Monographs by Konrad Hirschler
This book discusses the only known private book collection from pre-Ottoman Jerusalem for which w... more This book discusses the only known private book collection from pre-Ottoman Jerusalem for which we have a trail of documents. It belonged to an otherwise unknown resident, Burhān al-Dīn; after his death, his books were sold in a public auction and the list of objects sold has survived.This list – edited and translated in this volume – shows that a humble part-time reciter of the late 14th century had almost 300 books in his house, evidence that book ownership extended beyond the elite. Based on a corpus of almost fifty documents from the Ḥaram al-sharīf collection in Jerusalem, it is also possible to get a rare insight into the social world of such an individual. Finally, the book gives a unique insight into book prices as it will make available the largest such set of data for the pre-Ottoman period.
في اكتشاف جديد لمخطوطة تسمية كتب يوسف بن حسن بن عبد الهادي، يُقدِّم سعيد الجوماني وكونراد هيرشلر ... more في اكتشاف جديد لمخطوطة تسمية كتب يوسف بن حسن بن عبد الهادي، يُقدِّم سعيد الجوماني وكونراد هيرشلر أضبط قائمة ببليوغرافية بمؤلفاته الشخصيَّة وبخط يده؛ فنبَّهت هذه القائمة إلى جزءٍ من إنتاجه الفكري كان مجهولاً تماماً، وصححت الكثير من أخطاء القراءة في القوائم السابقة. ونشرها سيدعم الأبحاث العاملة بحقل حركة التأليف بدمشق والحياة الفكريّة فيها نهاية القرن التاسع الهجريّ، خاصّةً ما يتعلق بالتراث الحنبليّ وعلم الحديث. وسيفتح الربط بين المؤلفات المذكورة في تسمية الكتب من جهة ووقف كتب ابن عبد الهادي من جهة ثانية والمخطوطات الموجودة في مكتبات العالم من جهة ثالثة باباً جديداً إلى دراسة التراث الفكري في مدينة دمشق أواخر العهد المملوكي. وتقترح هذه الدراسة إطاراً جديداً لدراسة التاريخ الاجتماعي اعتماداً على الوثائق الشخصيَّة والهيئات الماديّة للمخطوطات الشخصيّة.
أثرٌ باقٍ على ثقافة الكتاب الشامي من العصر المملوكي- مكتبة ابن عبد الهادي, 2020
Reassembles the books of a medieval Arabic library that are today dispersed around the world
... more Reassembles the books of a medieval Arabic library that are today dispersed around the world
. Sets out a new approach to the study of Arabic book culture
. Edits the most important Arabic medieval book list
. Provides a new angle on the history of ḥadīth in the late-medieval period
. Reconceptualises the mobility of endowed books
. Reproduces the entire catalogue in colour
In the late medieval period, manuscripts galore circulated in Middle Eastern libraries. Yet very few book collections have come down to us as such or have left a documentary trail. This book discusses the largest private book collection of the pre-Ottoman Arabic Middle East for which we have both a paper trail and a surviving corpus of the manuscripts that once sat on its shelves: the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī Library of Damascus. The book suggests that this library was part of the owner’s symbolic strategy to monumentalise a vanishing world of scholarship bound to his life, family, quarter and home city.
The written text was a pervasive feature of cultural practices in the medieval Middle East. At th... more The written text was a pervasive feature of cultural practices in the medieval Middle East. At the heart of book circulation stood libraries that experienced a rapid expansion from the twelfth century onwards. While the existence of these libraries is well known, our knowledge of their content and structure has been very limited as hardly any medieval Arabic catalogues have been preserved. This book discusses the largest and earliest medieval library of the Middle East for which we have documentation – the Ashrafiya library in the very centre of Damascus – and edits its catalogue. The catalogue shows that even book collections attached to Sunni religious institutions could hold very diverse titles, including Mutazilite theology, Shiite prayers, medical handbooks, manuals for traders, stories from the 1001 Nights, and texts extolling wine consumption. At the same time this library catalogue decisively expands our knowledge of how books were thematically and spatially organised on the shelves of such a large medieval library.
Listing over two thousand books the Ashrafiya catalogue is essential reading for anybody interested in the cultural and intellectual history of Arabic societies. Setting it into a comparative perspective with contemporaneous libraries on the British Isles opens new perspectives for the study of medieval libraries.
""The Middle East was one of the most literate civilizations during the high and late medieval pe... more ""The Middle East was one of the most literate civilizations during the high and late medieval period and home to bustling book markets, voluminous libraries and sophisticated book production. After the 'paper revolution' of the 9th and 10th centuries the number of books and the availability of the written word increased dramatically. In the scholarly world the written word played an increasingly prominent role and reading was taken up by wider sections of the population.
