Download PDF | Said Aljoumani_ Konrad Hirschler - Owning Books and Preserving Documents in Medieval Jerusalem_ The Library of Burhan al-Din-Edinburgh University Press (2023).
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Argument and Historiographical Setting: Books, Documents and Social Practice Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm al-Nāṣirī died in the autumn of the year 1387, on what was probably a mild day in Jerusalem. Most readers of this book have surely never heard of him, as Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm was neither rich nor famous, was part neither of the political nor the social elite, and was neither an acclaimed scholar nor a widely travelled trader. He was, rather, a man of modest means whose routine life juggling numerous part-time positions as reciter in his home town of Jerusalem did not leave any trace in the chronicles of his period. Yet his death gave birth to a remarkable collection of inventories and lists that tell a tale of material objects (mostly books, but also pots and plates), social aspiration and archival reconfigurations.
This paperwork allows us a unique insight into a non-elite life and also a non-elite library in medieval Bilād al-Shām. It is precisely because Burhān al-Dīn was in many ways so unremarkable that his life is central to the lines of argument that this book will pursue. This tale of aspiration, books and archival collections does not take place in highly visible social sites, such as the Sultan’s court or prestigious madrasas. Rather, it mostly takes place in the mundane mainstream of Arabic Muslim society of that period – in modest dwellings, narrow alleyways and little-known mausolea. We do not know what Burhān al-Dīn’s death meant emotionally to Shīrīn, his wife, and the five children he left behind. We are, however, quite well-informed about the financial and legal side of things, as his death set in motion two closely linked routine processes in order to settle his estate. His personal belongings were firstly converted into easily divisible cash by public auction, and at the same time documents linked to him were brought together in order to settle outstanding claims and debts.
Even though these were routine processes, Burhān al-Dīn’s case is unusual in that the ‘estate archive’, as we call it, of over fifty documents that was assembled to sort out his inheritance has survived until today. This corpus of documents, currently held in the Islamic Museum on the Ḥaram al-sharīf (Temple Mount) in Jerusalem, provides the scaffolding for re-creating the world of Burhān al-Dīn. In the sale booklet of his estate we see, for instance, (parts of) the material world of an average Jerusalem household of the period: combs change hands as much as razors, cushions, vessels, jars, fans, knives and door bolts. We get an idea of the clothing worn by a man such as Burhān al-Dīn, including over-garments, knitwear, long robes and headgear. Finally, and most importantly for the lines of discussion developed here, the booklet contains information on over three hundred books that had been in his ownership – Burhān al-Dīn’s library. This book proposes three main arguments, and the phenomenon of significant non-elite book ownership is central to the first: namely, that the use of the written word, literacy, had by the eighth/fourteenth century become a central feature of almost all spheres of life in the region.
With this line of argument, the present book completes in some sense a trilogy on documented libraries and book collections from pre-Ottoman Bilād al-Shām.1 The two previous studies have shown, firstly, how large and diverse the contents of library collections in endowed organisations were (the library of the Ashrafīya Mausoleum in seventh/thirteenth-century Damascus),2 and secondly how important personal book collections of scholars were in the urban topographies of books (the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī library of ninth/fifteenth-century Damascus).3 The library of Burhān al-Dīn in eighth/fourteenth-century Jerusalem, in turn, shows the decisive role of non-elite book ownership within urban topographies of books. This study not only extends the argumentation of its two predecessors on books and libraries. It also looks beyond the world of books and libraries to develop an argument on the salience of the written word with reference to pragmatic literacy, that is, the use of written documents for often very mundane and even trifling transactions.4 In contrast to colleagues working on medieval Europe, we are much more hesitant to identify a ‘writing revolution’ in a specific period.5 There is, however, no doubt that astonishingly mundane transactions triggered the writing of documents, among them intricate orders to pay very modest salaries and receipts for paying equally modest rents for what must have been very humble dwellings.
