E D I N B U R G H S T U D I E S I N C L A S S I C A L I S L A M I C H I S T O R Y A N D C U LT U R E KONRAD HIRSC H L E R A M O N U M E N T T O M E D I E V A L S Y R I A N B O O K C U L T U R E THE LI B R A RY O F I B N ‘A B D A L - H A D I - - A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture Edinburgh Studies in Classical Islamic History and Culture Series Editor: Carole Hillenbrand A particular feature of medieval Islamic civilisation was its wide horizons. The Muslims fell heir not only to the Graeco-Roman world of the Mediterranean, but also to that of the ancient Near East, to the empires of Assyria, Babylon and the Persians; and beyond that, they were in frequent contact with India and China to the east and with black Africa to the south. This intellectual openness can be sensed in many interrelated fields of Muslim thought, and it impacted powerfully on trade and on the networks that made it possible. Books in this series reflect this openness and cover a wide range of topics, periods and geographical areas. Titles in the series include: Arabian Drugs in Early Medieval Mediterranean Medicine Zohar Amar and Efraim Lev The Abbasid Caliphate of Cairo, 1261–1517: Out of the Shadows Mustafa Banister The Medieval Western Maghrib: Cities, Patronage and Power Amira K. Bennison Keeping the Peace in Premodern Islam: Diplomacy under the Mamluk Sultanate, 1250–1517 Malika Dekkiche Queens, Concubines and Eunuchs in Medieval Islam Taef El-Azhari The Kharijites in Early Islamic Historical Tradition: Heroes and Villains Hannah-Lena Hagemann Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library – The Ashrafīya Library Catalogue Konrad Hirschler A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture: The Library of Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī Konrad Hirschler The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt: State and Society, 1173–1325 Nathan Hofer Defining Anthropomorphism: The Challenge of Islamic Traditionalism Livnat Holtzman Making Mongol History: Rashid al-Din and the Jami ʿ al-Tawarikh Stefan Kamola Lyrics of Life: Sa‘di on Love, Cosmopolitanism and Care of the Self Fatemeh Keshavarz Art, Allegory and The Rise of Shiism In Iran, 1487–1565 Chad Kia A History of the True Balsam of Matarea Marcus Milwright Ruling from a Red Canopy: Political Authority in the Medieval Islamic World, From Anatolia to South Asia Colin P. Mitchell Islam, Christianity and the Realms of the Miraculous: A Comparative Exploration Ian Richard Netton Conquered Populations in Early Islam: Non-Arabs, Slaves and the Sons of Slave Mothers Elizabeth Urban edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/escihc A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture The Library of Ibn Abd al-Ha ˉ dı ˉ Konrad Hirschler Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com We are committed to making research available to a wide audience and are pleased to be publishing an Open Access ebook edition of this volume. © Konrad Hirschler 2020, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives licence Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f ) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/15 Adobe Garamond by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 5156 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5159 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5158 1 (epub) The right of Konrad Hirschler to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents List of Illustrations vi Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1 Setting the Scene: The World of a Late Medieval Middling Scholar 23 2 Monumentalising the Past 64 3 Binding Matters – From Stand-alone Booklet to Monumental Composite Manuscript 115 4 Conclusion: The After-life of the Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī Collection 155 5 The Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī fihrist : Title Identification 171 Abbreviations 196 The Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī fihrist 198 6 The Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī fihrist : Edition 512 Bibliography 555 General Index 575 Index of Titles 582 Index of Authors 596 Index of Thematic Categories 607 Index of Identified Manuscripts of the Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī Corpus 611 Illustrations Tables I.1 The Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī fihrist in numbers 19 1.1 Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī’s children 31 2.1 Thematic categories in the Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī collection 75 Maps 1.1 Damascus and suburbs at the beginning of the 10th/16th century 24 1.2 The Í āli ª īya Quarter at the end of the Mamluk period 29 2.1 Book-related markets in in Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī’s lifetime 71 2.2 Plan of the ʿ Umarīya Madrasa 108 4.1 Trajectories of Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī manuscripts 162 Figures 3.1 Booklet with two bi-folia 124 3.2 Booklet after users added one bi-folium 124 Plate Section I: Plates for Chapters 1–4 Situated between pages 170 and 171 I.1 Entry for composite manuscript in Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī’s fihrist I.2 Land sale contract I.3 Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī’s receipt for annual rent I.4 ʿ Inda -account in hand of Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī I.5 Example of Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī’s mise-en-page I.6 Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī running out of space in his auto-bibliography Tasmiya li-kutubī I.7 Book-lending list of Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī I.8 Transmission notes in hand of Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī I.9 Transmission note, written when Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī was unwell I.10 Primary title page of ª adīth booklet I.11 Secondary title page of ª adīth booklet I.12 Modern protective wrapper of ª adīth booklet I.13 Recto and verso of same folio filled with transmission notes I.14 Booklet with endowment note by Mu ª ammad Ibn Hāmil al- Ó arrānī I.15 Money ledger belonging to Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī reused to make a pasteboard I.16 Protective parchment wrapper of a ª adīth booklet I.17 Do-it-yourself stitching by Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī household I.18 Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī’s transmission note right on the secondary title page I.19 Leftover binding material on spine of a ª adīth booklet Plate Section II: The Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī fihrist Situated between pages 554 and 555 II.1 title page II.2 entries 1–24 II.3 entries 25–51 II.4 entries 52–76 II.5 entries 77–101 II.6 entries 102–123 II.7 entries 124–141 II.8 entries 142–160 II.9 entries 161–169 II.10 entries 170–180 II.11 entries 181–190 II.12 entries 191–201 II.13 entries 202–208 II.14 entries 209–214 II.15 entries 215–221 II.16 entries 222–228 II.17 entries 229–233 II.18 entries 234–245 II.19 entries 246–260 II.20 entries 261–287 II.21 entries 288–314 II.22 entries 315–336 II.23 entries 337–342 II.24 entries 343–355 II.25 entries 356–364 II.26 entries 365–379 II.27 entries 380–393 II.28 entries 394–399 illustrations | vii viii | a monument to medieval s y r i a n b o o k c u l t u r e II.29 entries 400–404j II.30 entries 404k–411 II.31 entries 412–420 II.32 entries 421–425 II.33 entries 426–432d II.34 entries 432d–437e II.35 entries 437f–442 II.36 entries 443–446 II.37 entries 447–457o II.38 entries 457p–462 II.39 entries 463–468g II.40 entries 468h–472h II.41 entries 472h–480 II.42 entries 481–485 II.43 entries 486–490 II.44 entries 491–499 II.45 entries 500–505d II.46 entries 505d–511f II.47 entries 511f–515 II.48 entries 516–523 II.49 entries 524–530k II.50 entries 530k–535d II.51 entries 535d–539 II.52 entries 540–543 II.53 entries 544–550d II.54 entries 550d–553 II.55 entries 554–563n II.56 entries 563o–567 II.57 entries 568–573 II.58 entries 574–578 II.59 entry 579 ix Acknowledgements A s always, there are more people to thank than there is room for on these pages, but a few names should be singled out. Karima Benaicha (Al-Furqan Foundation, London), Abdul Aati al-Sharqawi (ILM, Cairo) and Philipp Roe (Chester Beatty Library) generously helped with gaining access to manuscript reproductions. Said Aljoumani has been a wonderful com- panion and was always there to discuss manuscript notes. Iman Zayat and Stephanie Luescher helped to bring the manuscript and illustrations into shape. Suzanne Ruggi once again copy-edited the book manuscript. Benedikt Reier, Boris Liebrenz and Garrett Davidson sent those emails with clues that led me to identify yet another manuscript. Rania Abdellatif got hold of the titles published in Syria. Tamer el-Leithy invited me to the History Seminar at Johns Hopkins University, a uniquely helpful meeting for discussing what I then believed would be a chapter for this book. Reading and discussing the work of PhD students, while writing this book especially Christopher Bahl, Mohamad El-Merheb and Daisy Livingston, has been a constant inspiration. I can only express my heartfelt gratitude to all those colleagues who were willing to discuss this project and who have responded to my queries. This goes especially for the participants in the workshops and conferences where I presented aspects of this work, especially those in London, Munich, Cairo, Paris, Istanbul, Rabat, Jena, Beirut, Princeton, Hamburg and Leeds. Writing a book requires extended periods of research leave and I have to thank three institutions who enabled this project: a fellowship by the British Academy for 2014/15 allowed me to begin; a three-month stay as fellow at the Annemarie-Schimmel-Kolleg in Bonn in 2015 provided me with the tranquil environment needed to take it further; and a sabbatical granted by my home institution Freie Universität Berlin in 2018 gave me much-needed time to finish the draft. As with my previous books, my thanks to these institutions is particularly sincere as they were willing to support a stand-alone project at a time when funding is increasingly focused on large-scale research groups. My particular gratitude goes to the Freie Universität Berlin for providing funds to publish this book as open access. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers at Edinburgh University Press for their constructive comments, especially on how to pre- sent the material. The different members of staff at Edinburgh University Press who were involved in this project, in particular Nicola Ramsey, Kirsty Woods and Eddie Clark, once again greatly contributed to bringing this work to publication. x | acknowledg e m e n t s 1 Introduction T his is the story of a man and his books in late medieval Damascus. The story will take us up the slopes of Mount Qāsyūn, to the west of the walls of the Old City, and into the home of Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī (d. 909/1503). 1 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 stud- ied 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 auto- graph 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 ʿ Abd al-Hādī 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 ( fihrist ) 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 shabby- looking book list of fifty-eight folia, which sits today on the shelves of the National al-Asad Library in Damascus. Here, Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī 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). 