This book discusses the history of reading in the high and late medieval period in the Middle East in depth. It offers a detailed and wide-ranging analysis of the period, exploring the key themes of literacy/orality/aurality, the teaching of reading skills in schools, and the accessibility and profile of libraries, as well as popular reading practices, often associated with the notion of the illicit. This much-needed overview of the history of reading places the emphasis on the combination of cultural and social history and provides a depth of historical insight to the gradual development of reading practices over the centuries. On the basis of documentary sources and medieval illustrations the book shows in what ways new groups in the Arabic speaking lands, especially craftsmen and traders, started to read and to participate in the written culture between the 12th and the 15th centuries. With this book the late and high medieval periods of Middle Eastern history are finally brought into the burgeoning field of the history of reading."
Winner of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Book Award 2012"
Medieval Arabic Historiography is concerned with social contexts and narrative structures of pre-... more Medieval Arabic Historiography is concerned with social contexts and narrative structures of pre-modern Islamic historiography written in Arabic in seventh and thirteenth-century Syria and Eygpt. Taking up recent theoretical reflections on historical writing in the European Middle Ages, this extraordinary study combines approaches drawn from social sciences and literary studies, with a particular focus on two well-known texts: Abu Shama’s The Book of the Two Gardens, and Ibn Wasil’s The Dissipater of Anxieties. These texts describe events during the life of the sultans Nur-al-Din and Salah al-Din, who are primarily known in modern times as the champions of the anti-Crusade movement. Hirschler shows that these two authors were active interpreters of their society and has considerable room for manoeuvre in both their social environment and the shaping of their texts.
Through the use of a fresh and original theoretical approach to pre-modern Arabic historiography, Hirschler presents a new understanding of these texts which have before been relatively neglected, thus providing a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of historiographical studies.
Reviews:
(11) Journal of the American Oriental Society 130/4 (2010), Reuven Amitai; (10) MESA Review of Middle East Studies 44/1 (2010), Eric Hanne; (9) British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 37/2 (2010), Bruno De Nicola; (8) Orientalische Literaturzeitung 105/1 (2010), Axel Havemann; (7) Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 160/1 (2010), Albrecht Fuess; (6) The American Historical Review 114/3 (2009), Tarif Khalidi; (5) Bulletin of SOAS 72/2 (2009), Yehoshua Frenkel; (4) Al-Masaq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean 20/2 (2008), Amira K. Bennison; (3) Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 82/3 (2007), Fred M. Donner; (2) The Muslim World Book Review 28/1 (2007), Fozia Bora; (1) Sehepunkte 7 (2007), Kurt Franz.
Monographs (translations) by Konrad Hirschler
La produzione libraria delle società islamiche medievali è così imponente da non poter essere par... more La produzione libraria delle società islamiche medievali è così imponente da non poter essere paragonata a quella di nessun’altra civiltà coeva. Eppure le modalità e i tempi con cui il mondo musulmano iniziò a servirsi della parola scritta non hanno ricevuto la dovuta attenzione da parte degli studiosi.
Grazie a un’ampia varietà di fonti, il volume evidenzia come tra xi e xv secolo in Siria e in Egitto l’uso dei libri ebbe un significativo incremento, al quale fece seguito un processo di popolarizzazione che portò sempre più ampi strati della società a leggere individualmente o ad assistere a letture di gruppo. Un nuovo uditorio per le sedute di lettura, nuovi programmi scolastici nelle scuole, un crescente numero di biblioteche sovvenzionate e l’apparire di una produzione letteraria popolare in forma scritta sono tutti segni di una profonda trasformazione delle pratiche culturali e dei contesti sociali nei quali esse si esplicavano.
تاریخ نگاری عربی در دوره میانه پژوهشی است که به زمینه های اجتماعی و ساختارهای روایی متون تاریخ نگ... more تاریخ نگاری عربی در دوره میانه پژوهشی است که به زمینه های اجتماعی و ساختارهای روایی متون تاریخ نگاری اسلامی پیشامدرن می پردازد که به زبان عربی نوشته شده اند و با بهره گیری از تأملات نظری جدید درباره نوشته های تاریخی در قرون وسطای اروپا، رویکردهای برگرفته از علوم اجتماعی و مطالعات ادبی را برای پژوهش روی دو اثر معروف وقایع نگاری دوره ایوبیان به هم می آمیزد. نتیجه آنکه مؤلفان این آثار، مفسران فعال جامعه هایشان بوده اند و هم در محیط اجتماعی شان و هم در شکل دادن به متن هایشان نقش مهمی داشته اند. این کتاب، با بهره بردن از یک رهیافت نظری نو به تاریخ نگاری عربی پیشامدرن، خوانشی اصیل از این متون عرضه می کند و می تواند نقش چشمگیری در حوزه رو به رشد مطالعات تاریخ نگاری ایفا کند.
