper: he compiled over 800 works (the exact number is not known and settling this would require another book); he wrote not one but several auto-bibliographies; he left thousands of notes of all sorts in the books he owned; he loved to organise his daily life in lists; and he wrote the catalogue, fthrist, of the books he endowed. Most importantly, when working on this book I soon found that many of the actual manuscripts that he had once owned and subsequently endowed in the ‘Umariya Madrasa can be identified in modern-day libraries around the world.
These manuscripts brought the Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi endowment to life in several ways: their materiality and their physical form tell a much richer story than that of the frAvist alone (for a start, it is striking how shabby and small many of these manuscripts are); the notes they carry add crucial texture to what this collection meant to him in practice (such as him noting that one of his sons had fallen asleep while he was reading the book to him); and the legal documents he bound into them (scraps of paper obviously never mentioned in the frhrist) show that he used his books as quasi-archival depositories that give unique insights into how he earned his daily bread and sustained his sprawling household.
That Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi produced such an extraordinary documentation was the initial reason for writing this book. Much more striking, however, is that so much of this documentation has survived until today. This is not just down to the chance of document and manuscript survival; it has a social logic that sits at the heart of this book’s argument. On the one hand, so much of his paperwork has survived because it was carefully packaged within the framework of a highly conscious project that Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi was conducting: a project of monumentalising a specific moment from the past of his city, his quarter, his family and his scholarly community via his carefully curated collection of books. Moreover, it is not the case that so much of his endowment survived because these books were subsequently lovingly preserved and valued as cultural artefacts.
On the contrary, his books had an outstandingly stable trajectory because, as will have become clear by the end of this book, they had already fallen out of scholarly fashion when he endowed and thus monumentalised them — they had become so marginal that people no longer cared much about them. ‘They have survived in such large numbers because readers did not wear out their pages and bindings with constant use, because inattentive users did not tear off their title pages when they took them from the book stacks on the shelves, because readers who longed to own them did not steal them and because traders did not resell them expecting high margins. This all changed in the late nineteenth century when Middle Eastern and European actors started to ascribe a new cultural value to these books (that increasingly became ‘manuscripts’) and took them out of the ‘Umariya Madrasa on Mount Qasyiin where they had rested for some 400 years. In consequence, we find manuscripts from the Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi endowment today in libraries around the world, even though — on account of their relatively late mobilisation compared to other corpora of Arabic manuscripts — most of them have stayed in Damascus.
As we have such a rich documentation, this book operates on two levels. Firstly, it has a merely descriptive purpose, most importantly editing the fehrist, identifying its titles and matching these titles with the actual extant manuscript. This is what Chapters 5 and 6 are about. Secondly, it goes beyond this descriptive level and builds up over the course of Chapters 1 to 4 the central argument that the Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi endowment in its textual configuration and its material form was an attempt to monumentalise a bygone era of scholarly practices, namely ‘post-canonical hadith transmission’. The post-canonical approach of dealing with the sayings and deeds attributed to Prophet Muhammad had had its heyday in the previous three centuries and was particularly popular within the Hanbali community on the slopes of Mount Qasyiin. Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi was highly invested in this line of scholarship in terms of the religious significance he ascribed to it, in terms of its importance for his own scholarly profile and in terms of the central position it had held for members of his family, for those he considered to be his scholarly ancestors and for his home turf, the Salihiya Quarter.‘
This process of monumentalisation was reflected in the endowment as a whole on various levels, not least because more than half of its titles were booklets concerned with hadith. It is also reflected in the level of the individual book via the process of ‘majmi'isation’, that is binding previously independent codicological units (in this case small booklets) into one large book (majmi'). As we will see, Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi embarked on a massive binding project, creating along the way hundreds of new textual configurations in new material forms, each of them a monument in its own right. Thus the use of the term ‘monumentalisation’ refers in the following to two distinct, but closely linked, processes and outcomes: on the one hand the overall corpus of the books that Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi endowed and on the other hand, on a more granular level, to the individual books that he created to build up his endowment.