The dense networks of books and also documents that we will see in the following chapters were part of the long-term processes of textualisation and popularisation in Egypt and Syria (and probably beyond) in this period.6 By combining the analysis of book ownership (and library) with the analysis of document use (and archiving) in one specific case study, this book suggests a distinct approach that might contribute to further conversations on literacy in the pre-Ottoman period. Both fields are highly dynamic, as evidenced by the recent publication of Beatrice Gruendler’s Rise of the Arabic Book and Marina Rustow’s Lost Archive. We are thus in a much better position to think of books and documents together now than we were two decades ago. The second main argument of this book puts an emphasis on social practices, namely socio-cultural practices establishing patronage–client relationships between members of the military and political elites on the one hand and members of wider society on the other. We argue that these patronage– client relationships were not exclusively established and maintained through endowed organisations (such as madrasas), as scholarship has emphasised so far. Rather, we can also observe institutionalised practices of peripheral households providing patronage outside such organisational structures – practices that are below the radar of most of our available sources.
This argument is intended to be part of a wider rethinking of late medieval society in Egypt and Bilād al-Shām, in particular the gradual fading of the ‘state’ as an analytical category.7 Scholarship has used this category profusely, but has hardly ever conceptualised what this state was meant to be. One of us pleads guilty for having in the past used this term in exactly this under-conceptualised way where it does not contribute to clarity of argument but, on the contrary, puts a thin structuralist veneer over highly complex – and highly fascinating – processes.8 Rather than falling back on this under-conceptualised and underexplained concept of statehood, some recent scholarship has adopted a much more fine-grained approach in analysing the production, contestation and implementation of political authority by focusing on different loci of authority, among them the household, as analytical units. In this book, we refer in particular to the work of Jo van Steenbergen in analysing social structures during this period in terms of household politics and competition.9 As we will see, paying closer attention to precise historical actors and processes, rather than to how ‘the Mamluk State’ supposedly is doing something or other, allows a much better understanding of the documents that an individual such as Burhān al-Dīn produced and received. The concept of the state might have mileage for analysing other phenomena, but for this book’s characters and this book’s objects, for the institutions and organisations it analyses, and for the developments and processes it traces, this concept proved to have no value.
The book’s third line of argument is concerned with archival practices. The question of the archive is one of the few topics where the field of late medieval Arabic history has had something like a debate, and the relevant scholarship will be reviewed in Chapter 3. Our contribution to this debate is not particularly conceptual, as we broadly follow the line first indicated by Tamer El-Leithy, which emphasises a focus on archival process rather than searching for the brick-and-mortar archive.10 This in turn allows us to suggest a set of archival practices that led to the formation of the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus of over 900 documents. The main point here is that numerous archival actors (once again, decisively more complex – and fascinating – than a ‘state’) were the protagonists in preserving paperwork in numerous archival sites widely distributed across the urban topography (mostly ‘at home’). This wide spatial distribution of documents brings the book’s arguments full circle, to some extent, because Burhān al-Dīn’s books, too, were redistributed across more than sixty new households when they left his home after the auction.
It is precisely this wide distribution of books and documents that underlies the argument that literacy, in terms of textualisation and popularisation, had become such a central feature of life in this period. This book thus engages with three fields of studies (library/book studies, history of the Mamluk period and documentary/archival studies) and we will review the relevant scholarship in the following chapters. However, the (non-)use of two terms, ‘institution’ and ‘Mamluk’, are linked to broader changes in scholarship and deserve to be addressed right away in this introduction. With regard to the use of the term ‘institution’, Hofer has successfully introduced a differentiation to the field of the pre-Ottoman history of Egypt and Syria: institutions show patterns of discursively recognised ways of behaviour whereas organisations arise from highly institutionalised social fields.11 In that sense, the madrasas, mausolea and khānqāhs in which we find Burhān al-Dīn procuring salaried positions are referred to as organisations in this book. By contrast, his strategy of acquiring personal stipends from households of the military-political elite is understood as an institutionalised pattern of behaviour. This terminological convention can be fruitfully combined with Paula Manstetten’s suggestion that we should focus on processes of institutionalisation, rather than on binaries such as formal/informal and systematic/unsystematic, in order to analyse changes in social and cultural practices.12 This emphasis on how institutions gradually crystallise via – often very non-linear – processes is particularly helpful when thinking about book collections. For understanding the making and unmaking of book collections and libraries, binaries such as ‘formal endowed library’ versus ‘informal private library’ are generally analytical cul-de-sacs that create more problems than they solve. The second terminological convention adopted in this book concerns the term ‘Mamluk’ and is more controversial. The qualifier ‘Mamluk’ was an enormously successful point of reference for the formation of a distinct (and by now quite large) field of studies. Universities and research institutes across West Asia, North Africa, Europe, Japan and the USA hired in this area in the course of the second half of the twentieth century, leading to a steep rise in publications, specialised conferences and large-scale research projects.