Edited volumes & Catalogues by Konrad Hirschler
This book was made possible with the help, support and advice of many colleagues. Chief among the... more This book was made possible with the help, support and advice of many colleagues. Chief among them are our Jerusalemite colleagues Bashir Barakat, Arafat Amro (Islamic Museum, Jerusalem) and Yusuf al-Uzbaki (al-Aqṣā Library). Christian Müller (Paris) helped by offering his intimate knowledge of the documents and Linda Northrup (Toronto) generously shared her knowledge of the documents' discovery in the 1970s. Mohammad Ghosheh (Jerusalem/Amman) has supported this project (and many other related ones) in numerous ways. Suzanne Ruggi converted our various English vernaculars into a more legible shape. Jost Gippert and his team on the European Research Council project The Development of Literacy in the Caucasian Territories project at CSMC (Universität Hamburg), and David Maisuradze (Tbilisi University) provided invaluable help in reading the Armenian and Georgian texts in the documents. Nimet İpek (Sabancı University) generously agreed to take on the documents in Ottoman Turkish. Ken'ichi Isogai (Kyoto University), Ryoko Watabe (Tokyo University) and Takao Ito (Kobe University), helped to improve considerably the readings of the Persian and Persianate documents, while the intervention of Yoichi Yojima (Nara Women's University) was crucial for deciphering their Mongolian and Turkic witness clauses.
This volume aims at placing the large set of multilingual documents and codices from the Damascen... more This volume aims at placing the large set of multilingual documents and codices from the Damascene “Qubbat al-khazna” on the map of Middle Eastern history as a corpus. So far, these texts have played a very minor role in Middle Eastern history and if they have been noticed at all this was generally done within specific subfields such as biblical studies, Armenian studies, or Jewish studies, and there has hardly ever been a vision of these artefacts as one corpus with a shared history. Until the early twentieth century, this corpus was housed in a dome in the courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. This Qubbat al-khazna and its contents became known to scholarship from the late nineteenth century, having been “discovered” at around the same time as its famous sibling, the Geniza of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. Both the Qubba and the Geniza served as depositories of worn-out books and disused documents, but there is one major difference that sets these two depositories apart, and this is also the main rationale for this volume: while the scholarly discovery of the Geniza has gradually generated a fully fledged field of research over the course of the last century, the Qubba has so far remained marginal in the field of Middle Eastern history.
The seventeen articles in this volume deal with the history of the Qubbat al-khazna (including its pre-19th century history, the role of European consuls and the agency of Ottoman stakeholders) as well as with specific sub-corpora (including Jewish texts, block-printed amulets, Christian Arabic texts as well as texts in Syriac, Greek, Latin, Old French and Armenian). These sub-corpora contain material spanning from the Late Antique period to the Middle Period and give a unique insight into the diverse linguistic, religious and scriptural traditions of its surrounding society.
Arabic manuscripts abound in notes: readers scribbled notes recording their reading of the text, ... more Arabic manuscripts abound in notes: readers scribbled notes recording their reading of the text, teachers issued certificates and licences of transmission, owners stated their legal ownership of the manuscript, users praised (or dispraised) the text, copyists added their verses and endowers set down their conditions. This copious material represents a unique resource for widening our understanding of Middle Eastern societies and for studying a variety of fields, such as social history, history of ideas, economic history, urban history, historical topography and biographical studies. This is the first volume that is specifically dedicated to discussing the potential of this source material. The eleven contributors, among them some of the leading researchers in this field, discuss case studies that date from the classical period to the 20th century and that originate in the different regions of the Middle East from Anatolia to Yemen and from North Africa to Iraq. The contributions collected in this volume show that the study of manuscript notes has set off to new horizons and that it will enhance our knowledge about societies in the region.
This publication has been typeset in the multilingual "Brill" typeface. With over 5,100 character... more This publication has been typeset in the multilingual "Brill" typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface.
Die gegenwärtige Renaissance des Heiligen, ja des Religiösen und religiöser Gefühle wirft die Fra... more Die gegenwärtige Renaissance des Heiligen, ja des Religiösen und religiöser Gefühle wirft die Frage danach auf, ob das Dogma vom unaufhaltsamen Prozess der Säkularisierung endgültig der Vergangenheit angehört. Gleichwohl erscheint das Heilige als flüchtig und schwer eingrenzbar, außerdem als ambivalent und es ist in der gegenwärtigen westlichen Hemisphäre eng mit esoterischen Praktiken verbunden. Eine Neubestimmung des Heiligen verlangt nach neuen Positionierungen, die nicht ohne Bezüge auf außereuropäische Regionen vorgenommen werden können. Vor diesem Hintergrund vereinigt der Band zehn Einzelstudien, die teils aus ethnographischen Datenerhebungen stammen, teils Produkte historisch-philologischer Analysen sind. Sie befassen sich mit Konzepten des Heiligen Ortes und der an ihnen vollzogenen Praktiken in Ostafrika, im Nahen Osten, in Südasien sowie in China.