Research Context and Approach
In terms of its scholarly peer group, this book is first and foremost in conversation with other studies on the history of libraries and book collections in the Arabic Middle East. Library and book history has been part and parcel of the field of Middle Eastern history/Islamic Studies since its inception as a modern discipline.’ In a philologically inclined field it comes as no surprise that the early pioneer Etienne Quatremére had published the substantial Mémoire sur le gout de livres chez les orientaux as early as the 1830s.° This piece was to prove paradigmatic for research into libraries and book collections in the field with its focus on narrative sources (such as chronicles) and normative sources (such as adab works for scholars). This narrative/normative-sourcesapproach has remained an important feature of the field and has contributed some important works, among them Houari Touati’s L Armoire a sagesse and Doris Behrens-Abouseif’s The Book in Mamluk Egypt and Syria.’
However, studying what authors had to say about books can obviously be only one piece in the jigsaw of reconstructing what books people owned, what books were held in collections and what significance people ascribed to them. In consequence, individual scholars have repeatedly tried out other approaches to write the history of books and libraries, especially by identifying alternative sources. This has developed over the past decade into a full-blown reorientation of the field as part of the wider changes in writing the history of the medieval Middle East that can by now be called a veritable “documentary turn’. Recent scholarship, especially for the early Islamic period, has revised the received wisdom that hardly any documentary sources are available for writing the region’s history. The 2013 book by Petra Sijpesteijn, for instance,
has fundamentally rewritten how the new Muslim elites shaped administration in late antique Egypt. This documentary reorientation has brought to light numerous large corpora of documents that scholarship acting within the narrative/normative-sources-approach paradigm had simply either not noted or had considered to be of little interest. One of the most striking examples of this are the thousands of Arabic administrative documents, primarily from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, that are part of the Cairo Genizah collection. It required the dedicated work of Marina Rustow and others to bring this rich material to the attention of the field.” In the same vein, since the 1970s, scholarship has been aware of the hundreds of legal documents from the Haram al-sharif in Jerusalem, primarily from the fourteenth century, but they have only recently started to make a real impact on writing the region’s history.'° Finally, the documentary corpora held in Christian contexts are increasingly emerging as crucial points of reference.'!
In line with this broader development, we see in the course of the second half of the twentieth century in the field of book and library history the gradual emergence of two additional approaches that both centre on the manuscript itself: the ‘“corpus-approach’ and the “documentary-approach’. The corpus-approach was pioneered in the 1960s by the ground-breaking book of Youssef Eche, Les bibliothéques arabes publiques et semipubliques. In this book, drawing on his intimate knowledge of manuscripts in the Syrian National Library, at this point held in the Zahiriya building, he took the first steps to reconstruct the history of an Ayyubid/early Mamluk collection, the library housed in the Damascene Diya’iya Madrasa/Dar al-Hadith.’” This splendid book also showed to what extent working with a multitude of the manuscript notes that are so characteristic of Arabic manuscript cultures (those registering ownership, lending, transmission, reading and so on) allows the development of a collection to be traced.’°
It has taken a very long time for the field to fully grasp the potential of
Eche’s work, but since the 2010s it has had a series of seminal successors.
