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Owning Books and Preserving Documents in Medieval
Jerusalem
Edinburgh Studies in Classical Islamic History and Culture
Series Editor: Carole Hillenbrand
A particular feature of medieval Islamic civilization 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 inter-related 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:
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The Body in Arabic Love Poetry: The ‘Udhri
Making Mongol History: Rashid al-Din and the
Tradition
Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh
Jokha Alharthi
Stefan Kamola
Arabian Drugs in Early Medieval Mediterranean
Lyrics of Life: Sa‘di on Love, Cosmopolitanism and
Medicine
Care of the Self
Zohar Amar and Efraim Lev
Fatemeh Keshavarz
Towards a History of Libraries in Yemen
Art, Allegory and The Rise of Shiism In Iran,
Hassan Ansari and Sabine Schmidtke
1487–1565
Chad Kia
The Abbasid Caliphate of Cairo, 1261–1517:
Out of the Shadows
The Administration of Justice in Medieval Egypt:
Mustafa Banister
From the 7th to the 12th Century
Yaacov Lev
The Medieval Western Maghrib: Cities, Patronage
and Power
Zoroastrians in Early Islamic History:
Amira K. Bennison
Accommodation and Memory
Andrew D. Magnusson
Christian Monastic Life in Early Islam
Bradley Bowman
A History of Herat: From Chingiz Khan to
Tamerlane
Keeping the Peace in Premodern Islam: Diplomacy
Shivan Mahendrarajah
under the Mamluk Sultanate, 1250–1517
Malika Dekkiche
The Queen of Sheba’s Gift: A History of the True
Balsam of Matarea
Queens, Concubines and Eunuchs in Medieval Islam
Marcus Milwright
Taef El-Azhari
Ruling from a Red Canopy: Political Authority
Islamic Political Thought in the Mamluk Period
in the Medieval Islamic World, From Anatolia
Mohamad El Merheb
to South Asia
The Kharijites in Early Islamic Historical
Colin P. Mitchell
Tradition: Heroes and Villains
Islam, Christianity and the Realms of the
Hannah-Lena Hagemann
Miraculous: A Comparative Exploration
Classical Islam: Collected Essays
Ian Richard Netton
Carole Hillenbrand
The Poetics of Spiritual Instruction: Farid al-Din
Islam and the Crusades: Collected Essays
‘Attar and Persian Sufi Didacticism
Carole Hillenbrand
Austin O’Malley
The Medieval Turks: Collected Essays
Sacred
Place
and
Sacred Time in the Medieval
Carole Hillenbrand
Islamic Middle East: An Historical Perspective
Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an
Daniella Talmon-Heller
Arabic Library – The Ashrafīya Library Catalogue Conquered Populations in Early Islam: Non-Arabs,
Konrad Hirschler
Slaves and the Sons of Slave Mothers
A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture:
Elizabeth Urban
The Library of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī
Owning
Books
and Preserving Documents in
Konrad Hirschler
Medieval Jerusalem: The Library of Burhan al-Din
The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and
Said Aljoumani and Konrad Hirschler
Mamluk Egypt: State and Society, 1173–1325
Medieval Syria and the Onset of the Crusades: The
Nathan Hofer
Political World of Bilad al-Sham, 1050–1128
Defining Anthropomorphism: The Challenge of
James Wilson
Islamic Traditionalism
Livnat Holtzman
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Owning Books and Preserving
Documents in Medieval Jerusalem
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The Library of Burhan al-Din
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Said Aljoumani and 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
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© Said Aljoumani and Konrad Hirschler, 2023 under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommerical licence
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Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun – Holyrood Road
12 (2f ) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
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Cover image: Petition by Burhan al-Din, Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum,
#007a, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
Cover design: www.paulsmithdesign.com
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Typeset in 11/15 Adobe Garamond by
Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire,
and printed and bound in Great Britain
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 9206 5 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 9208 9 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 9209 6 (epub)
The right of Said Aljoumani and Konrad Hirschler to be identified as authors 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
Acknowledgements
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Argument and Historiographical Setting: Books, Documents and
Social Practice
Making a Living in Endowments
2
Beyond Endowment
3
Archival Practices and Pragmatic Literacy
4
Lists and Inventories: The Sale Booklet’s Documentary Logic
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5
The Making and Unmaking of a Prestige Library
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6
Book Prices
165
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Part I The Narrative
Looking Beyond Jerusalem: The Dynamics of the Written Word and
its Materiality
23
49
78
203
Part II The Documents
7
Analysis and Edition of the Sale Booklet
213
8
Analysis and Edition of the Documentary Network around the
Sale Booklet
287
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354
Bibliography
General Index
Index of Authors in Burhān al-Dīn’s Library
Index of Book Titles in Burhān al-Dīn’s Library
Index of Buyers in the Auction of Burhān al-Dīn’s Estate
Index of Subjects in Burhān al-Dīn’s Library
Index of Objects Other than Books in Burhān al-Dīn’s Estate
Index of Ḥaram al-sharīf Documents
362
382
394
396
400
403
404
406
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Appendix 1 Overview of Documents Linked to Burhān al-Dīn’s Life
and Estate
Appendix 2 Edition of Sixteen Documents Linked to Burhān al-Dīn’s
Life and Estate
Appendix 3 List of Edited Ḥaram al-sharīf Documents
324
Illustrations
Tables
Maps
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6.2
6.3
6.4
8.1
Burhān al-Dīn’s positions and stipends
Burhān al-Dīn’s salaries and stipends
The sale of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate in numbers
Thematic categories in Burhān al-Dīn’s library
Most popular authors (by entry) in Burhān al-Dīn’s library
Distribution of book prices in the sale booklet of Burhān al-Dīn’s
estate
Books in Ḥaram al-sharīf documents
Books sold from the estate of Muḥyī al-Dīn
Comparison between Arabic documentary numerals
The documentary network for settling Burhān al-Dīn’s estate
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196
291
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1.1
2.1
4.1
5.1
5.2
6.1
1.1 Locations of Burhān al-Dīn’s positions and stipend
5.1 Trajectories of Burhān al-Dīn’s books after the auction
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Figures
2.1 Family tree of Burhān al-Dīn
5.1 Burhān al-Dīn’s library, chronological distribution of datable
works
69
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Plate Section I: The Sale Booklet
Situated between pages 116 and 117
Sale Booklet, sheet 1a, #061a
Sale Booklet, sheet 1b, #061b
Sale Booklet, sheet 2a, #180a
Sale Booklet, sheet 2b, #180b
Sale Booklet, sheet 3a, #532a
Sale Booklet, sheet 3b, #532b
Threading holes in the sale booklet, sheet 1a, upper half, #061a
Bundle string photographed in 1978, #507
Bundle string photographed in 1978, #774
Bundle string photographed in 1978, #836
Typical layout of entry in the sale booklet (sheet 3a), #532a
Corrected entry in sale booklet (sheet 1a), #061a
Order of sheets in the sale booklet
Blank sheets of sale booklet in daftar format before the
scribe started to write
I.13 Sale booklet in daftar format after the scribe had filled the
first page
I.14 Sale booklet in daftar format after the scribe had filled all pages