Reviews: Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 100 (2010), Procházka-Eisl; Sehepunkte 9/3 (2009), Stephan Conermann; Bibliotheca Orientalis 65/1 (2008); Bulletin of SOAS 71/1 (2008), Gebhard Fartacek; Internationales Asienforum/International Quarterly for Asian Studies 38 (2007), Florian Feuser; Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 7/1 (2007), Anne Koch.
WEB RESOURCES (DIGITAL HUMANITIES) by Konrad Hirschler
Audition certificates are a salient feature of Arabic manuscript cultures. They are brimming with... more Audition certificates are a salient feature of Arabic manuscript cultures. They are brimming with data and can include: the name of the teacher(s), the name of the student(s) (including highlighting those coming late or leaving early), the name of the reader, the name of the writer of the certificate, the name of the book’s owner, the date of the reading, the place of the reading and many other surprises (such as a writer recording the birth of his son during the reading session in the room next door). These certificates contain a wealth of historical data, in particular on persons we do not find in many other sources such as women and dependants.
They are thus a source of outstanding importance for fields such as social history, history of ideas, economic history, urban history, historical topography, and biographical studies. It goes without saying that, especially in a comparative perspective with other world regions, such as Latin Europe, this copious material represents a considerable resource for widening the understanding of Islamicate societies.
So far, this unparalleled source has only been used on the basis of individual manuscripts or small corpora. ACP is the first major project aimed at unlocking the potential of this unique source corpus. It is based on the holdings of selected libraries (Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, The Bibliothèque nationale de France, Syrian National Library) and will be continiously enlarged.
Articles by Konrad Hirschler
Der Islam, 2023
This article discusses the fragment of an Arabic-script book list with a Cairo Geniza provenance ... more This article discusses the fragment of an Arabic-script book list with a Cairo Geniza provenance that includes 33 identifiable titles. On the basis of the list's provenance, its organization, and its content, we argue that it was part of a larger Cairene library catalogue dating to the seventh/thirteenth century. All titles in this catalogue refer to Arabic poetry ranging from pre-Islamic jāhilīʾ poets to poets living in the first half of the seventh/thirteenth century. A comparison with the poetry section of the Damascene Ashrafīya Library from the same period shows a distinct overlap in terms of titles and textual format. We thus suggest that this Cairene catalogue should not primarily be seen as witness of a "Jewish" library but rather as part of Egyptian/Syrian Arabic elite book culture that cut across religious communities. While it is likely that this shared book culture went beyond Egypt and Syria and encompassed wider regions in North Africa and West Asia, further comparative material is needed to substantiate this assumption.
علماء مكرمون نزار أباظة بحوث ومقالات مهداة إليه, 2023
يستكمل هذا البحث تأريخ مكتبة المدرسة الضيائية بدمشق الذي بدأه كل من يوسف العش ، ومحمد مطيع الحافظ... more يستكمل هذا البحث تأريخ مكتبة المدرسة الضيائية بدمشق الذي بدأه كل من يوسف العش ، ومحمد مطيع الحافظ ، وذلك بالاعتماد على خوارج النصوص التي أتت على ما تبقى من مخطوطاتها؛ فكشف عن إسهامات ستة واقفين جُدد، كما ناقش شروط الواقفين المختلفة وتأثيرها على عمل خَزَنَة المكتبة الذين عُرف منهم تسعة خَزَنَة، واتضح أن مكتبة المدرسة الضيائية كانت مقراً تُعقد فيه حلقات العلم، وفيما يخص مصيرها فقد رسمه عاملان، أحدهما خارجي والآخر داخلي، ثم سعى للإجابة عن السؤال الذي تركه يوسف العش مفتوحاً: متى انتقلت مجموعات مكتبة المدرسة الضيائية إلى مكتبة المدرسة العمرية؟
Beyond Authenticity. Alternative Approaches to Ḥadīth Narrations and Collections, 2023
This article argues that examining the manuscripts and their materiality is an important element ... more This article argues that examining the manuscripts and their materiality is an important element for understanding the history of ḥadīth scholarship. Whether it is their format (the difference between the role of a stand-alone booklet and a composite manuscript is striking), their size (smallness matters), added bi-folia (a sign of a an actively used text) or repairs to tears or parchment wrappers – they are all crucial indications as to the various stages of the life cycle of a manuscript. Each of these hundreds of booklets do tell rich stories of how they were used and what they were meant to do in these various stages. Looking at the materiality of these booklets is not an exercise in assembling codicological factoids, but it is a crucial element in understanding the cultural and social contexts in which they were circulating.
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Monographs by Konrad Hirschler
. Sets out a new approach to the study of Arabic book culture
. Edits the most important Arabic medieval book list
. Provides a new angle on the history of ḥadīth in the late-medieval period
. Reconceptualises the mobility of endowed books
. Reproduces the entire catalogue in colour
In the late medieval period, manuscripts galore circulated in Middle Eastern libraries. Yet very few book collections have come down to us as such or have left a documentary trail. This book discusses the largest private book collection of the pre-Ottoman Arabic Middle East for which we have both a paper trail and a surviving corpus of the manuscripts that once sat on its shelves: the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī Library of Damascus. The book suggests that this library was part of the owner’s symbolic strategy to monumentalise a vanishing world of scholarship bound to his life, family, quarter and home city.