These have especially focused on the Ottoman-period collections which, by virtue of temporal proximity, have a much higher probability of being preserved — more or less — in their original form. Two recent examples of this trend are the studies of Berat Agil in 2015 and Boris Liebrenz in 2016." Acil took one of the many historic collections held in the Siileymaniye Library in Istanbul, that of Carullah Efendi endowed in the early eighteenth century. Even though this collection has some 2,200 volumes, its endower was an obscure figure whose biography can only be reconstructed from the notes on his books. Acgil does an ingenious job of reconstructing the profile and the role of a library that would have remained under the radar of any study within the narrative/normative-sources-approach. Liebrenz, in turn, focused on a corpus of manuscripts acquired in 1853 in Damascus by the Prussian consul Johann Gottfried Wetzstein (1815-1905) and held today in Leipzig.” This Rifa‘iya Library of some 500 volumes was a private library that narrative sources again ignored entirely and the biography of its owner is once more hardly visible from these sources. Its history and role in the cultural life of Ottoman Damascus is only evident from the manuscripts themselves and more importantly from the numerous manuscript notes that Liebrenz wonderfully pieced together. One rare example of the corpus-approach being successfully applied to a medieval library is the ongoing work by Ashirbek Muminoy, Sh. Ziyadov and Akram Khabibullaev on the family endowment library of Muhammad Parsa (d. 822/1420) from Bukhara that survived up to the nineteenth century and has since been scattered across the world.'®
This corpus-approach will continue to make crucial contributions to the field; one only has to think of the many historical collections held in the Siileymaniye alone that are still woefully understudied as corpora in their own right. Yet even further afield, work is developing along these lines and the ongoing Saadian Intellectual and Cultural Life project by Francois Déroche and Nuria Martinez de Castilla is a perfect example of this. This project is based on the collection of Arabic manuscripts in the San Lorenzo de El Escorial Library, which contains the books of the library of Moroccan Sultan Malay Zaydan.’” Captured in 1612, this corpus still preserves to a large extent the profile of an early modern court library. For the early modern period in South Asia, Christopher Bahl has identified several corpora that provide an insight into library holdings of Arabic texts.'* The ongoing project of Feras Krimsti on the library of a physician from Aleppo also revolves around rebuilding a library by identifying its manuscript corpus.'? For the medieval period, the corpus-approach is particularly helpful to shed light on smaller collections, such as that of the scholar Sadr al-Din Qunavi (d. 673/1274) in Konya studied by Mikail Bayram.”°
The third approach, in addition to the narrative/normative-sourcesapproach and the corpus-approach, is the documentary-approach, which primarily focuses on documentary evidence on book collections. It has to be stated right away that the borders between this approach and the corpusapproach are very fluid as working with corpora of existing manuscripts, as seen above, has always involved working with manuscript notes that could also be classified as documentary sources.”! In that sense the characteristic element of the documentary-approach, as it is understood here, is that it focuses on collections that have been dispersed over the course of the centuries. Its starting point is thus not a corpus of manuscripts, but rather documentation that was written with reference to such vanished collections. Its genesis is very much linked with the wider documentary turn in medieval Middle Eastern history/Islamic Studies as the very first studies, such as those by ‘Abd al-Latif Ibrahim, were published in parallel with the academic ‘discovery’ of Mamluk endowment records in the 1960s.” As we have relatively few other documentary sources, endowment records are still the most important resource for gaining insights into institutional collections.”
For the Ottoman period the use of documents had been standard practice, well before the documentary turn in the field of medieval history. In consequence, we see here a much wider range of documentary source genres being used to write the history of libraries and book collections. These include, for instance, estate inventories; Nelly Hanna’s Jn Praise of Books on Ottoman Cairo is one of the best examples of what such inventories can contribute to writing cultural history from the perspective of book ownership. For the pre-Ottoman period in the Syrian and Egyptian lands, by contrast, only three book-related estate inventories are known, those of the Haram al-sharif collection in Jerusalem.” Ulrich Haarmann made the first attempt to discuss this material, yet it still awaits the full attention it deserves.*® In order to understand the wide range of documentary material that has been mobilised for writing the history of libraries and book collections in the Ottoman period, the best example is the oeuvre of Ismail Eriinsal. In his enormous set of publications, he has given us a unique insight into the libraries of Istanbul up to the nineteenth century on the basis of various documentary source genres.””
The study of library catalogues, and hence the present book, is part of the documentary-approach and its development in recent decades. The term ‘catalogue’ is not just the translation of ‘fthris?; there are fihrists that are not catalogues and there are catalogues that are not called fthrists. | understand a ‘catalogue’ to be a book list that referred to a collection of books in one physical place without having a legal function. The non-legal requirement differentiates catalogues from other book lists such as estate inventories and endowment deeds. The legal function of these latter lists entailed very different notions of what should be included (for instance monetary value) and how they were organised (for instance according to buyers of various lots of books). The ‘physical place’ requirement is crucial in order to draw a line between catalogues and what could rather be called bibliographies. The classical example of the latter is the famous Fihrist of the tenth-century Baghdadi bookseller Ibn al-Nadim.** Obviously this is not a catalogue as we have no indication whatsoever that the books in this list were held in one single collection. Rather this fzhrist expressed the accumulated knowledge of books gained by an individual over the course of many years in various cities and numerous collections. Moreover, it is debatable to what extent the largest group of medieval Middle Eastern book lists known to date, those from the Cairo Genizah, actually include anything that could be called a catalogue. Those that refer to book collections in institutions are rather inventories and thus again have very different concerns.”