I.15a Sheet number in sale booklet, sheet 2a, #180a
I.15b Sheet number in sale booklet, sheet 3a, #532a
I.16 Keeping track of payments in the sale booklet (sheet 3b), #532b
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I.1
I.2
I.3
I.4
I.5
I.6
I.7
I.8a
I.8b
I.8c
I.9
I.10
I.11
I.12
Plate Section II: The Documentary Network around the Sale
Booklet
Situated between pages 292 and 293
II.1
II.2
II.3
II.4
List of payments after the auction of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate,
sheet 1a, #812a
List of payments after the auction of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate,
sheet 1b, #812b
List of receivables after the auction of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate, #968
First accounts with payments and expenses after the auction of
Burhān al-Dīn’s estate, sheet 1a, #800a
il l ustrations
II.5
II.6
II.7
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First accounts with payments and expenses after the auction of
Burhān al-Dīn’s estate, sheet 1b, #800b
Second accounts with receivables, expenses and payments,
sheet 1a, #793a
Second accounts with receivables, expenses and payments,
sheet 1b, #793b
Plate Section III: Sixteen Documents Linked to Burhān al-Dīn’s
Life and Estate
Situated between pages 340 and 341
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III.1a Acknowledgement deed on money lending from Burhān
al-Dīn’s estate, #016a
III.1b Acknowledgement deed on repayment of debt and archival
notes, #016b
III.2a Decisions on the monthly obligatory maintenance payment, #052a
III.2b Archival note, #052b
III.3a Acknowledgement deed by Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Aḥmad
Ibn al-Bawwāb, #106a
III.3b Archival note, #106b
III.4 Receipt for payment of rent, #109
III.5a Decisions on the monthly obligatory maintenance payment, #111a
III.5b Archival note, #111b
III.6a Acknowledgement deed by Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Aḥmad
Ibn al-Bawwāb, #115a
III.6b Archival note, #115b
III.7a Acknowledgement deed by Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Aḥmad
Ibn al-Bawwāb, #118a
III.7b Archival note, #118b
III.8a Acknowledgement deed by Shīrīn, #188a
III.8b Archival note, #188b
III.9 Acknowledgement deed by Shīrīn, #313
III.10 Declaration of intent, #508
III.11 Declaration of no further claims, #509
III.12 Acknowledgement deed by Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Aḥmad
Ibn al-Bawwāb, #676
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III.13 Acknowledgement deed by Burhān al-Dīn’s divorced wife
Maryam, #699
III.14 Receipt for payment of rent, #843
III.15 Receipt for payment of rent, #850
III.16 Division of the estate of Fāṭima 1, #897
Acknowledgements
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The library of Burhān al-Dīn and the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents have
accompanied us in various forms and shapes for more than a decade. We
thus owe thanks to the many colleagues with whom we have discussed
them and who offered advice at various points. We want to specifically
express our gratitude to Linda Northrup (Toronto), who so generously
shared her knowledge of the documents’ discovery in the 1970s; Bashir
Barakat (Jerusalem), who knows how important he has been for this project; Arafat Amro (Islamic Museum, Jerusalem), who has supported us in
various ways; Yusuf al-Uzbaki (al-Aqṣā Library), who helped us with queries
on Jerusalem manuscripts; Angela Ballaschk (Berlin), who made sure that
grants (and much more) ran smoothly; Mohammad Ghosheh (Jerusalem/
Amman), who engaged with our detailed queries; Suzanne Ruggi (Salisbury),
who saved us from many mistakes; and Christian Müller (Paris), who helped
with his intimate knowledge of the documents. Colleagues commented on
drafts of chapters (some as conference presentations and several of them
subsequently abandoned), and we want to specifically thank Mustafa
Bannister, Zacharie Mochtari de Pierrepont, Benedikt Reier and Jo van
Steenbergen.
This book has only been possible because of the organisations that
granted financial support at various stages of its development over the years:
the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund, the
Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (Philipp Schwartz Initiative), the Einstein
Foundation Berlin, the Freie Universität Berlin and the Centre for the Study
of Manuscript Cultures (Universität Hamburg). The library of the Freie
Universität Berlin provided funds for this book to be published open access.
Our particular gratitude goes to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
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(DFG, German Research Foundation) for funding part of the reseach
under Germany’s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2176 ‘Understanding Written
Artefacts: Material, Interaction and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures’
(project no. 390893796).
Argument and Historiographical Setting:
Books, Documents and Social Practice
urhān 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
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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
1
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3
Bilād al-Shām refers to the modern nation-states of Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Syria (except
for northern Mesopotamia) and parts of southern Turkey. It is the most frequently used geographical term in the chronicle of Jerusalem by al-ʿUlaymī (d. 928/1522), al-Uns al-jalīl (Schick,
Geographical Terminology, 93).
Hirschler, Ashrafīya Library Catalogue.
Hirschler, Monument.
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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
4
5
6
7
In taking this approach we were inspired by works such as Bainton, History and the Written Word.
See for instance Bertrand, Documenting the Everyday.
Hirschler, Written Word.
This development was also inspired by debates on the ‘state’ in late medieval European political
history such as Watts, Making of Polities.
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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.
8
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10
Hirschler, The Formation of the Civilian Elite.
In particular, van Steenbergen, Mamluk Sultanate as a Military Patronage State, and in a more
syntactical way van Steenbergen, History of the Islamic World.
El-Leithy, Living Documents, Dying Archives.
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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.
11
12
Hofer, Popularisation of Sufism.
Manstetten, Ibn ʿAsākir’s History of Damascus.
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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
13
14
15
Van Steenbergen, Revisiting the Mamlūk Empire, History of the Islamic World and Nomen Est
Omen.
Bauer, Warum es kein islamisches Mittelalter gab.
As already evident in Gerhard, Periodization in European History from 1956. See also Reuter,
Medieval: Another Tyrannous Construct?; von Moos, Gefahren des Mittelalterbegriffs; Holmes
and Standen, Towards a Global Middle Ages; Dusil et al., ‘Typisch Mittelalter?’. Suggestions for
discarding the term for European history have not yet proposed convincing alternatives – see for
instance Jussen, Richtig denken im falschen Rahmen? – and often end up with something called
‘pre-modern’. For a recent contribution to this debate that indicates a more profound rethinking of the ‘medieval’ and explicitly refers to T. Bauer’s impact see Depreux et al., Relevanz der
Mediävistik.
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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
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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,
16
17
18
For details see Hirschler, Ashrafīya Library Catalogue, 3.
Kopp, Der König und die Bücher.