Yet the adoption of this term to characterise and shape a scholarly field called Mamluk Studies has come at a cost. There has been a tendency to overstate the importance of military slavery and of a supposed shared ethnogenesis on an elite level in analysing the political and social processes between the seventh/ thirteenth and the tenth/sixteenth centuries in West Asia and North Africa (the ‘Mamluk’ period).13 The time has come to conceptually ‘de-Mamlukise’ our field, and we will largely avoid the term in this book, as the cultural, political and social processes that we observe are hardly ever specifically ‘Mamluk’. The terminological alternatives to ‘Mamluk’ are – we must admit – at least equally fraught with problems. Jo van Steenbergen has proposed the term ‘Cairo Sultanate’ and this does indeed work in many cases. However, there is a stylistic issue (try to derive an adjective from this term), and at some points using this term underplays the agency of individuals and groups situated in regions beyond Cairo. In such cases we have thus simply used the centuries, and if that was too awkward we have resorted to the term ‘medieval’. Now, ‘medieval’ is obviously packed with problems, and Thomas Bauer has formulated a wonderfully eloquent and beautifully sharp argument against using this term for the history of non-European regions.14 Colleagues working on European medieval history abandoned the idea that this term has any analytical value long ago and they use it as a purely descriptive and conventional term.15 So, in some sense one can argue that ‘medieval’ is by now an empty chronological marker that has as little analytical usefulness for the history of Latin Europe as it has for the history of other world regions such as West Asia, North Africa and South Asia. In our view the term is actually particularly attractive for talking about the history of regions such as West Asia and North Africa, because it is so obviously alien and analytically pointless. Now that historical scholarship has so lovingly taken apart and emptied ‘medieval’ in the last few decades we consider it to have less conceptual potential for damage than ‘Mamluk’. The term ‘Mamluk’ has not been reduced yet to such a mere descriptive and conventional status, but rather still carries analytical connotations, for instance regarding military slavery as the central phenomenon of the period – connotations that are entirely irrelevant or even misleading for the individuals, groups and objects we are discussing in this book.
Profiling and Situating the Library At the centre of this book’s arguments stands Burhān al-Dīn’s library. This library matters so much because it was impressively large, and at the same time because it is the oldest library of an individual in Jerusalem (and wider Bilād al-Shām) for which we have comprehensive documentary evidence. On the first point, size, the number of books that Burhān al-Dīn owned, over three hundred, needs to be put into perspective to have any meaning. If we consider Latin European libraries and book collections, we see that in the British Isles the number of books in medieval monastic libraries typically did not exceed the low to mid-hundreds and only the most remarkable libraries, such as those at Norwich Cathedral’s priory, Christ Church Cathedral and St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury, and Bury St Edmunds Abbey, had collections that came close to 2,000 volumes.16 In France, the royal library in the Louvre, founded during the lifetime of Burhān al-Dīn and dissolved three decades after his death, was the largest library after the papal libraries in Avignon and the library of the Sorbonne, but did not exceed 900 manuscripts.17 Cistercian monasteries in the Holy Roman Empire at this point had an average stock of 400 books, not so many more than Burhān al-Dīn kept at home.18 It thus seems that the collection of books in the house of this unremarkable individual in Bilād al-Shām was not too far from the numbers of books held in quite august libraries in Latin Europe. To drive this point home, it is obviously much more appropriate to draw comparisons with personal libraries beyond the highest elites. In Latin Europe, parish priests are to some extent comparable with a reciter such as Burhān al-Dīn in social and intellectual terms; the book ownership patterns of Bavarian priests a century after Burhān al-Dīn died have received the closest attention. The parish priest Mathias Bürer (d. 1485) left twenty-six manuscripts to St Gall, Johannes Molitoris owned more than forty volumes and Ulrich Pfeffel owned thirty-two manuscripts and three printed books. However, parish priests more typically owned much smaller collections of one or two books.19 When more substantial personal libraries arose on the British Isles in the sixteenth century, obviously a period when the number of printed books shot up, ‘a library of 100 books was a substantial collection’.20 The extent of Burhān al-Dīn’s holdings is also quite impressive when turning to the Iberian Peninsula during the eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries. Here, Jewish book owners and their libraries were found to possess an average of twenty-eight books per owner with few individuals owning well over 100 books.21 In Iberian