For the pre-Ottoman period the number of known catalogues from the Arabic lands is exceedingly small.° The oldest extant catalogue is that of a minor teaching institution in early Mamluk Damascus, the Ashrafiya catalogue from the 670s/1270s. Its writer used an ingenious classification system according to alphabet, subject matter and size to deal with over 2,000 books that were on the shelves of this library.*! The highly sophisticated system indicates that there was a rich tradition of cataloguing practices of which most examples are lost (or yet to be discovered). The other well-known medieval Arabic specimen is the catalogue-cum-inventory of the mosque library in the North African city of Kairouan from 693/1293—4, which only has 125 titles.” The final example of a known pre-Ottoman catalogue is the one dealt with in this book, the endowment catalogue by Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi.
However, calling Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s frhrist a ‘catalogue’ comes with a caveat, as this catalogue, in contrast to the Ashrafiya catalogue, had no practical function; the purpose of Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s catalogue was not for users to quickly identify what books were in the library and locate them on the shelves (Chapter 5 has more on its organisation). Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s catalogue has been well known for decades, but it has not been edited and studied in a dedicated book to date.** This is despite Ibn “Abd al-Hadi being ‘rediscovered’ in the course of the twentieth century, especially in the framework of Islamic revivalism. As a Hanbali from Damascus who was deeply invested in hadith scholarship, he is being recognised increasingly as a meaningful author whose works are now far more popular than they were during his lifetime or subsequent centuries. In consequence, dozens of his books have been edited (usually based on the unicum autograph) and we have several overviews of his works that also used his fthrist.*4 The absence of a fully edited frhrist that takes into account the existing corpus of manuscripts has assigned it a rather marginal place — too marginal for it to be seen as anything more than a factual repository of bibliographical information and also too marginal for it to even be consulted for cross-referencing catalogues, where it could have prevented factual errors.*’ That this catalogue has not been subject to a dedicated study made it possible that quite wild numbers circulate as to the number of titles it lists.%°
However, to centre this book around this fzhrist is not only meant to present factoids, but also to argue that this fArist had a much wider ambition as part of Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s monumentalisation project. This is more than just a list of titles. As Celeste Gianni has argued, catalogues of libraries and book collections have also to be read as literary texts.*” That narrative texts were meant to do something and had a performative character has very much become part of medieval Middle Eastern historiography and has been convincingly shown by work such as that of Gowaart Van Den Bossche for early Mamluk biographies.** Yet, to read texts with significantly less literary ambition in this way is much less standard in the field and has been slightly side-lined by the enthusiasm of the documentary turn. To read the Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi catalogue as a text that was meant to do something, not just repre-
sent something, also harks back to my earlier work on Ayyubid and early Mamluk-period chronicles where I suggested that they were much more than relatively benign political narratives and had much wider literary and social ambitions.”
This book thus follows the documentary turn within book and library history with the twist of taking the catalogue more seriously as a text. However, its main contribution in terms of approach lies elsewhere, namely in its very strong emphasis on material philology.” This is possible because this catalogue has allowed me to do something that had proved impossible for the other main book-related document from pre-Ottoman Syria, the Ashrafiya Library catalogue: to track down a substantial corpus of the books that Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi owned in modern-day libraries. The study of the Ashrafiya Library depended almost exclusively on its library catalogue as the actual manuscript could only be identified for less than 10 per cent of its books. For a variety of reasons (for more details on this see Chapter 5), most importantly Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s distinctive hand and his meticulous system of writing transmission notes on his books, the situation has fortunately been quite the opposite for his collection. Almost fifty per cent, forty-seven-and-a-half per cent to be precise, of the titles that had once been on the shelves of his library on Mount Qasyiin could be identified in libraries in Damascus (National al-Asad Library and al-Majma’ al-‘ilmi Library), Cairo, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Escorial, Vatican City, Paris, Berlin, London, Gotha, Dublin and Princeton as well as private collections in Beirut/Amman (Shawish) and ‘Unayza (Saudi Arabia, al-Bassam). On the basis of this incomparably richer corpus of identifiable books, this study can lay a particular emphasis on the function and meaning of the book as a physical object in late medieval Syria.