Listing over two thousand books the Ashrafiya catalogue is essential reading for anybody interested in the cultural and intellectual history of Arabic societies. Setting it into a comparative perspective with contemporaneous libraries on the British Isles opens new perspectives for the study of medieval libraries.
This book discusses the history of reading in the high and late medieval period in the Middle East in depth. It offers a detailed and wide-ranging analysis of the period, exploring the key themes of literacy/orality/aurality, the teaching of reading skills in schools, and the accessibility and profile of libraries, as well as popular reading practices, often associated with the notion of the illicit. This much-needed overview of the history of reading places the emphasis on the combination of cultural and social history and provides a depth of historical insight to the gradual development of reading practices over the centuries. On the basis of documentary sources and medieval illustrations the book shows in what ways new groups in the Arabic speaking lands, especially craftsmen and traders, started to read and to participate in the written culture between the 12th and the 15th centuries. With this book the late and high medieval periods of Middle Eastern history are finally brought into the burgeoning field of the history of reading."
Winner of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Book Award 2012"
Through the use of a fresh and original theoretical approach to pre-modern Arabic historiography, Hirschler presents a new understanding of these texts which have before been relatively neglected, thus providing a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of historiographical studies.
Reviews:
(11) Journal of the American Oriental Society 130/4 (2010), Reuven Amitai; (10) MESA Review of Middle East Studies 44/1 (2010), Eric Hanne; (9) British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 37/2 (2010), Bruno De Nicola; (8) Orientalische Literaturzeitung 105/1 (2010), Axel Havemann; (7) Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 160/1 (2010), Albrecht Fuess; (6) The American Historical Review 114/3 (2009), Tarif Khalidi; (5) Bulletin of SOAS 72/2 (2009), Yehoshua Frenkel; (4) Al-Masaq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean 20/2 (2008), Amira K. Bennison; (3) Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 82/3 (2007), Fred M. Donner; (2) The Muslim World Book Review 28/1 (2007), Fozia Bora; (1) Sehepunkte 7 (2007), Kurt Franz.
Monographs (translations) by Konrad Hirschler
Grazie a un’ampia varietà di fonti, il volume evidenzia come tra xi e xv secolo in Siria e in Egitto l’uso dei libri ebbe un significativo incremento, al quale fece seguito un processo di popolarizzazione che portò sempre più ampi strati della società a leggere individualmente o ad assistere a letture di gruppo. Un nuovo uditorio per le sedute di lettura, nuovi programmi scolastici nelle scuole, un crescente numero di biblioteche sovvenzionate e l’apparire di una produzione letteraria popolare in forma scritta sono tutti segni di una profonda trasformazione delle pratiche culturali e dei contesti sociali nei quali esse si esplicavano.
Edited volumes & Catalogues by Konrad Hirschler
The seventeen articles in this volume deal with the history of the Qubbat al-khazna (including its pre-19th century history, the role of European consuls and the agency of Ottoman stakeholders) as well as with specific sub-corpora (including Jewish texts, block-printed amulets, Christian Arabic texts as well as texts in Syriac, Greek, Latin, Old French and Armenian). These sub-corpora contain material spanning from the Late Antique period to the Middle Period and give a unique insight into the diverse linguistic, religious and scriptural traditions of its surrounding society.
Reviews: Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 100 (2010), Procházka-Eisl; Sehepunkte 9/3 (2009), Stephan Conermann; Bibliotheca Orientalis 65/1 (2008); Bulletin of SOAS 71/1 (2008), Gebhard Fartacek; Internationales Asienforum/International Quarterly for Asian Studies 38 (2007), Florian Feuser; Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 7/1 (2007), Anne Koch.
WEB RESOURCES (DIGITAL HUMANITIES) by Konrad Hirschler
They are thus a source of outstanding importance for fields such as social history, history of ideas, economic history, urban history, historical topography, and biographical studies. It goes without saying that, especially in a comparative perspective with other world regions, such as Latin Europe, this copious material represents a considerable resource for widening the understanding of Islamicate societies.
So far, this unparalleled source has only been used on the basis of individual manuscripts or small corpora. ACP is the first major project aimed at unlocking the potential of this unique source corpus. It is based on the holdings of selected libraries (Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, The Bibliothèque nationale de France, Syrian National Library) and will be continiously enlarged.