Christian society numbers were more modest, and even the largest libraries of the aristocracy did not go beyond ‘a couple of hundred books’.22 We will return to the numbers in Chapter 4, but the main point here is that we find, in the eighth/ fourteenth century in a relatively small town such as Jerusalem in the house of a rather average individual such as Burhān al-Dīn, a number of books that is strikingly high in trans-regional comparative perspective. What does this statement and the book’s three main arguments mean in the wider scheme of things? This book is obviously a micro-history and, like any micro-history, it raises the question of the extent to which broader statements can be derived from this one case. In order to tackle this issue, we have contextualised the case study at various stages of the argument in order to make transparent our process of formulating broader statements. The splendid recent examples of documentary micro-history such as Elizabeth Lambourn’s Abraham’s Luggage and Nandini Chatterjee’s Negotiating Mughal Law have shown in what ways micro-historical approaches hold so long as the methodological approach is clearly laid out. Following these examples, we argue that the case of Burhān al-Dīn’s books is indeed representative of broader trends in terms of quantity, but we are much more hesitant – on account of much weaker contextual data – to make the same claim for representativeness with regard to content, that is the intellectual profile of the library’s books. Apart from size, the second special feature of this library is that it is the oldest documented personal library in Jerusalem and Bilād al-Shām.23 This phrase warrants some discussion, as any town and city in the region has a history of libraries that starts well before the eighth/fourteenth century. In addition, the claim to an ‘oldest’ anything in Jerusalem is particularly sensitive on account of the disputed status of the city in the modern period. What we refer to here is not that Burhān al-Dīn’s library was some kind of beginning or that Jerusalem was at the centre of some major development – if Jerusalem was indeed the City of the Book, 24 the major urban centres in Bilād al-Shām such as Damascus and Aleppo were the metropolises of the book. Burhān al-Dīn’s books constitute simply the oldest library outside an organisation (synagogue, monastery, madrasa and so on) for which we have documentary evidence. There is no doubt that many personal libraries had previously existed in Jerusalem and many more in wider Bilād al-Shām, but these remain elusive on account of scarce extant documentation. That documentary evidence is available for this library is so crucial because what we know about the library history of Jerusalem (and most other towns and cities in the region) mostly comes from narrative reports such as chronicles.25 These include, for instance, the cathedral library used by William of Tyre in the sixth/twelfth century,26 but even the existence or non-existence of a library in a town as large as Frankish Acre is open to discussion.27 In the rare cases where documentary evidence has survived these are libraries attached to some kind of organisation, such as the Frankish Augustinian chapter library in nearby Nazareth from c. 1200, for which a very brief book list exists.28 Jerusalem is in one way special in terms of the history of libraries in the region, namely because it houses several medieval libraries that have had a more or less continuous existence until today, such as the patriarchal Greek Orthodox library29 and the Franciscan library at Mount Zion.30 However, they are again of limited relevance for our topic as they are attached to organisations and did not have individual owners. In addition, these libraries have been heavily reconfigured in the course of recent centuries and it will require very detailed studies to reconstruct their actual holdings at a given point in the past. Jerusalem is special in another way, in that it houses extant historical family libraries, such as, most famously, the Khālidīya and the Budayrīya libraries. Here we have book collections that were once owned by individual family members, and these libraries have an enormous potential for writing the book history of Jerusalem and thus contributing to the wider history of libraries in West Asia and North Africa. However, these libraries were heavily reconfigured in the late Ottoman period when they gained their status as family libraries and when individual collections were merged.31 More importantly, even if we were able to reconstruct the libraries of individual family members they would go back no further than the twelfth/eighteenth century and are thus much younger than Burhān al-Dīn’s book collection. Finally, one would have expected documentary corpora other than the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus to yield material, especially the Cairo Geniza(s). Here we do indeed find many lists on books and libraries in Cairo, but they are conspicuously silent on libraries in Jerusalem.32 At most we get letters referring to books from a pre-Frankish synagogue library.33 Burhān al-Dīn’s library is thus indeed, for the time being, the oldest documented personal library in the history of Jerusalem – and wider Bilād al-Shām.