With hundreds of actual manuscripts available from this one late medieval book collection, it is possible to consider the material form, ‘the whole book’, and not just the text. The collection is thus not merely seen as reflecting specific scholarly preoccupations (especially post-canonical hadith transmission), but also as things with specific materialities: features such as size are as
important as bindings, binding fragments, configurations of title pages and so on.*! The Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi collection is thus studied here as a collection of objects that came into being through a series of processes at a specific time, in a specific place and for a specific purpose.” These physical objects bear traces that are crucial for understanding their dissemination and consumption in the various stages of their life cycle — and it is very important to underline right from the outset that the Ibn “Abd al-Hadi collection is merely one of these stages. Thus the aim here is, to use the term coined by Igor Kopytoff in his seminal paper, to reconstruct the biographies of things. In the field of Middle Eastern book history, material philology has now (implicitly) started to make a discernible impact as is evident from two monographs: Tobias Heinzelmann’s study has shown how careful attention to the texts’ materiality, including traces of users kissing the object, elucidates the usage contexts of largely anonymous texts.“4 Frederike-Wiebke Daub, in turn, has turned to layout (and this is really the first major study in the field to do so) to understand the usage contexts of a different set of popular literature.” What we have started to do, and what this book is very much about, is thus to, in Paul Love’s words, ‘listen to the manuscript’s story’.*°
The increasing interest in material philology in book and library studies is also part of similar changes in the wider field of Middle Eastern history. The study of documents is a case in point.‘” Here we see, for instance, a growing interest in the archive, or rather archival practices. The concerns underlying material philology have driven this new scholarship where the individual document has emerged as the prime site of research. Rather than an exclusive focus on the text, issues such as tears, folding lines, traces of gluing and layout
are now coming to the fore.“* Once the document becomes more than the text and also a ‘thing’, new questions start to arise and one question that is of particular relevance for this book is that of documentary ‘life cycles’. Even if the text remained the same the physical object might have a vivid and meaningful trajectory after the moment of its production, as forcefully shown by Daisy Livingston.” In the present book, life cycles feature prominently because Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi himself welded new books from small booklets that had come into existence a year, ten years or 300 years earlier. He thus built new textual and material configurations out of very dissimilar texts and materials. What mattered to him was clearly not only preserving the text, but also preserving the traces of the objects’ life cycles: he did not cross out the names of previous owners, the notes on previous endowments, the references to previous lenders and so on. Some of the booklets he bound into his manuscripts no longer even included the original text and contained nothing but transmission notes of a vanished, or ‘ghost’, text. It was precisely these life cycles that mattered to him, as they were what drove his monumentalisation project — itself a crucial new stage in these objects’ life cycles.
‘The present book thus moves away from focusing on the point of production as the determining point in the life cycle of a manuscript book but, in line with recent scholarship on medieval Europe,” it considers the book as a process that resulted in its continued and constant evolution. In other words, focusing on a manuscript’s entire life cycle allows its changing trajectories and changing meanings to be highlighted. They can depart strikingly from what the text was meant to do and what it was meant to signify at the point of production. This allows the manuscript book to be taken as much more than a way to illuminate the historical context at the point of its production, as it becomes a rich source for later periods as well. Perhaps even more importantly, tracing the social lives and material changes of a manuscript brings into the picture later manuscript users as perhaps even as important as the original author/compiler himself or herself. The authority that the manuscript book was meant to signify thus does not rest with the author alone. A later owner or user of the manuscript, such as Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi, becomes an authority in their own right in determining these texts’ multifarious significations. Once later users of the manuscript book are recognised as actors in various stages of the life cycle, the physical traces they left in the books in terms of manuscript notes, annotations, repairs, binding in their personal paperwork and so on become more than just ‘dirt’, as William Sherman observed when discussing modern attitudes to such usage traces in Renaissance books.*!