Neddermeyer, Handschrift zum gedruckten Buch, I, 70.
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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
19
20
21
22
Wranovix, Priests and Their Books.
Purcell, Country House Library, 56.
Hacker, Jewish Book Owners and Their Libraries, 95.
Lawrance, Une bibliothèque fort complète, 1,079.
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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,
23
24
25
26
27
28
We thank Merav Mack for her crucial advice on the wider library history of Jerusalem.
Mack and Balint, Jerusalem. City of the Book.
In addition, we have ample evidence of Jerusalem’s book culture beyond libraries, see for instance
Goldstein, Arabic Book Culture.
Mayer, Pontifikale von Tyrus; Edbury and Rowe, William of Tyre, 20.
As evident from Rubin, Learning in a Crusader City.
Beddie, Notices of Books in the East; Bale, Reading and Writing in Outremer, 112; Edbury and
Rowe, William of Tyre, 35.
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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.34
29
30
31
32
33
34
Pahlitzsch, Graeci und Suriani, 213–34.
Campopiano, Writing the Holy Land, 55–87.
The history of the library provided by al-Khālidī, al-Maktaba al-khālidīya and the historical
sketch in Ju’beh and Salameh, Fihris makhṭūṭāt al-Maktaba al-Khālidīya can now be enlarged by
the rich data of the library’s manuscript notes.
Frenkel, Book Lists from the Cairo Genizah, summarising Allony, Jewish Library, does not refer to
any documents linked to libraries in Jerusalem. Miriam Frenkel confirmed this absence of book
lists linked to Jerusalem in an email communication (June 2021).
Goitein, Contemporary Letters.
Contributions such as Scheiner, Ibn ʿAsākirʼs Virtual Library strive to reconstruct the texts available to a specific scholar, but not a ‘library’. Libraries owned by individuals beyond Bilād al-Shām
include the seventh/thirteenth-century case studied in D’Ottone, Bibliothèque d’un savant
yéménite.
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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
35
36
37
38
Liebrenz, Rifāʿīya aus Damaskus. Thanks to the work by Paul Love another large cluster of libraries has entered scholarship over the last decade, the North African Ibadi libraries (cf. Love, Ibadi
Muslims of North Africa).
Though this ‘ample’ documentation is still very patchy when compared to cases such as the late
medieval royal library at the Louvre in Paris (discussed by Kopp, Der König und die Bücher), for
which we have four inventory lists for less than fifty years, and further lists on lending and acquisitions, as well as bills, receipts and payment orders (in addition to extant codices and illustrations).
On the different approaches (narrative/normative-sources, corpus and documentary), see
Hirschler, Monument, 5–9.
Aljoumani, Maktaba madrasīya fī Ḥalab, 9–17; Hirschler, Monument, 5–17.
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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.42
39
40
41
42
To this can be added Déroche, de Castilla and Tahali, Les livres du sultan, on the collection
of Arabic codices in the San Lorenzo de El Escorial Library, which contains the books of
the library of Moroccan Sultan Mūlay Zaydān. This corpus reflects to a large extent the profile
of an early modern court library that was closely connected to the Cairene book market via
the trans-regional book trade (many of them sold in public auctions similar to that of Burhān
al-Dīn).
On this issue see also Franssen, Mamlūk amīr’s Library and Mauder, In the Sultan’s Salon.
Krimsti, Lives and Afterlives; Reier, Bibliophilia in Ottoman Aleppo. Charles Wilkins (Wake
Forest) is working on an Aleppan estate inventory with 200 books left by a notable in the late
eleventh/seventeenth century. The famous post-Ottoman conquest inventory of books in the citadel has finally been published in a slightly flawed edition (Inbaşı, Haleb Kalesinde Tespit Edilen
Kitaplar), and D’hulster, Browsing through the Sultan’s Bookshelves, includes the authoritative
version.
Mills, Commerce of Knowledge.
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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
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
Non-Arabic book-related inventories include that for the French crusader knight Odo de Nevers
(d. 1266) in Acre, including a missal, a breviary, a ‘romanz de Loheranz’ and ‘a romanz de la terre
d’outre mer’ (cf. Bale, Reading and Writing in Outremer, 86).
Aydın and Erünsal, Tereke Kayıtlarına Göre, use inventory registers to study book ownership
among students, and Sievert, Verlorene Schätze among bureaucrats.
Öztürk, Askeri kassama ait.
Erünsal, Osmanlılarda Kadınlar Ne Okuyordu.
Balkans: Sabev, Private Book Collections and Zubceviz, Book Ownership; Damascus: Establet/
Pascual, Les livres des gens.
On this see in particular Neumann, Arm und Reich in Qaraferye.
See Young, List Cultures for one example of the long list of scholarship on inventories and lists.
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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
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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, was
50
51
52
53
54
Schenda, Volk ohne Buch.
Jaritz, Stories Inventories Tell, 166.
Northrup/Abul-Hajj, Collection of Medieval Arabic Documents; Little, Catalogue. On Donald
Little see the volume dedicated to his memory, Massoud, Studies in Islamic Historiography.
Little, Catalogue, 2.
Chatterjee, Negotiating Mughal Law, 28.
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formed 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’).59
55
56
57
58
59
Little, Catalogue, 4.
The 1978 set was deposited at McGill University and most editions until well into the 2010s
de facto relied on (microfilm) copies of these images. They were made available online in 2021:
https://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/oclc/1102813166 (last accessed 5 September 2022). The 2010 set
was produced under the supervision of Christian Müller (Paris) and Khader Salamah (Jerusalem)
in December 2010 with some additions in February 2011. At the same time, the documents were
placed in protective folders. It is not clear why the 2014 set of photographs was produced so shortly
after the 2010 set.
#507 and #774.
For the sake of simplicity we refer to the documents in this book with the established system used
by Christian Müller, that is ‘#061’ for ‘2824.61’.
In the colour photographs we see, furthermore, that in addition to the pencil classmarks one user
had written the classmarks in blue pen on many documents, especially in the lower numbers.
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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
60
61
62
63
64
We use here the number of 883 to quantify the core corpus, but this is only the number of classmarks in Little’s catalogue. Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 27, refers to 915 sheets and draws
attention to the fact that documents #057 and #099 are in fact the same document. In addition, we
show in this book that documents #061, #180 and #532 all belong to one single document.
This additional discovery was first announced in the paper Hirschler, Wathāʾiq jadīda min alQuds al-mamlūkīya [New Documents from Mamluk Jerusalem] at the online workshop ‘The
History of Jerusalem through the Documents and the Manuscripts of the Ḥaram al-sharīf’, Freie
Universität Berlin, 17 March 2021.
#897.
#968.
Linda Northrup was kind enough to discuss in detail their work in the 1970s with us on several
occasions in 2020 and 2021. She also does not recall any further documents besides those catalogued by Donald Little.