While Burhān al-Dīn’s library can lay claim to being the oldest comprehensively documented library of an individual in Bilād al-Shām, it is by no means the oldest preserved library of an individual owner. We have not succeeded in matching a single title listed in the sale booklet for his collection with an actual codex currently sitting on the shelves of some library around the world (see Chapter 7 for details on this) – yet surely there are extant codices. His library is thus a virtual or phantom library which we know existed, but for which the material traces are missing. That we could not work with extant codices is exactly the opposite of the situation for the Rifāʿīya library. This is one of the oldest preserved libraries from Bilād al-Shām that has not reached us via an organisation’s library such as a madrasa library. Boris Liebrenz has studied this mid-nineteenth-century Damascene library, which was transferred as such to Leipzig.35 For this library we thus have the actual books, but neither the library nor its owner is mentioned in any Arabic documentation, so that we have two perfectly inverted cases: no codices, but ample documentation for Burhān al-Dīn’s library (calling for the documentary approach);36 ample codices, but no additional Arabic documents for the Rifāʿīya (calling for the corpus approach).37 The field of Arabic-script library and book studies has undergone an amazing development in recent years. We have reviewed this development before and there is no need to repeat it here.38 However, for the line of work that we pursue, documentary-based library archaeology, there are two pioneering predecessors who need to be mentioned as we are so deeply indebted to their main publications, both published in the 1960s: ʿAbd al-Laṭīf Ibrāhīm, the documentary grand master of Egypt, especially with his Dirāsāt fī al-kutub wa-al-maktabāt al-islāmīya; and Youssef Eche (Yūsuf al-ʿĪsh), director of the Ẓāhirīya Library in Damascus, with his Les bibliothèques arabes publiques et semipubliques. There are also two new projects on libraries in the late eighth/ fourteenth and early tenth/sixteenth century that are of direct relevance to our work.39 Kristof D’Hulster has taken a decisive first step in reconstructing the court library in Cairo using the corpus approach. In his Browsing through the Sultan’s Bookshelves, and in a steady stream of addenda since, he offers a splendid discussion of numerous books and titles that had once been part of the library of Sultan Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 906–22/1501–16). In his Ph.D., Kyle Wynter-Stoner (University of Chicago) undertakes a similar reconstruction project identifying the extant codices that once were in the library of Jamāl al-Dīn Maḥmūd al-Ustādār (d. 799/1397). Maḥmūd was the major-domo of the sultan in Cairo from 792/1390 to 798/1395 and thus one of the most prominent officers of his time. He also delved into the murkier side of life (at least that is how he was portrayed) and he even plays a walk-on part in the story of Burhān al-Dīn, as we will see. Both projects show the vivid book culture within the military and political elite (severely under-studied so far) and the crucial importance of book ownership in this section of society.40 A recent important development in the history of books and libraries specifically in Bilād al-Shām has been the development of a cluster of works on Aleppo. Feras Krimsti has studied the extant library of a Maronite physician of the eighteenth century, and Benedikt Reier the earlier book inventory of an Aleppan book collector.41 Simon Mills has published an analysis of the English side of the story during the seventeenth century with a heavy emphasis on local scholars and booksellers in Aleppo.