Articles by Konrad Hirschler
. Sets out a new approach to the study of Arabic book culture
. Edits the most important Arabic medieval book list
. Provides a new angle on the history of ḥadīth in the late-medieval period
. Reconceptualises the mobility of endowed books
. Reproduces the entire catalogue in colour
In the late medieval period, manuscripts galore circulated in Middle Eastern libraries. Yet very few book collections have come down to us as such or have left a documentary trail. This book discusses the largest private book collection of the pre-Ottoman Arabic Middle East for which we have both a paper trail and a surviving corpus of the manuscripts that once sat on its shelves: the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī Library of Damascus. The book suggests that this library was part of the owner’s symbolic strategy to monumentalise a vanishing world of scholarship bound to his life, family, quarter and home city.
Listing over two thousand books the Ashrafiya catalogue is essential reading for anybody interested in the cultural and intellectual history of Arabic societies. Setting it into a comparative perspective with contemporaneous libraries on the British Isles opens new perspectives for the study of medieval libraries.
This book discusses the history of reading in the high and late medieval period in the Middle East in depth. It offers a detailed and wide-ranging analysis of the period, exploring the key themes of literacy/orality/aurality, the teaching of reading skills in schools, and the accessibility and profile of libraries, as well as popular reading practices, often associated with the notion of the illicit. This much-needed overview of the history of reading places the emphasis on the combination of cultural and social history and provides a depth of historical insight to the gradual development of reading practices over the centuries. On the basis of documentary sources and medieval illustrations the book shows in what ways new groups in the Arabic speaking lands, especially craftsmen and traders, started to read and to participate in the written culture between the 12th and the 15th centuries. With this book the late and high medieval periods of Middle Eastern history are finally brought into the burgeoning field of the history of reading."
Winner of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Book Award 2012"
Through the use of a fresh and original theoretical approach to pre-modern Arabic historiography, Hirschler presents a new understanding of these texts which have before been relatively neglected, thus providing a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of historiographical studies.
Reviews:
(11) Journal of the American Oriental Society 130/4 (2010), Reuven Amitai; (10) MESA Review of Middle East Studies 44/1 (2010), Eric Hanne; (9) British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 37/2 (2010), Bruno De Nicola; (8) Orientalische Literaturzeitung 105/1 (2010), Axel Havemann; (7) Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 160/1 (2010), Albrecht Fuess; (6) The American Historical Review 114/3 (2009), Tarif Khalidi; (5) Bulletin of SOAS 72/2 (2009), Yehoshua Frenkel; (4) Al-Masaq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean 20/2 (2008), Amira K. Bennison; (3) Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 82/3 (2007), Fred M. Donner; (2) The Muslim World Book Review 28/1 (2007), Fozia Bora; (1) Sehepunkte 7 (2007), Kurt Franz.
Grazie a un’ampia varietà di fonti, il volume evidenzia come tra xi e xv secolo in Siria e in Egitto l’uso dei libri ebbe un significativo incremento, al quale fece seguito un processo di popolarizzazione che portò sempre più ampi strati della società a leggere individualmente o ad assistere a letture di gruppo. Un nuovo uditorio per le sedute di lettura, nuovi programmi scolastici nelle scuole, un crescente numero di biblioteche sovvenzionate e l’apparire di una produzione letteraria popolare in forma scritta sono tutti segni di una profonda trasformazione delle pratiche culturali e dei contesti sociali nei quali esse si esplicavano.
The seventeen articles in this volume deal with the history of the Qubbat al-khazna (including its pre-19th century history, the role of European consuls and the agency of Ottoman stakeholders) as well as with specific sub-corpora (including Jewish texts, block-printed amulets, Christian Arabic texts as well as texts in Syriac, Greek, Latin, Old French and Armenian). These sub-corpora contain material spanning from the Late Antique period to the Middle Period and give a unique insight into the diverse linguistic, religious and scriptural traditions of its surrounding society.
Reviews: Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 100 (2010), Procházka-Eisl; Sehepunkte 9/3 (2009), Stephan Conermann; Bibliotheca Orientalis 65/1 (2008); Bulletin of SOAS 71/1 (2008), Gebhard Fartacek; Internationales Asienforum/International Quarterly for Asian Studies 38 (2007), Florian Feuser; Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 7/1 (2007), Anne Koch.
They are thus a source of outstanding importance for fields such as social history, history of ideas, economic history, urban history, historical topography, and biographical studies. It goes without saying that, especially in a comparative perspective with other world regions, such as Latin Europe, this copious material represents a considerable resource for widening the understanding of Islamicate societies.
So far, this unparalleled source has only been used on the basis of individual manuscripts or small corpora. ACP is the first major project aimed at unlocking the potential of this unique source corpus. It is based on the holdings of selected libraries (Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, The Bibliothèque nationale de France, Syrian National Library) and will be continiously enlarged.
transmission of scientific knowledge starting with the support material, moving on to the textual format and and finally discussing layout and writing implements.