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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
65
66
67
68
Salameh, Primary Sources, 3–5. Regrettably, he does not explicitly discuss why there is a difference
between his number and the number known at this point.
Muḥammad, Idārat amwāl awqāf; Muḥammad, Marsūm al-Sulṭān al-Ashraf Īnāl; ʿAbd
al-Raḥmān, al-Taʿāmulāt al-qaḍāʾīya; ʿAbd al-Raḥmān and Anas, ʿAqdā zawāj.
https://www.apd.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/apd/project1c.jsp (last accessed 30 November 2021).
https://cald.irht.cnrs.fr (last accessed 30 November 2021). Among the documents available on
CALD and cited in the following pages are #206, #315, #494 and #706.
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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.
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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’.
69
Haarmann, Library, 327 (his 1983 article with the same title is largely identical). Waseem Farooq
proposed further readings in his MA thesis Shaykh Burhān al-Dīn al-Nāṣirī. A 14th Century
Mamluk Scholar in Jerusalem (SOAS History Department 2014).
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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
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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.
PART I
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T H E N A R R AT I V E
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1
Making a Living in Endowments
his and the following chapter sketch the social environment of the
book’s protagonist, Burhān al-Dīn, during the second half of the eighth/
fourteenth century in Jerusalem.1 This sketch is crucial, because knowing
what books stood on the shelves (or in this case lay in the bookcases) of an
individual is only meaningful when we are also able to locate that person in
social terms. A ‘mere’ edition of yet another book list might provide us with
more book titles (and in this case book prices), but in terms of its impact on
the field of Middle Eastern history such an edition, stripped of its social Sitz im
Leben, would be missing a crucial dimension. This wider context is especially
relevant as book ownership in the pre-modern period is generally associated
with social elites. Yet, Burhān al-Dīn and his enormously rich and varied book
collection were situated outside the sphere of elite culture and they thus give a
rare glimpse into the bookish practices of wider sections of society.
Some facts about Burhān al-Dīn’s biography have been established over
the last few decades on the basis of the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents, with
Christian Müller having written the most detailed overview so far.2 However,
what is missing is an analysis setting Burhān al-Dīn’s life and his books into
the wider world of social practices and political spaces. These first two chapters will show how Burhān al-Dīn skilfully employed the social opportunities
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T
1
2
According to #039 his full name was Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm b. Zayn al-Dīn Rizq Allāh b. Shihāb
al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Nāṣirī (d. 789/1387). We assume that his death date was in late Ramaḍān because
the acknowledgement deeds #313 and #676 show that the first monthly obligatory maintenance
payment was paid for the following month of Shawwāl. Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 172 suggests early or mid-Shawwāl 789, which is also possible as the payment in #313 could be just a partial
payment. Haarmann, Library, 327 was still working with a very incomplete corpus and thus erroneously put his death one year too late.
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 169–75.
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offered by the provincial but ‘sacred’ town of Jerusalem to make a decent living
in the late eighth/fourteenth century. This skilfulness meant that he accumulated considerable wealth in the last decade of his life. Donald Little, with
his usual insight, described Burhān al-Dīn as an ‘enterprising, hard-working
scholar-Ṣūfī’, without, however, discussing this phrase further – as is so often
the case in his publications.3 The following will show that ‘enterprising’ and
‘hard-working’ are indeed apt terms for capturing Burhān al-Dīn’s numerous
endeavours to gain employment and stipends.
The use of the epithet ‘scholar’ brings us to the crux of this and the following chapter. We will argue that this term is much too broad to be analytically
useful for understanding Burhān al-Dīn’s background and setting his books
in their proper social space – the world of an individual who worked hard to
survive on the edges of the scholarly world by juggling numerous positions and
stipends. Burhān al-Dīn never made it into the inner circle of the Jerusalemite
scholarly elites, but his case shows how such individuals were adept at using
the room for manoeuvre they had within the transforming cultural and political landscapes to make a living. We will, more specifically, see that Burhān
al-Dīn employed two distinct social strategies not only to insert himself into
the town’s network of endowed organisations (discussed in this chapter), but
also to gain patronage from peripheral households of the military-political elite
(discussed in the following chapter). Our focus on thinking about Burhān
al-Dīn’s social life means that his activities are very much framed by the perspective of position, income and status. This is certainly not the whole story
and we do not intend to exclude or downplay his activities as reciter of Koran,
ḥadīth and other sacred texts and how they were deeply meaningful aspects
of his and his audiences’ lives. The distinct emphasis that we put on the material side of things is a mere analytical necessity for developing (in chapters of
reasonable length) a point that is crucial for the overall architecture of this
book’s argument.
Before we analyse Burhān al-Dīn’s life, let us take a step back and briefly
look at the broader political and social picture of Jerusalem in his lifetime. In
contrast to modern perceptions of the political map of the region, Jerusalem
was during this period not a political heavyweight: it only became the seat of
3
Little, Significance of the Ḥaram Documents, 218.
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a governor in the late eighth/fourteenth century, and even then the governors
were often middle-ranking officers of whom we know little.4 One of the town’s
main functions within the political topography of the Cairo Sultanate was that
of a place of exile.5 Yet Burhān al-Dīn did not even have any contacts with this
modest political elite of his home town. The town was also not of strategic
importance: it did not have a city wall in this period and all that one chronicler
had to say about its citadel was that ‘it does not matter whether it exists or
not as it is useless and does not protect the town’.6 Jerusalem was also too far
from the coast and from the main trading routes to emerge as an important
commercial centre. A generous estimate puts the town’s population at around
20,000 inhabitants.7 The earliest Ottoman figures, 130 years later, counted no
more than 934 households.8 Even though such figures are highly approximative, they reinforce the impression of a town that was no economic or political
epicentre during this period.
However, Jerusalem had a religious significance that allowed it to punch
above its political, economic and demographic weight and thus attract a considerable number of endowments.9 Even though the case of Jerusalem can
certainly not be compared with the high number of often very substantial
endowments that were established in cities such as Cairo, Damascus, Alexandria
and Aleppo, the town’s Ḥaram al-sharīf itself attracted substantial pious investments.10 The best survey lists almost ninety religious organisations (madrasas,
khānqāhs, mausolea and so on) that were endowed in Jerusalem in the period
of the Cairo Sultanate.11 The presence of the sultanic Manṣūrī Ribāṭ shows
that the political elite in Cairo had incentives for spiritual investments and
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Al-Qalqashandī, Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā, VII, 186; Little, Jerusalem under the Ayyūbids and the Mamlūks,
187.
See Onimus, Maîtres du jeu, 358 and Ayalon, Discharge from Service for Jerusalem as a site of
political exile.
Al-ʿUmarī, Masālik al-abṣār, III, 544.
Lutfi, Al-Quds al-Mamlûkiyya, 225, based on the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus.
Burgoyne, Mamluk Jerusalem, 61.