2 His 1 This book uses ‘Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī’, in contrast to ‘Ibn al-Mibrad’ as he is sometimes referred to in scholarship (e.g. Miura, Dynamism in the Urban Society of Damascus and Ibn al-Mibrad [Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī], It ª āf al-nubalā ʾ ). This divide in naming practices is deplorable and has led to confusion. Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī almost without exception referred to himself with this name. 2 MS Damascus, National al-Asad Library 3190. After much hesitation, in light of the current situation in Syria, I opted for its current name National al-Asad Library in order to avoid fur- ther confusion. This library has repeatedly changed its name in the course of the last 130 years from Public Library ( al-Maktaba al- ʿ umūmīya ), to the National Ê āhirīya Library ( Dār al-kutub 2 | a monument to medieval s y r i a n b o o k c u l t u r e fihrist 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 fihrist allows us to ease the door open to see the cultural practices of book production, book ownership and book transmission in late medi- eval 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 ʿ Abd al-Hādī’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 ʿ Abd al-Hādī’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 fihrist . This dense documentation provides a unique insight into the main question driv- ing this book: what was the social and cultural significance of owning and endowing books in the late medieval period? That Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī’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 thou- sands of notes of all sorts in the books he owned; he loved to organise his daily life in lists; and he wrote the catalogue, fihrist , 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 ʿ Umarīya Madrasa can be identified in modern-day libraries around al-ahlīya al- Õ āhirīya ), to the National al-Asad Library ( Maktabat al-asad al-wa † anīya ). These changes in names were accompanied by changes in the classmark system. Regrettably, modern authors often refer to manuscripts with the old Ê āhirīya classmarks, adding to the difficulty in retrieving the manuscript in question. In order not to add a further element to this confusion, this book simply uses the current official name irrespective of any other considerations. introduction | 3 the world. These manuscripts brought the Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī endowment to life in several ways: their materiality and their physical form tell a much richer story than that of the fihrist 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 fihrist ) 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 ʿ Abd al-Hādī 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 ʿ Abd al-Hādī was conduct- ing: 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 ʿ Umarīya Madrasa on Mount Qāsyūn where they had rested for some 400 years. In consequence, we find manuscripts from the Ibn ʿ Abd 4 | a monument to medieval s y r i a n b o o k c u l t u r e al-Hādī 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 fihrist , 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 ʿ Abd al-Hādī endowment in its textual con- figuration and its material form was an attempt to monumentalise a bygone era of scholarly practices, namely ‘post-canonical ª adīth transmission’. 3 The post-canonical approach of dealing with the sayings and deeds attributed to Prophet Mu ª ammad had had its heyday in the previous three centuries and was particularly popular within the Ó anbali community on the slopes of Mount Qāsyūn. Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī was highly invested in this line of scholar- ship 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 Í āli ª īya Quarter. 4 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 ª adīth . It is also reflected in the level of the indi- vidual book via the process of ‘ majmū ʿ isation ’, that is binding previously independent codicological units (in this case small booklets) into one large book ( majmū ʿ ). As we will see, Ibn ʿ Abd al-Hādī embarked on a massive binding project, creating along the way hundreds of new textual configura- tions 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 ʿ Abd al-Hādī endowed and on the other 3 For post-canonical ª adīth transmission see first and foremost Davidson, Carrying on the Tradition 4 The Í āli ª īya will be called throughout this book a ‘quarter’, rather than an independent ‘town’. In this I follow the seminal book on the Í āli ª īya by Miura, Dynamism in the Urban Society of Damascus. Yet, it is evident that it also was at times a rather independent urban entity in the course of its history. introduction | 5 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 conver- sation 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. 5 In a philologically inclined field it comes as no surprise that the early pioneer Etienne Quatremère had published the substantial Mémoire sur le goût de livres chez les orientaux as early as the 1830s. 6 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-sources- approach has remained an important feature of the field and has contributed some important works, among them Houari Touati’s L’Armoire à sagesse and Doris Behrens-Abouseif ’s The Book in Mamluk Egypt and Syria 7 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 5 For another recent literature review of the field see Liebrenz, Rifā ʿ īya aus Damaskus . Also relevant is Ansari/Schmidtke, Bibliographical Practices 6 Quatremère, Goût de livres 7 Touati, L’Armoire à sagesse ; Behrens-Abouseif, Book in Mamluk Egypt and Syria . Further exam- ples: Ghanem, Bibliotheksgeschichte von Damaskus ; Elayyan, History of the Arabic-Islamic Libraries ; Pourhadi, Muslim Libraries ; Sibai, Mosque Libraries 6 | a monument to medieval s y r i a n b o o k c u l t u r e in late antique Egypt. 