Against this background, the aim of this contribution is simple, namely to propose one way of writing non-European actors into the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century story of the Qubba. This is not done to suggest that these non-European actors were clearly separated from or even opposed to European actors. Quite to the contrary, our intention is rather to show that their stories are deeply interwoven with those of the English consuls, the Prussian consuls, the German scholars, and the German administrators. We need to reconstruct precisely these webs of entanglement to move away from the simplistic and reductive notions of “European” and “non-European” actors that we use here merely as heuristic devices to frame this paper. Manuscript dealers, scholars, notables, and officials in Damascus, as well as administrators, scholars, and politicians in Istanbul, all had their own agency and agendas in the events surrounding the Qubba’s modern transformation into a historical building with cultural artefacts. They also all had different notions of what the Qubba meant and what was to be done with its contents. The interest in the Qubba material was not just a reaction to European actors playing a more prominent role; we propose that the non-European actors display a set of attitudes that indicate a notion of Ottoman cultural heritage preservation. This attitude was certainly not limited to the Qubba, but was part of a wider trend in the Ottoman period, as the example of the late Ottoman Museum of Islamic Endowments shows. Our aim here is thus not to write a heroic account of local and regional actors, but to write them back into history to retrieve the webs of entanglement that a purely Eurocentric narrative obliterates.
Four themes can be detected in earthquake treatises: cosmology (in order to reject pneumatic earthquake theories of Antiquity), historical reports, significance of earthquakes and rules for appropriate behavior. The authors developed especially in the latter two sections a normative framework that placed the occurrence of earthquakes within the discourse of continuity. In a final section, the article discusses how this normative framework found its expression in chronicles by analyzing in detail the reports on one specific earthquake, the 702/1303-eartquake in the Eastern Mediterranean. These reports developed over time into coherent narratives and increasingly sidelined the disruptive elements of these catastrophes.
الموضوع لإنها فتحت لنا نافذةً جديدة على الجانب الاقتصاديّ في دمشق خلال
القرن السابع الهجريّ/ الثالث عشر الميالديّ، وصوَّرت لنا مجريات الحياة العمليّة
اليوميَّة داخل إحدى الأسواق الدمشقيَّة، إضافةً إلى إبرازها شطراً من لغة التجَّار، كما
أنها أول وثيقة تُنشر من هذا النّوع قبل الحقبة العثمانيّة، ثانياً: من ناحية الممارسات
الإرشيفية والكتابية، فقد منحتنا هذه الوثيقة فرصة استثنائيّة في التعرف على كيفيّة
إنتاج الأعمال الورقيّة ودورة حياتها، والتفكير في الممارسات الكتابيّة والإرشيفيّة في
سياقات غير إداريّة وغير رسميّة، ثالثاً: من ناحية المصدر لإنها وثيقة من قبة الخزنة
في الجامع الأمويّ بدمشق.
published in: Majallat Maʿhad al-makhṭūṭāt al-ʿarabīya 62 (2018), pp. 164-183.
الثالث عشر الميلادي، الكيفية التي واجه فيها المعاصرون آنذاك، التحدي المتمثّل بتحديد ما هو المقصود بالكتاب. ويقودنا التركيز على القسم المتعلّق بالمخطوطات المركبّة (أيْ: المجاميع) إلى مسألة أن صاحب هذا الفهرس التوثيقي قد استخدم تعريفين للكتاب لا يمكن التوفيق بينهما البتّة: الكتاب بوصفه وحدة نصيّة قائمة بذاتها (متّخذاً من العنوان معياراً رئيساً)، والكتاب وفقاً لشكله المادي. وتوضّح عمليات الفهرسة التي التجأ إليها هذا الكاتب، الطبيعة الفضفاضة لما كان يعرف بالـ(كتاب) في المرحلة الزمنية الوسيطة، التي تنحصر بين حقبة التكوين الإسلامي (القرون: من الأوّل إلى الرابع للهجرة/ السابع إلى العاشر للميلاد) والعصور الحديثة.
We are looking for highly qualified and very motivated international candidates (non-German citizens) with excellent English skills and holding a Master's, Diploma or equivalent degree in any discipline concerned with the study of manuscript cultures and written artefacts. In particular, we welcome applications from candidates from developing and emerging countries.
CSMC has created a cross-disciplinary and international research environment for the holistic study of handwritten artefacts and the rich diversity of global manuscript cultures beyond traditionally held boundaries of academic discipline, time, and space. Today, around 150 researchers from over 40 academic disciplines are working on more than 60 research projects, many of which combine the humanities with the natural sciences and computer sciences.
Hamburg that combines humanities and sciences. The study programme covers a broad spectrum of manuscript cultures, especially in Asia, Africa and Europe. Scholarships are available.
For more information see
https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/study-at-csmc/master.html
For questions, register for our online Q&A Session Thu, 23.02.2023:
https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/en/register-q-a-session1
Hamburg that combines humanities and sciences. The study programme covers a broad spectrum of manuscript cultures, especially in Asia, Africa and Europe. Scholarships are available.