Lutfi, Al-Quds al-Mamlûkiyya, discusses this issue on the basis of the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus, and
Little, Mujīr al-Dīn, on the basis of al-ʿUlaymī’s chronicle al-Uns al-jalīl.
For the development of the Ḥaram al-sharīf up to the Crusading period see Kaplony, The Haram
of Jerusalem. For the post-Crusader period see Hawari, Ayyubid Monuments, Burgoyne, Smaller
Domes, Hillenbrand, Ayyubid Aqsa, Flood, Ambiguous Aesthetic and Burgoyne, Mamluk
Jerusalem.
Burgoyne, Mamluk Jerusalem, 65–74.
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that the town was more than a provincial backwater. We have several periods
of particularly intensive investment in the city and the surrounding regions,
such as during the reigns of Sultan Baybars in the mid-seventh/thirteenth
century and Sultan Qāytbāy in the late ninth/fifteenth century.12 The most
important period of urban rebuilding took place during the reign of Sultan
al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn in the early eighth/fourteenth century with
the governor of Damascus Sayf al-Dīn Tankiz playing a prominent role. These
monuments still define to some extent the urban tissue and ‘old’ city skyline
of Jerusalem.13
New endowments established in the late eighth/fourteenth century were,
however, less impressive. We can take as an example one of these new endowments, the Ṭāz Mausoleum in which Burhān al-Dīn worked for many years.
Sayf al-Dīn Ṭāz was a prominent officer whose career began during the rule
of al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn’s sons in the 740s/1340s. He belonged
to that generation of officers who were able to build up massive households
that constituted the main centres of power in the late Qalāwūnid period.14 His
splendid palace in Cairo still testifies to the central role he and his peers played
in the period’s politics.15 Yet he increasingly lost influence in the 750s/1350s
during the reconfigurations of the Qalāwūnid political matrix and was finally
reduced to a minor position and then blinded. After a modest comeback
he endowed his mausoleum in Jerusalem, which did not even come close to
the splendour of his palace in Cairo. Furthermore, he was not even buried
in this mausoleum; his final resting place was Damascus.16 It is from among
such figures, who fell outside the inner circle of political authority, that those
endowing in Jerusalem were primarily recruited in the second half of the
eighth/fourteenth century.
Jerusalem was thus of limited political significance, but it was home to
a substantial number of endowments that provided income for scholars. In
consequence we see a group of elite scholars who were closely linked with the
12
13
14
15
16
Daʿadli, Jerusalem Mamluk Regional Building Style.
Daʿadli and Barbé, Development of Sūq al-Qaṭṭānīn Quarter.
Here the work of Jo van Steenbergen is crucial, for instance his Mamluk Sultanate as a Military
Patronage State.
On his demise cf. Onimus, Maîtres du jeu.
Burgoyne, Mamluk Jerusalem, 399–411.
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town, such as those belonging to the Banū Jamāʿa family. For instance, a contemporary of Burhān al-Dīn named Sarī al-Dīn married into the Jamāʿa family.
We find this Sarī al-Dīn in several important positions in Jerusalem, such as
preacher (khaṭīb) in the Aqṣā Mosque.17 We will meet Sarī al-Dīn again in
Chapter 3, as he had a central role in the formation of what we know today as
the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus of documents. For our purposes here, that is, identifying him as a member of the scholarly elite of Jerusalem, he is typical in the
sense that his prominent appointments in Jerusalem alternated with appointments in Damascus, such as the chief judgeship of the city. The scholarly elite
of Jerusalem was thus in many ways a quite mobile elite that was, in particular,
deeply intertwined with the elite of Damascus. Even though Burhān al-Dīn
lived in the same period as Sarī al-Dīn, their social worlds hardly overlapped –
for a start, there is no indication that Burhān al-Dīn ever left Jerusalem or held
any of the town’s lucrative positions. Burhān al-Dīn thus had to entertain very
different strategies to make a living and, as we will see, he was highly skilled
in carving out a place for himself within the landscape of endowments and
within the political landscape of peripheral military households.
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In methodological terms, the reconstruction of Burhān al-Dīn’s life is based
on the large cluster of Ḥaram al-sharīf documents that are linked to him, the
‘Burhān al-Dīn documentary corpus’. Donald Little counted thirty-nine such
documents18 and Christian Müller identified further documents to establish
a corpus of forty-nine Ḥaram al-sharīf documents linked to Burhān al-Dīn.19
We count fifty-two documents (see Appendix 1), and this higher number is the
result of identifying additional documents in the known Ḥaram al-sharīf core
corpus as well as finding new documents in the Ḥaram al-sharīf plus corpus.
The most important additions to Burhān al-Dīn’s corpus are the two sheets
#180 and #532, which have so far not been seen as part of the corpus but are
beyond doubt part of the sale booklet and are thus indispensable in analysing
his library. More exciting still, after we came to understand that the Ḥaram
17
18
19
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 512–16.
Little, Six Fourteenth Century Purchase Deeds, 315.
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 175.
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al-sharīf corpus was larger than scholarship had assumed (see Introduction),
was the discovery of additional traces of Burhān al-Dīn’s documentary world
in this Ḥaram al-sharīf plus corpus.20
The Burhān al-Dīn documentary corpus will be discussed in Chapter 3 in
more detail to understand the production of individual documents, how they
came together as a corpus, and the subsequent archival preservation of this
corpus. We will describe it here briefly in so far as it is relevant to the discussion
of its protagonist’s social world. Among these fifty-two documents, twentyfour refer to his working life (most importantly, Burhān al-Dīn’s petitions for
a job, subsequent diplomas and declarations by administrators of endowed
organisations and members of the political elite granting him a job, payment
orders for his salaries, and an accounts sheet of a primary school mentioning his
salary), eleven refer to other matters in which he was involved during his lifetime (such as settling the estate of a deceased wife, divorce papers, rent receipts
for his house, the purchase contract for another house and his neighbour’s
consent to extending this house) and seventeen refer to the settlement of his
estate after his death (such as the acknowledgement deeds on the monthly
obligatory maintenance payments for the children he left behind, decisions
by a deputy judge on the amount of these maintenance payments, our sale
booklet concerning his estate, and accounts linked to this sale).
Counting things in any documentary corpus is as complex as counting
things (books, volumes, parts, titles and so on) in a library corpus and the
documentary corpus of Burhān al-Dīn is no exception. When we refer to
a ‘document’, this is in the vast majority of cases one physical sheet – fiftytwo documents of the corpus simply consist of one such single sheet of paper
or parchment.21 However, there is one document that consists of more than
one sheet, the sale booklet concerning his estate. This document consists of
three sheets (#061, #180 and #532), and they must have become separated at
some point over the last few centuries (more on this in Chapter 4). Our corpus
is thus made up of fifty-two documents on fifty-four separate sheets.