Many of the Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi books are strange and unwieldy creatures. ‘They are full of material that has (at first glance) no direct link to the main texts in the book. A modern-day reader might feel they have fallen through a rabbit hole when turning the pages. At first, we see what one would expect: relatively well-organised Arabic-Islamic scholarly texts. Yet, we suddenly come across an estate inventory turned by ninety degrees. Around the corner lurks an upside-down parchment fragment of a Greek liturgical text. The reader might have to wade through pages and pages of primary, secondary and tertiary title pages (more on these in Chapter 3) before reaching the main text. Further on sits a register of books Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi lent to friends and family. Next is a parchment fragment of the Book of Daniel in Georgian. Finally, we stumble across pieces that have been lovingly cut from a sale deed of land from fourteenth-century Damascus. As we will see in the following chapters, this stuff matters and these spolia, as I understand them, make many of his monuments highly intricate material constructions. One of the consequences of the material complexity of these books is that Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s own notes on reading, ownership and scholarly transmission are not only relevant for their content, but also for where he placed them. Even his notes can thus not be properly understood as text alone, but have to be understood in relation to their position within the overall shape of the book.
In order to make sense of these unwieldy creatures, two key concepts will be used in Chapter 3. Firstly, ‘reuse’ is employed in order to stress that the integration of old fragments (be they deeds or liturgical fragments from other scripts) could very well be a meaningful act and more than just opportunistic ‘recycling’. This has been well established for other manuscript cultures,” but for Arabic manuscript cultures we do not yet have a systematic approach to understanding medieval reuse practices. Reuse, as we will see, was often a meaningful and highly sophisticated practice where the reused objects have to be read as communicative acts of social and cultural performance. As with document reuse in other settings such as arrow flights,” textiles and head-gear,” these reuse practices could very well be highly meaningful acts of re-appropriating and re-purposing spolia of the past.*° Currently we know little about the specifics of text reuse. Such texts appear in many different forms and contexts and the present book is intended to make a first modest contribution in this regard. The second key concept refers to the abovementioned “archival practices’ to make sense of the paperwork that Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi bound into his books.
Recalibrating the focus from text to physical object in the study of the Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi collection will not only bring to the forefront manuscript notes, bound-in sale deeds and liturgical texts in Greek and Georgian, but also the most striking characteristic of this collection: the vast majority of the titles in this collection were not transmitted in the form of book(lets) with one single text (single-text manuscripts). Rather, in many cases we find that a book Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi owned (or here better a “codicological unit’) has two, three or even twenty separate texts. Furthermore, these codicological units with several texts have one very specific form: they were not multiple-text manuscripts, that is a codicological unit with several texts worked in a single operation by one scribe.”” Rather, they were composite manuscripts, that is a codicological unit in which formerly independent units, small booklets, were bound together.** While the predominance of composite manuscripts might at first glance sound highly (and boringly) technical, we will see in the following, especially under the heading of ‘monumentalisation’, that this material shape of the text is key for understanding the book collection’s historical setting and also for understanding what it was meant to do.
In sum, this book turns to material philology in order to reconceptualise the documentary turn for the history of the book and libraries in Middle Eastern history with the key concepts of life cycle, reuse and monumentalisation. In methodological terms, it does so by combining work with both digitised corpora and the actual physical object. Though such a combination is anyway indispensable for working with larger corpora,” it was inevitable for this book as the manuscripts in the National al-Asad Library could only be accessed as reproductions on account of the Syrian war that started in 2011. It would have been easier to opt for a collection that could be researched in a more accessible location — as was the case for the Ashrafiya Library, where most of the matched manuscripts, and the catalogue itself, are in Istanbul. Yet, this would reinforce the current trend of avoiding uneasy choices and opting for the simpler route — as has happened with research on Iraq since the 1990s when it virtually disappeared from research agendas. To compensate for the inaccessibility of the actual manuscripts in Damascus I consulted in situ those manuscripts of the Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi corpus that were in non-Syrian libraries, especially the Dar al-Kutub in Cairo, the Siileymaniye in Istanbul, the Escorial close to Madrid, the Vatican Library, the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris and Princeton University Library. For the National al-Asad Library, I mostly had to use digital reproductions of microfilms and photographs taken in the 1980s and the reader will notice their poorer quality in the plates section. In some isolated cases no such reproductions were available and I had to rely on the microfilm series produced in Damascus in the 1960s, which are of considerably lower quality. In
some cases I was able to secure Damascene manuscripts in colour, such as the
Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi frhrist itself. Terminology
The term ‘Syria’ as used in this book does not refer to the modern nationstate of Syria, but to historical Bilad al-Sham, which includes the modern nation-states of Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Syria (except for northern Mesopotamia) and parts of southern Turkey. Exact dates are generally given in the form ‘hijri date’/‘ce date’ while references to centuries only use the ce century. As has been evident thus far, the terms ‘book’ and ‘manuscript’ will be used interchangeably. For those living in a pre-print culture there was evidently no question that what they held in their hands were plain and simple books. It is only with the increasing dominance of print that the handwritten book gained a new status in the course of the nineteenth century in the Middle East and turned into a ‘manuscript’. I thus strive to use the terms ‘book’ and ‘booklet’ on a regular basis in line with the historical context, but will revert more often to ‘manuscript’ when it comes to codicological matters (thus “composite manuscript’ and not ‘composite book’). I use the term ‘codicological unit’, rather than manuscript or book, when I refer to the manuscripts’ materiality.