For more information see
https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/study-at-csmc/master.html
For questions, register until 1 June:
https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/calendar-page.html?event=77585
The Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies investigates the plurality, changeability, and global connectedness of Muslim cultures and societies. The area of study includes Muslim societies in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, as well as Muslim communities in Europe and North America. Our researchers examine, in a systematic and comparative way, concepts, practices, and institutions variously understood as Islamic.
The successful applicant will be employed on a full position for two years. The salary (Entgeltgruppe 13, starting at ca. 50.000,-EUR/year) includes public health insurance and social benefits. Berlin is an attractive location for families, as childcare and schooling is free of charge. Successful applicants are required to take residence in Berlin throughout their employment at Freie Universität Berlin.
The call is open for recent postdocs (thesis must have been submitted; not more than four years after award of the doctoral degree) in the humanities and the social sciences.
• Research projects situated in one of the disciplines of the Graduate School: Arabic Studies; Asian and African Studies; Central Asian Studies; History; History of Islamic Art; Human Geography; Islamic Studies; Political Science; Semitic Studies; Social and Cultural Anthropology; South and Southeast Asian Studies; South East European History.
• excellent command of English in both writing and speaking
• very good knowledge of one of the regional contexts of the Graduate School
• command of a further language relevant to the project
• proven experience with empirical research and research methods
• proven track record of publications Applications can only be submitted through the application platform: https://www.drs.fu-berlin.de/user/register? field_i_want_to=12
في الخامس من أكتوبر2020 بعنوان
مكتبات الشام ومصر في العصرَيْنِ المملوكيِّ والعثماني من خلال خوارج المخطوطاتِ والوثائق ِ
تُبَثُّ فعاليات اليوم مباشرة على قناة معهد المخطوطات على اليوتيوب، ورابطها
https://www.youtube.com/user/IARMSS/live
كما تبثُّ مباشرة على صفحة التواصل الاجتماعي (فيس بوك) الخاصة بالمعهد، ورابطها:
https://www.facebook.com/IARMSS
The al-Jazzar Library was founded by the Ottoman governor of the province of Sidon, Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar (d. 1804). While al-Jazzar is famous for his defeat of the Napoleonic troops and his massive building projects to change the urban topography of Acre, his library has so far remained on the margins of scholarly interest. Yet, this book collection was part of the most visible and enduring aspect of his long rule, a splendid mosque and madrasa complex in the economic and administrative center of his power. Even though this was a library on the cultural periphery of the Ottoman Empire, the holdings of this library included over 1,800 manuscripts, among them “ancient” masterpieces such as the most important copy of Ibn al-Nadim’s (d. 995) bibliographic work, The Catalogue (al-Fihrist).
Manuscripts bearing the stamp of al-Jazzār’s library have been known for a long time to sit in libraries around the world including Chester Beatty, Princeton and Berlin. Yet, the recent discovery of the 1801 library inventory in the Directorate General of Foundations in Ankara has finally provided the decisive clue to study one of the most important cultural projects of its period in the Ottoman provinces. Situated at critical junctures of the political and intellectual history of the region, the library represents continuities and changes in the wider world of books and knowledge economies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Closing MMS-II conference
https://www.mms.ugent.be/keynote-lecture-محاضرة-المتحدث-الرئيسي/
This volume aims at placing the large set of multilingual documents and manuscripts from the Damascene “Qubbat al-khazna” on the map of Middle Eastern history as a corpus. So far, these texts have played a very minor role in Middle Eastern history and if they have been noticed at all this was generally done within specific subfields such as biblical studies, Armenian studies, or Jewish studies, and there has hardly ever been a vision of these artefacts as one corpus with a shared history. Until the early twentieth century, this corpus was housed in a dome in the courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. This Qubbat al-khazna and its contents became known to scholarship from the late nineteenth century, having been “discovered” at around the same time as its famous sibling, the Geniza of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. Both the Qubba and the Geniza served as depositories of worn-out books and disused documents, but there is one major difference that sets these two depositories apart, and this is also the main rationale for this volume: while the scholarly discovery of the Geniza has gradually generated a fully fledged field of research over the course of the last century, the Qubba has so far remained marginal in the field of Middle Eastern history.
The seventeen articles in this volume deal with the history of the Qubbat al-khazna (including its pre-19th century history, the role of European consuls and the agency of Ottoman stakeholders) as well as with specific sub-corpora (including Jewish texts, block-printed amulets, Christian Arabic texts as well as texts in Syriac, Greek, Latin, Old French and Armenian). These sub-corpora contain material spanning from the Late Antique period to the Middle Period and give a unique insight into the diverse linguistic, religious and scriptural traditions of its surrounding society.
المحاضرة المباشرة الحاديةَ عشرةَ
الخميس (23 من ذي الحجة 1441هـ / 13 من أغسطي 2020م)، في تمام السابعة مساءً بتوقيت القاهرة وبرلين.
https://www.uni-erfurt.de/en/gotha-research-library/library/current-events/cultural-events/gotha-manuscript-talks/current-events-of-the-gotha-manuscript-talks