20
21
These include documents #897 (division of the estate of Fāṭima 1, the deceased wife of Burhān
al-Dīn) and #968 (a list of receivables from the sale of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate).
Though one of these ‘sheets’ (#369) is in reality the product of two distinct documents sewn
together.
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In order to profile our corpus numerically, we need one further number
in addition to ‘document’ and ‘sheet’, as many of these documents carry more
than one ‘text’. For instance, a document with a (successful) petition for a job
on the front will have the corresponding diploma of appointment on its back.
While this is one material ‘document’, there are two independent ‘texts’ and
the number of texts in documentary corpora is thus in general significantly
higher than that of documents or that of sheets. To provide the number of
such texts is a much more subjective endeavour than counting documents or
sheets, as it depends on the research interest. If one employs the documents
to understand legal procedure, as Christian Müller did, a judge’s crisp note
on top of a document indicating that this document has been admitted for
a lawsuit (‘udduʿiya bihi’) is a stand-alone text. If one is interested in archival
practices, as we are in Chapter 3, the archival note on the back of document
such as ‘monthly obligatory maintenance payment for Jamāl, son of [Burhān
al-Dīn] al-Nāṣirī’ (‘farḍ Jamāl / Ibn al-Nāṣirī’) is a text in its own right (see
Plate III.5b). If we combine all these perspectives, the number of texts in the
Burhān al-Dīn documentary corpus is well over one hundred.22
For the purposes of the first two chapters, we have limited the ‘texts’ to
those that are of immediate relevance for analysing Burhān al-Dīn’s social
world. From this perspective we arrive at a total of sixty-three texts in our
fifty-two documents on fifty-four sheets.23 That the life of an individual as
average as Burhān al-Dīn led to the production of so many documents and
texts is a clear indicator of the crucial role that the written word had come to
play by this period in the sphere of pragmatic literacy – it emphatically does
not mean at all that Burhān al-Dīn was of outstanding importance. On the
contrary, these fifty-two documents are only part of the much larger overall documentary corpus that must have been triggered by Burhān al-Dīn’s
22
23
References to an individual text follow the system established by Christian Müller in his work on
the overall Ḥaram al-sharīf documentary corpus, that is in the format ‘#039/1’ for the chronologically first text on the document carrying the classmark #039.
Six of these additional texts are from petitions for a paid position that carry the diploma of appointment on their back (#007, #009, #010, #013, #305 and #310); two additional texts are revisions
on the amount of the maintenance payments (#052 and #111); one is a note on the back of an
acknowledgement of a debt that the repayment was made (#016); Burhān al-Dīn’s house purchase
document carries two additional texts (#039).
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marriages, divorces, sales, purchases, job applications, salary payments and so
on, as will be discussed in Chapter 3.
The statement that the extant number of documents ‘may well make
[Burhān al-Dīn] the best-documented Muslim of the Middle Ages’ might
have been slightly over the top.24 For a start, the estate archive of the trader
Nāṣir al-Dīn in the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents is more extensive than that of
Burhān al-Dīn. Yet Burhān al-Dīn did indeed leave a fascinating paper trail,
the survival of which is very unusual for a non-elite individual (and even for
many elite individuals) of that period.25 That no detailed biography of him
has been written so far is astonishing. Few other similar individuals are so visible through documentary corpora. One of them is the Indian Ocean trader
Abraham Ben Yijū from the sixth/twelfth century, whom we know through
the documentary corpus linked to him from the Cairo Geniza(s). Even though
we have fewer documents relating to him, he has been a highly rewarding
subject to narrate and to analyse in various ways.26
Even a paper trail as dense as that of Burhān al-Dīn’s has many gaps,
and this has considerable methodological implications. For example, we can
never be sure whether the first document that we have on a specific issue is
the first document that was produced. At the same time, the absence of documents on specific issues cannot be taken as proof that Burhān al-Dīn was not
involved in a specific activity. However, the survival of the documents that we
do have was not random, but follows the archival logic of an ‘estate archive’
that Chapter 3 will set out. In consequence, it is possible to detect patterns
and structures from this incomplete and archivally reconfigured documentary
corpus to understand Burhān al-Dīn’s social world, and this is what the following will do.
Simply a ‘Scholar’?
The most important point in starting to sketch Burhān al-Dīn’s life is an
absence, but in this case not a documentary absence: none of the numerous
narrative texts that were produced during his lifetime and in the subsequent
24
25
26
Little, Six Fourteenth Century Purchase Deeds, 315.
Though future research will certainly unearth different source corpora in order to write the biographies of non-elite individuals; see e.g. Nakamachi, Life in the Margins.
Ghosh, Antique Land and Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage.
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decades ever mentioned him. We do not find any reference to him in the vast
corpus of biographical compendia and chronicles written in Bilād al-Shām
and Egypt in the course of the late eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth
centuries.27 Although these texts are teeming with individuals linked to the
scholarly world, Burhān al-Dīn was too insignificant to be mentioned or
referred to. One might argue that this was because the authors of these texts
wrote from the perspectives of their respective home towns, especially Cairo,
but also Damascus, Aleppo or Alexandria. In consequence, the scholarly
communities of those provincial towns without their own historian systematically tended to stay below the narrative radar – a metropolitan bias, so to say.
Jerusalem did indeed take a long time to find its historian. It was not until one
hundred years after Burhān al-Dīn’s death that this changed and Mujīr al-Dīn
al-ʿUlaymī (d. 928/1522) produced his combined chronicle and biographical compendium of Jerusalem and Hebron, the well-known al-Uns al-jalīl.28
Al-ʿUlaymī includes a number of Jerusalemite scholars from the second half of
the eighth/fourteenth century, but Burhān al-Dīn is not among them.
Burhān al-Dīn’s absence from the narrative record, even the indigenous
Jerusalem narrative record, is not by chance, but is closely linked to the social
environment in which he lived. He did not hail from a prominent family of
Jerusalem: none of his forefathers or foremothers made it into any chronicle
or biographical compendium. More importantly for our purposes, he himself
never held a position in the town’s judiciary as a judge, a deputy judge or any
other functionary. He also never held one of the lucrative teaching positions
in the town’s most generously endowed madrasas such as the Ṣalāḥīya or the
Tankizīya. When al-ʿUlaymī crafted his book one century later, he started his
section on biographies of scholars with those holding positions in the Ṣalāḥīya
Madrasa. Evidently, Burhān al-Dīn neither appears in this section nor in
al-ʿUlaymī’s following sections on the judges and the preachers in the Aqṣā
Mosque. Tellingly, he also does not appear in al-ʿUlaymī’s sections on jurists
(fuqahāʾ) and scholars where the author casts his net wide to include a broad
social section of the scholarly world.
27
28
For the vast number of biographical compendia produced in this period see Reier, Documents in
Books.
Al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl; Little, Mujīr al-Dīn.