In methodological terms, the most relevant line of research on Arabic-script book and library history are those studies within the documentary approach based on estate inventories. These studies are all placed in the Ottoman period because no other significant Arabic book-related inventory other than that of Burhān al-Dīn is known so far (or has been studied so far) for the pre-Ottoman period.43 For the Ottoman period, by contrast, we have ample evidence, and of particular relevance for our purposes are those studies based on non-elite individuals beyond the usual scholarly contexts.44 To these belong, for instance, analyses of book ownership within the military in Constantinople,45 among women,46 and among individuals from different walks of life in the Balkans and Damascus.47 These studies show how socially widespread book ownership was in the Ottoman period, including among artisans and merchants. In methodological terms, the most important point coming out of the work with these inventories is the complexity of their quantitative data. Rather than trying to aggregate them into large samples – to flatten their respective meanings – each inventory has to be studied in its own right as to what it actually is: a representation (often partial) of one specific individual’s possessions.48 Furthermore, as we will see in the following as well, the term ‘inventory’ is often too blunt and most documents require much more careful discussion in order to understand their respective function. The micro-historical approach taken in this study was thus adopted not only out of necessity, but also as an explicit methodological choice inspired by Ottoman-period studies on inventories and lists. Inventories and other lists are thus far from being neutral evidence; they are highly framed by legal, economic, cultural, social and linguistic factors.49 For instance, inventories are never complete; they always marginalise or sideline what is seen as trivial, worthless and compromising. As Rudolf Schenda showed decades ago for the European context, inventories of books did, for instance, systematically exclude ‘trashy’ literature.50 Precisely because inventories are much more than just harmless lists they ‘must be acknowledged as some of the most important evidence of culture, not just concerning things of the past, but regarding the relation of humans and things, that is, about (contexts of) life’.51 The sale booklet at the centre of this book – and other documents linked to Burhān al-Dīn – look like rather boring lists, but they unfold considerable analytical potential once seen as such complex objects with many functions that deserve to be read in their specific historical context.
The Ḥaram al-sharīf Corpus Burhān al-Dīn’s estate archive is part of (or rather, distributed across) the corpus of documents preserved in the Islamic Museum on the Ḥaram al-sharīf, one of the most important pre-Ottoman documentary corpora for Bilād al-Shām and Egypt. The documents were ‘academically discovered’ in the course of the 1970s in several batches in drawers of the museum. The main protagonists in this process were Amal Abul-Hajj, Linda Northrup and Donald Little.52 Notes accompanying the documents show that they had been known before: a member of staff had already started to work on some of them before the 1970s.53 How and when the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus – as we call it today – came into being is entirely unknown so far and this constitutes a major methodological challenge for anyone working on and with these documents. We are only beginning to understand the steps that led to the amalgamation of what must have been clearly distinct collections. The situation recalls that of the Acquired Persian Documents in the National Archives of India (Delhi), where the collection is, as Nandini Chatterjee has argued, made up of a small number of family archives, the traces of which have been erased.54 In response to this situation, Chapter 3 of this book centres on the question of how one of these independent collections in Jerusalem, Burhān al-Dīn’s estate archive, wasformed and how it might have joined others to become part of the present-day corpus. The Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus has a complex and dynamic history of reconfigurations and material changes not only before the 1970s, but also thereafter. When the documents were prepared for cataloguing in the 1970s they were unfolded, and folding patterns potentially going back to the eighth/ fourteenth century were lost. Subsequently, they were wetted with water and ‘placed while still damp between the pages of Creswell’s Early Muslim Architecture … and on top of these were placed, for extra pressure, a number of Islamic tombstones from those available in the museum’.55 In this process further material evidence was lost and thus the history of sub-collections erased. Such lost evidence includes, for instance, information about which documents had been kept in a bundle as well as some of the strings that kept bundles of documents together. In subsequent years further changes occurred, and these can be traced to some extent via three sets of photographs that were taken over the years: the black and white photographs taken by Martin Lyons in 1978, the colour photographs taken in 2010 and a new set of colour photographs taken in 2014.56 For instance, two of those strings still visible in the 1978 set had disappeared by the time that the 2010 set of photographs was taken.57 In the 1978 set we see that the classmarks assigned by Amal Abul-Hajj, Linda Northrup and Donald Little were pencilled in Arabic numbers on the documents (e.g. ‘٦١’ (61) on Plate I.1). Between 2011 and 2014 the classmarks were slightly amended by adding ‘2824.’ to the old classmark system so that document ‘61’ became ‘2824.61’.58 In this process the new classmarks were also written onto the documents in pencil (see e.g. Plate I.2 for ‘2824.61’).