In the following, the phrase ‘Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi collection’ refers to the titles mentioned in his fthrist, that is, this term primarily operates on the textual level. “Title’ refers to an individual text, whether it comes in the physical form of a single-text manuscript or as one of dozens of other titles within a composite manuscript. For instance, entries 399a, 399b and so on (see Plate I.1) are all individual ‘titles’, even though they are part of one codicological unit. The term ‘Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi manuscript corpus’, by contrast, refers to the physical objects, the codicological units, that once sat on the shelves of Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s library and that have been identified in the course of this research in modern libraries.
The term ‘entry’ as used in the following follows the structure of Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s catalogue, where each entry received a distinct paragraph (see Plates II.2 and following). One such catalogue entry can, however, relate to one or more codicological units and/or one or more titles. An entry is identical to one title and one codicological unit when it refers to a single-text manuscript (kitab) in one volume. Entry 55 is a case in point where we have one title, The Refinement of Answers (Tahdhib al-ajwiba) by Ibn Hamid al-Hanbali (d. 403/1012) in one volume. An entry can also be a single-text manuscript in several volumes (kitab fi x mujalladat); in such cases the entry relates to one title, but there is more than one codicological unit. This is for instance the case of entry 24, The Embellishment (al-Tahbir) by al-Qadi ‘Ala’ al-Din (d. 885/1480), that comes in two volumes. Finally, an entry in the catalogue can also be a composite manuscript (majmii‘); in such cases the entry relates to one codicological unit, but we have more than one title. Entry 205, for example, is a single volume, but contains fourteen texts. This might sound dull, but this terminological precision does matter because the difference between ‘entry’, ‘title’ and ‘codicological unit’ means that there are different numbers for each of them (see Table I.1): we have 579 entries in the fihrist, but on account of single-text manuscripts in several volumes we have a slightly higher number of codicological units (665), and on account of the many composite manuscripts we have a substantially higher number of titles (2,917).
In the fthrist, 538 codicological units are identical to an entry, either because they are composite manuscripts (275), which are by definition in one volume, or single-text manuscripts in one volume (263). Further 127 codicological units go back to those forty-one entries that have single-text manuscripts in two (or more) volumes.®° Obviously, it is possible that Ibn “Abd al-Hadi did not always record whether an entry had more than one volume. That would mean that my calculation of the total number of volumes would be too low. However, from my experience of working with the fthrist and matching its entries with extant manuscripts I am fairly confident that this would have been the exception and that we can thus use these numbers for analytical purposes. The only black box is entry number 260 where he simply states ‘several volumes’ (‘iddat mujalladat), so the total number of codicological units may have been slightly higher than 665.