8 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. 9 In the same vein, since the 1970s, scholarship has been aware of the hundreds of legal docu- ments from the Ó aram al-sharīf in Jerusalem, primarily from the fourteenth century, but they have only recently started to make a real impact on writing the region’s history. 10 Finally, the documentary corpora held in Christian contexts are increasingly emerging as crucial points of reference. 11 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 bibliothèques 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 Ê āhirīya building, he took the first steps to reconstruct the history of an Ayyubid/early Mamluk collection, the library housed in the Damascene ¤ iyā ʾ īya Madrasa/Dār al- Ó adīth. 12 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. 13 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. 8 Sijpesteijn, Shaping a Muslim State 9 Rustow, The Lost Archive 10 Müller, Der Kadi und seine Zeugen 11 The best example of this trend is still El-Leithy, Coptic Culture 12 Eche, Bibliothèques arabes publiques et semipubliques 13 On such notes cf. Görke/Hirschler, Manuscript Notes . A very good recent example of the impact manuscript notes have is the survey by Erünsal, Kitap ve Kütüphâne introduction | 7 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 Açıl in 2015 and Boris Liebrenz in 2016. 14 Açıl took one of the many historic collections held in the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul, that of Cârullah 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. Açıl 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. 15 This Rifā ʿ īya Library of some 500 volumes was a private library that narra- tive 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 Muminov, Sh. Ziyadov and Akram Khabibullaev on the family endowment library of Mu ª ammad Pārsā (d. 822/1420) from Bukhārā that survived up to the nineteenth century and has since been scattered across the world. 16 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 Süleymaniye 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 François Déroche and Nuria Martínez 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 14 Açıl, Osmanlı kitap kültürü ; Liebrenz, Rifā ʿ īya aus Damaskus 15 On Wetzstein see Liebrenz, Rifā ʿ īya aus Damaskus ; Huhn, Orientalist und preußischer Konsul ; Liebrenz/Rauch, Manuscripts, Politics and Oriental Studies 16 Khabibullaev, Scattered Manuscripts 8 | a monument to medieval s y r i a n b o o k c u l t u r e Mūlay Zaydān. 17 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. 18 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. 19 For the medieval period, the corpus-approach is particularly helpful to shed light on smaller collections, such as that of the scholar Í adr al-Dīn Qunavī (d. 673/1274) in Konya studied by Mikâil Bayram. 20 The third approach, in addition to the narrative/normative-sources- approach 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 corpus- approach 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. 21 In that sense the characteristic ele- ment 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 ʿ Abd al-La † īf Ibrāhīm, were published in parallel with the academic ‘discovery’ of Mamluk endowment records in the 1960s. 22 As we have relatively few other documen- tary sources, endowment records are still the most important resource for gaining insights into institutional collections. 23 For the Ottoman period the use of documents had been standard prac- tice, well before the documentary turn in the field of medieval history. In consequence, we see here a much wider range of documentary source genres 17 On early modern history see Hershenzon, Traveling Libraries 18 Bahl, Histories of Circulation. 19 Krimsti, Lives and Afterlives 20 Bayram, Library 21 Görke/Hirschler, Manuscript Notes 22 Ibrāhīm, Maktaba fī wathīqa 23 Al-Nashshār, Ta ʾ rīkh al-maktabāt ; Behrens-Abouseif, Waqf of a Cairene Notable introduction | 9 being used to write the history of libraries and book collections. These include, for instance, estate inventories; Nelly Hanna’s In 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. 24 For the pre-Ottoman period in the Syrian and Egyptian lands, by contrast, only three book-related estate inventories are known, those of the Ó aram al-sharīf collection in Jerusalem. 25 Ulrich Haarmann made the first attempt to discuss this material, yet it still awaits the full attention it deserves. 26 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 Erünsal. 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. 27 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 ‘ fihrist ’; there are fihrist s that are not catalogues and there are catalogues that are not called fihrist s. I 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 dif- ferent 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-Nadīm. 28 Obviously this is not a catalogue as we have no indication whatsoever that the books in this list were held in one 24 Hanna, Praise of Books . Other examples of this approach include Establet/Pascual, Livres des gens ; Sievert‚ Verlorene Schätze ; Vesely, Bibliothek eines ägyptischen Arztes 25 Jerusalem, al- Ó aram al-sharīf Collection nos 61, 180, 532. 26 Haarmann, Library of a Fourteenth Century Jerusalem Scholar 27 The latest synthesis of his work is Erünsal, Osmanlılarda kütüphaneler ve kütüphanecilik 28 Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Fihrist ; Stewart, Editing the Fihrist ; Ducène, l’Ordre des livres.