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The silence of the sources means that we do not even know Burhān al-Dīn’s
birth date, and have to make with a rough estimate. In one of his petitions for
a job in the town’s central Muslim sanctuary, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, from the year
781/1380 (#009/1) he claimed that he had performed pious recitations on the
Ḥaram al-sharīf without remuneration for twenty years. There is little reason
to take such a claim by a petitioner at face value as he certainly had strong
incentives to exaggerate his track record and come up with an impressive
number. However, in the margin of this report we see that the responsible in
charge wrote a note saying that the validity of the claim was to be checked (the
document’s second text, #009/2). The subsequent diploma of appointment
(the document’s third text, #009/3) was indeed only issued after this check had
taken place. In other words, it is highly likely that Burhān al-Dīn’s claim must
have had some degree of veracity even if the exact number of twenty years is
not a quantitative factoid. Now, if we assume that he started these recitations
on the Ḥaram al-sharīf at the relatively young age of twenty-five, this takes us
to the year 736/1335 as an (admittedly very rough) earliest birth year. From
his documents we know that he died in the year 789/1387 (see Introduction),
which would mean that he died at an age of slightly over fifty years.
In light of the absence of Burhān al-Dīn from the narrative record, placing
him in his society has been difficult. Previous scholarship has thus resorted to
one of the most widespread fall-back options in our field, namely to describe
such an individual simply with the catch-all term ‘scholar’, that is to say, as
belonging to the ʿulamāʾ.29 There is nothing wrong in describing him as a
member of the ʿulamāʾ and thus using the emic term per se. Yet, as an etic term
of analysis it is woefully imprecise and thus of limited usefulness for the purpose of social history. The ʿulamāʾ are, as is well known, one of the best-studied
sections of pre-Ottoman society, yet the field of Mamluk Studies, as Nobutaka
Nakamachi pointed out, generally uses this term without much precision.30
The foundational work on the social history of this group, Carl Petry’s seminal
Civilian Elite of Cairo, for instance, defined them rather briefly as those ‘who
were regarded as the literati of traditional Islamic cultures’.31 Such a literatus
29
30
31
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 169 and Little, Five Petitions, 349.
Nakamachi, Life in the Margins.
Petry, Civilian Elite of Cairo, 4.
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could in social terms be anybody from the most prominent judge who was
part of a city’s social elite to a very humble part-time Koran reciter in a small
neighbourhood mausoleum who could barely make a living from this stipend.
It is thus necessary to differentiate the emic category ‘scholars’ and to
develop a terminology – which we do not have at the moment, and which this
book does not claim to develop – to reflect the wide variety of social contexts
in which the different members of this group acted. If we imagine the scholarly
world as concentric circles, a small scholarly social elite (those being part of the
notables, the aʿyān) was situated at the centre. In Jerusalem, for instance, the
above-named Sarī al-Dīn, who was preacher in the Aqṣā Mosque and also chief
judge in Damascus, belonged to this elite. These are thus individuals who held
highly remunerated positions and who have a very strong presence in our narrative sources. Yet the vast majority of those linked to the scholarly world were
positioned in much larger circles at a considerable distance from this centre.
To give one example of such a group of literati outside the inner elite
circle: the notary witnesses (sg. shāhid) constituted an indispensable tier of
legal administration, independently validating legal transactions and, as
court-appointed witnesses, validating documents produced by judges.32 Until
recently, we knew very little about this group, but the academic ‘discovery’
of the diary of one of these witnesses, Ibn Ṭawq from Damascus, at the very
end of the Cairo Sultanate, has changed this. His text has substantially added
to our knowledge of what the modest life of one of these otherwise unknown
‘scholars’ looked like.33 On the basis of the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents,
Christian Müller has been able to show how large this hitherto rather hidden
group was. For Jerusalem alone he identified more than one hundred individuals who acted as notary witnesses in a period of only four years.34 That such
witnesses acted as a coherent social group during political conflicts indicates
the existence of a distinct identity.35 Another group that is often dealt with
under the wide label of scholars, but which arguably had a distinct identity
32
33
34
35
On the role of the shāhid in the late medieval period see for instance Amīn, al-Shāhid al-ʿadl and
El-Leithy, Living Documents, Dying Archives.
Wollina, Zwanzig Jahre Alltag; Shoshan, Damascus Life 1480–1500.
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 280–319.
Olsen, Just Taxes?, 9.
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too, is that of ‘popular’ preachers.36 To subsume such groups under a catch-all
category of ʿulamāʾ does a disservice to understanding their specific places
within these concentric circles – places that were very distinct from those of
judges or teachers at prestigious madrasas.
Burhān al-Dīn was certainly not ‘an average “college teacher”’ as he has
been erroneously called.37 He never taught in a madrasa and never earned as
much as teachers in endowed organisations. We find him much further from
the centre, in proximity to notary witnesses and modest popular preachers.
He thus belonged to that group of literati that was positioned – in the case of
Burhān al-Dīn at least for most of his career – in the outer circles of the scholarly world at a considerable distance from the elite centre. This does not mean
that he and his peers among the notary witnesses and the popular preachers
were outsiders, but they clearly operated in a social world very different from
that of those holding the lucrative judiciary and teaching positions in the town,
such as Sarī al-Dīn. Their distance from the scholarly centre is also evident in
the fact that peripheral scholars hardly ever produced written works, with Ibn
Ṭawq being a rare exception.
The following will propose that Burhān al-Dīn belonged to a sub-category
of peripheral scholars that can be labelled ‘multiple part-time reciter’ –
admittedly quite a descriptive and not a very elegant term.38 Members of this
group held two, three or more very modestly paid positions at the same time in
order to make a living in this gig economy. These were not the prestigious and
well-paid teaching positions of Jerusalem, available at the likes of the Ṣalāḥīya
Madrasa and the Tankizīya Madrasa, yet they were better paid than the menial
positions that we also find in mosques, madrasas and mausoleums (such as
gatekeeper, water carrier and sweeper). In the case of Burhān al-Dīn we will see
that he started to hold so many of these positions that he was able to accumulate considerable wealth, even if only in the last decade of his life.
To hold a position as a multiple part-time reciter one required some background of learning, and those holding them certainly saw themselves as literati
of traditional Islamic culture. As we will also see in the case of Burhān al-Dīn,
36
37
38
On this group see Berkey, Popular Preaching.
Haarmann, Library, 328.
The activities of these reciters include those outlined in al-Subkī, Muʿīd al-niʿam, 156–63: qāriʾ
al-ushr and, especially, qāriʾ al-kursī.
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engagement with this textual tradition was not so much in terms of what we
intuitively associate with scholarly practices, that is, teaching, commenting,
interpreting and potentially authoring books. Rather, we see that such a
multiple part-time reciter made his living by holding several of the numerous
positions of recitation with modest remuneration that were available in a town
such as Jerusalem. In these posts, members of this group recited the Koran and
numerous other texts such as ḥadīth and even Koranic exegesis (tafsīr). One
position never paid a sufficient stipend or salary for survival on it alone, but
an individual could make a decent living on the outer circles of the scholarly
world by combining several of these positions.