An exciting change with respect to the known corpus transpired during our work on this book, namely that the ‘core corpus’ of 883 documents, photographed by Martin Lyons in 1978 and catalogued by Donald Little in 1984 (the basis for all work on the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus so far), is not the end of the story.60 Rather, there are almost a hundred additional documents that we call the ‘Ḥaram al-sharīf plus corpus’, which significantly expands the known corpus of documents.61 These documents will be described in a supplementary catalogue that we are preparing with Zahir Bhallo (Hamburg). Suffice to say here that the new corpus enlarges the number of Persian/Persianate documents, adds some Ottoman-period documents, and contains further legal, trade and endowment-related documents produced in Jerusalem. Most important for our purposes here is that the plus corpus added two further documents directly relevant for Burhān al-Dīn, namely a draft list of the estate of his deceased wife62 and a list produced after the auction of his belongings.63 How and when these ‘new’ documents became part of the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus is unclear. Amal Abul-Hajj, Linda Northrup and Donald Little never mention any further documents in their publications,64 the same goes for the colleagues who subsequently worked on these documents (such as Kāmil al-ʿAsalī, Donald Richards and Christian Müller), and Martin Lyons did not photograph any documents other than the core corpus of 883 documents. The first (implicit) reference to the existence of further documents in the Islamic Museum is found in an article by Khader Salameh, the director of the museum, in 2001 when he speaks of ‘950 items’, that is, clearly a higher number.65 The additional documents were part of the 2010 set of photographs and that of 2014, but so far none of them has been edited or even referred to in scholarship. Even though the provenance of the plus corpus is so unclear, there is no doubt that its documents belong to the core corpus and that they shared a similar trajectory. The documents in the core corpus and the plus corpus display a significant overlap in terms of language, period and content. In future we can thus simply speak once again of the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus without ‘core’ and ‘plus’, the only very pleasant difference being that the corpus has grown. With the cataloguing of the documents and their availability as microfilm copies from the early 1980s onwards, numerous documents have been edited in recent decades. This occurred in the 1980s in particular, but the recent years have seen a pleasing stream of publications in Arabic (see Appendix 3).66 A major challenge that remains is the dispersed nature of the printed editions, which are often difficult to track down. The Munich Arabic Papyrology Database provides the texts of many of these documents in digital format, but not images.67 A major milestone was the launch of the Paris Comparing Arabic Legal Documents database in 2021 with (often improved) editions of documents previously published in print.68 It not only provides text and image, but has also started to offer online-only editions of previously unpublished documents. This book edits a further twenty-one documents (twenty-three when counting by classmarks). Yet, the ultimate aim has to be that the editions and photos are one day available on the website of their home institution, the Islamic Museum in Jerusalem. While scholarship has produced many editions, the analytical potential of the documents remained rather underused for a long period. The turning point in this regard, and thus a milestone in understanding the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus, has been the work, by Christian Müller in particular but not exclusively, with regard to legal practices. Our work is deeply indebted to Müller’s publications, and rather than adding another panegyric to his Der Kadi und seine Zeugen, suffice to say that this book is by far the most referenced title in the following pages. One article based on a Ḥaram al-sharīf document brings us back to the library of Burhān al-Dīn. This is the 1984 article by Ulrich Haarmann, The Library of a Fourteenth Century Jerusalem Scholar, which actually highlighted the books of Burhān al-Dīn some forty years ago when academic interest in the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents awoke. With his trademark acumen Ulrich Haarmann had understood the importance of this topic and made the first tentative suggestions regarding what this document actually was, and the identity of some books. Yet, in this seven-page article, he did not identify any of the dozens of buyers mentioned in the document or discuss any of the prices. Regrettably, he was never able to embark on the ‘exhaustive study which I hope to complete in the not too distant future’.69 In a sense, the present book is based on Ulrich Haarmann’s article and pays tribute to the crucial role he has played with regard not just to this document, but also the development of the field of Mamluk Studies as a whole.