Both ‘collection’ (of titles) and ‘corpus’ (of objects) include texts and manuscripts that Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi owned, but that others had authored and produced. Yet, they exclude titles and manuscripts written and produced by Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi but not mentioned in his fihrist. His complete oeuvre will play a minor role in this book, which is a study of a specific book collection and does not primarily see itself as a contribution to the field of ‘Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadiology’. In whatever way we count the books on Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s shelves, it is important to underline that his was a massive book collection. We get some insights into pre-Ottoman private libraries from the three Haram al-sharif estate inventories from Jerusalem, where we see much lower numbers of books.*' If we move further abroad, we see that a private library of 100 books was ‘a substantial collection’ in sixteenthcentury England and few were those members of the upper classes who owned more.” Chapterisation The first chapter discusses the biography of Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi on the basis of the different source corpora available for him. These range from estate inventories and rent agreements via entries in the Ottoman cadastral surveys (tapu tahrir defierleri) to the traces of his life in his manuscript corpus. This chapter sets the scene, most importantly by framing the social and scholarly world of a rather middling scholar, and thus providing the context in which Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi undertook his monumentalisation project. Readers primarily interested in books and bindings can skim through these pages.
The second chapter turns to the foundation of the Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi collection in late Mamluk Damascus with a focus on the monumentalisation project. It shows that this collection was built up by a systematic purchasing strategy of books that circulated in Damascus and more specifically in the Salihiya Quarter on Mount Qasyin. The new collection had a very clear thematic profile with the vast majority of the texts belonging to one single field, hadith transmission, in particular small booklets typical for hadith scholarship in its ‘post-canonical’ period. These texts posed a challenge for Ibn “Abd al-Hadi as he could not transmit them using the standard protocol of the very period he wanted to remember with this monument of books. The chapter thus discusses his strategies to deal with this problem. The chapter then addresses the highly unusual way he bade farewell to his books — ritualised binge-reading with his family over the course of several months. The very act of endowing the books raises the issue that books continually moved between private ownership and endowment status, neatly demonstrating that endowment practice rather than endowment theory is the best place to start understanding this act. The final part of the chapter discusses why this endowment and monument ended up in the most important madrasa of the Salihiya Quarter, the ‘Umariya Madrasa.
Chapter 3 zooms in on the individual manuscript to argue that changing their material form was an indispensable element of Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s monumentalisation project. This chapter thus focuses on one of the most intriguing aspects of the collection, namely the large number of composite manuscripts it contained. With reference to multiple title pages and manuscript notes it will show that the material form of the composite manuscript was not the original form of these booklets and that they had, rather, circulated independently. This chapter shows that Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi undertook a massive binding project, producing hundreds of new composite manuscripts. Each of these books, containing up to twenty or so booklets, was meant to function as a discrete monument to the bygone period of Hanbali Damascene engagement with the Prophet’s words. The chapter thus makes the first historical argument on the material logic of Arabic composite manuscripts on the basis of a large sample. Furthermore Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi developed a uniform system of where to place his manuscript notes (on the title page) and a standardised system of layout. In combination with him using a motto (the one he also used. in legal documents) and employing a signature, the chapter argues that these notes functioned as de facto book stamps. In its final part, this chapter discusses the book collection’s materiality from the angle of archival practices. Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi used the rebinding process as an opportunity to bind paperwork emanating from his various professional activities into the new books: we thus find for instance book-lending lists, money ledgers, estate inventories issued in his capacity as notary witness and sale contracts. Overall, this chapter shows how studying the material logic of manuscripts is a crucial element to comprehending their historical roles and trajectories.
Chapter 4 follows the subsequent trajectory of the collection, arguing that the survival of so many books from this medieval library in Damascus reflects the low scholarly and cultural value that these books had in subsequent centuries. At the same time notes on extant manuscripts show that some books had already started to move to new shores a few years after Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s death, but the most intensive period of manuscripts departing occurred in the late nineteenth century with European markets playing a major role.
Chapter 5 provides an annotated analysis of the Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi fthrist itself. It starts with comments on the methodology used and then identifies the individual titles providing information on the ‘author’, the modern edition (if existing) and the book’s thematic field, as well as occasional further information (such as multiple copies and name of copyist). Most importantly, it will in many cases match the title with the actual manuscript and provide data on notes made on it by Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi. Chapter 6 is the diplomatic edition of the catalogue’s sole (autograph) manuscript. The indexing of such a large document is inevitably unsatisfying and cannot possibly cater for the various ways researchers might want to use it. In consequence the data contained in Chapter 5 is available as an open-resource database, which allows users to manipulate the information commensurate with their research questions. As there is nothing as unreliable and unstable as references to internet links in printed works, the interested reader is invited to locate it with the search terms “The Historical Arabic Libraries Database’.
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