A Brief Outline of this Book This book starts with six thematic chapters in the book’s narrative Part I that build up its core arguments. The twin Chapters 1 and 2 offer a social biography of Burhān al-Dīn, with a focus on understanding how he was financially able to amass such a substantial library. The core axis of argumentation of these two chapters is to show how deeply involved Burhān al-Dīn was in the bookish culture of his time as a non-elite member of society. Chapter 1 engages with the current discussion on the attendant complications of the catch-all term ‘scholar’. It also establishes the historical non-elite context of Burhān al-Dīn and his books, with an emphasis on endowments. Chapter 2 extends this discussion and suggests how we can make sense of his peculiar professional trajectory and how we can acknowledge his agency. This includes the identification of a set of socio-cultural practices that allowed a modest reciter such as Burhān al-Dīn to pursue a successful career, which we call that of a ‘multiple part-time reciter’.
After two chapters devoted to Burhān al-Dīn, the twin Chapters 3 and 4 zoom in on the documentary protagonist of this study, the sale booklet. A discussion of the archival and documentary practices evident in this booklet allow it to be contextualised within the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus at large. The starting point for Chapter 3 is very basic, namely, why did this sale booklet survive? This question obviously comes out of the micro-historical focus of our book and the concern that we might be dealing here with a documentary outlier. In consequence, we examine in detail the archival practices that are evident from the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus at large, the Burhān al-Dīn documentary subcorpus specifically and the sale booklet itself to suggest archival trajectories. These archival trajectories, in turn, can only be understood with reference to the sale booklet’s function and an understanding of what this booklet actually was and was not meant to do. In terms of argumentation, these chapters thus focus on pragmatic literacy. The large number of documents produced during this period, as well as the intricate documentary and archival practices, indicate just how deeply the written word had penetrated society beyond the world of books at this point. Widespread pragmatic literacy was certainly not a new phenomenon in West Asia and North Africa, but the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus is probably a very good prompt for further thought on the issue. Chapter 5 finally takes us to the library itself and emphasises the important contribution it makes to our knowledge of book culture beyond the realms of the political elite, scholarly organisations and scholarly elite households. It suggests that this book collection fulfilled the specific cultural and social function of a ‘prestige library’ and that this function was reflected in the books’ profile. In its final part the chapter presents the afterlife of the book collection and takes a brief look at how Burhān al-Dīn’s books were sold at the auction and the profile of the ‘auction community’ that came together for this event. This is crucial because the sale booklet names more than sixty buyers and thus provides a wealth of data on further book ownership in Jerusalem during that period. This dense network of new owners indicates once again how bookish societies such as that of Jerusalem were at this point in history. Chapter 6 turns to the book prices, which are of outstanding importance because we have so far only very patchy evidence of book prices for the preOttoman Arabic lands. The main purpose here is to gauge the financial means necessary to participate in the world of books as book owner or even as patron of a substantial personal library – in other words, to ask how expensive a book was in late medieval Jerusalem. Against this background, this chapter extends the argument on widespread literacy by highlighting the broad range of book prices that allowed different social groups access to the world of books. In methodological terms the chapter thinks about whether broader conclusions can be drawn from different sets of data and how to read the numerals that we find in late medieval documentary sources. Chapter 7 starts the book’s documentary Part II. It offers an analysis and an edition of the sale booklet, and its data provides much of the scaffolding for the previous chapters. This is a rather descriptive chapter that does not offer much in terms of argument, yet it took us the longest to complete. Identifying the buyers and book titles, understanding the objects mentioned, reading the numerals, interpreting the strokes, trying to make sense of folding lines and actually solving the order of the sheets was for a long time one of our main occupations. We hope that some readers will follow, and in some cases challenge, our readings and interpretations. Chapter 8 provides a discussion of the documentary network around the sale booklet and an edition of the relevant four documents that were written with reference to the booklet in the days after the auction. Again, there is no great argument, but the chapter is absolutely essential in terms of Part I of the book working, and hopefully might furnish another helpful example of how to read such seemingly decontextualised lists and how to make connections. Appendix 1 provides an overview of documents linked to Burhān al-Dīn’s life and estate and is meant as a point of reference while reading the preceding chapters. Appendix 2 provides the edition of another sixteen of these documents as a complement to those already edited, in the hope that their publication in one open-access location will facilitate future access.
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