These multiple part-time reciters should not be confused with those
scholars who held in parallel several well-paid ‘full-time’ positions as teachers
in madrasas.39 These elite scholars sub-contracted one or several of their positions for lower pay and were thus able to generate a very considerable income.
These scholars could be labelled, borrowing a term from the medieval Latin
West, ‘pluralists’, and their plush social world was quite different from that
of most of their part-time colleagues who performed the recitations in the
same organisations. Sarī al-Dīn, for instance, had simultaneously held several
teaching positions in Damascus and was then appointed to several positions
in Jerusalem, including becoming preacher in the Aqṣā Mosque.40 This did
not pose a serious problem for him. Rather, he saw opportunities: he simply
sub-contracted his positions in Damascus and moved to Jerusalem to take up
his multiple appointments there.
Burhān al-Dīn’s career shows that being a multiple part-time reciter meant
starting at the outer edge of the scholarly world. Yet there was the possibility of moving closer to the centre over the years, and during the last decade
of his life he was carving out an increasingly comfortable place for himself.
What makes his case interesting is that the unique documentary corpus linked
to him allows us to understand the social agency and strategies of such an
individual. This micro-historical approach shows that positions were not
primarily ‘bestowed’ upon or ‘granted’ to him. Instead, we see an individual
who actively pursued his two strategies to make a decent living: He skilfully
39
40
Petry, Civilian Elite of Cairo, 252.
Ibn Qāḍī Shuhba, Tārīkh, III, 475.
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navigated the rich landscape of endowments in Jerusalem to obtain positions
(discussed in this chapter), while also procuring personal stipends from individual patrons among the peripheral political elites of the region (discussed in
the next chapter).
The World of Endowments
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So, let us start with the first strategy that Burhān al-Dīn pursued to make a
living in the second half of the eighth/fourteenth-century Jerusalem, namely
to seek positions in endowed organisations. This strategy was firmly embedded within the significant role that such organisations played in the cities and
towns of that period. It thus comes as no surprise that the earliest trace of
Burhān al-Dīn’s professional life is a petition in which he seeks an appointment in the above-mentioned Manṣūrī Ribāṭ, an organisation endowed by
al-Malik al-Manṣūr Qalāwūn in the late seventh/thirteenth century.41 The
Manṣūrī Ribāṭ was a multi-functional organisation centred on a hospice that
also provided for the poor (number 1 in Table 1.1 and Map 1.1).42 Burhān
al-Dīn applied for a remunerated appointment from this organisation’s
endowment after the previous beneficiary died and the application was successful. This happened in the year 770/1368, roughly twenty years before his
death in 789/1387.
However, this first trace of his professional life shows Burhān al-Dīn at
the very outer edges of the scholarly world in social terms – the remuneration
he sought consisted of nothing more than four loaves of bread a day. Burhān
al-Dīn’s statement that he had a family to care for, and was thus particularly
needy, seems genuine enough given that he was applying for such a humble
appointment. What job he applied for at the Manṣūrī Ribāṭ is not clear from
the petition. It was most likely a position as a reciter, as he refers in his petition
to ‘recitation’ (qirāʾa) and promises an intercessory prayer (duʿāʾ) after this
recitation. That this was indeed an application as reciter is especially likely as
‘recitation/intercessory prayer packages’ were important in Burhān al-Dīn’s
41
42
#013 (1.2.770/1368).
Burgoyne, Mamluk Jerusalem, 129–40. On the term ribāṭ see Little, Nature of khānqāhs, ribāṭs
and zāwiyas.
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Table 1.1 Burhān al-Dīn’s positions and stipends
Place/patron
Year
Doc. #
1
2
position
stipend
770
774
013
603
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
position
position
position
position
position
position
position
position
stipend
stipend
775
775
780
780
780
780
781
781
781
782
010
005, 007, 014, 303, 310
203
509
049
289, 336, 509, 699
305
009
490
508
13
stipend
14
stipend
15
stipend
16
stipend
Manṣūrī Ribāṭ
al-Ḥaram al-sharīf /
Salāma b. Abī Bakr al-Fāriqānī
unnamed madrasa-cum-ribāṭ
Ṭāz Mausoleum
Awḥadīya Mausoleum
al-Ḥaram al-sharīf (Sitt ʿĀʾisha)
primary school Fakhr al-Dīn Īyās
Ṣalāḥīya Khānqāh
al-Ḥaram al-sharīf (Aqṣā Mosque)
al-Ḥaram al-sharīf
Aḥmad b. Sayf al-Dīn Bustumur
al-Ḥaram al-sharīf /
Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Shādī
al-Ḥaram al-sharīf /
Ḥaydar al-ʿAskarī al-Manṣūrī
al-Ḥaram al-sharīf /
ʿAlī b. Qōjā al-ʿAlāʾī
al-Ḥaram al-sharīf /
ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Aqbughā Yankī
al-Ḥaram al-sharīf /
Ibrāhīm b. ʿUmar Ṣārim al-Dīn
Pr
782
004
783
012
788
002
?
026
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Position/stipend
rg
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No.
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strategy for accumulating part-time positions, as we will repeatedly see during
the following years.
The recitation of Koran, ḥadīth and other sacred texts was provided for in
any endowment in this period.43 While teaching was not all-pervasive, founders
did systematically provide funds for reciters, even in small-scale organisations
with modest endowments. We will see that Burhān al-Dīn appears as such a
reciter of the Koran, but that he gradually built up a reputation for one specific
form of recitation, namely ‘reciter of mīʿād’. It is in this field that he must have
gained something of a reputation within Jerusalem. We do not know too much
about miʿād sessions, except that they consisted of the recitation of different
texts, but two documents from the Burhān al-Dīn documentary corpus give
us the best insight we have into what such a session actually entailed during
43
Berkey, Transmission of Knowledge.
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Map 1.1 Locations of Burhān al-Dīn’s positions and stipends; based on Burgoyne, Mamluk
Jerusalem, 34 (Fig. 1, © Kenyon Institute [British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem])
this period in Jerusalem. The first of these documents lays out the structure of
the recitation session as follows. First came Koranic exegesis, followed by some
ḥadīth, then stories of the virtuous (‘ḥikāyāt al-ṣāliḥīn’), and finally Koranic
verses (sūra no. 113, 114, 1 and the beginning of 2).44 The second document is
strikingly similar and has exegesis, ḥadīth and the stories of the virtuous in the
44
#026.
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same order. However, instead of Koranic recitation this document mentions
the more generic term ‘exhortation’ (mawʿiẓa).45
Burhān al-Dīn was already in his mid-thirties (according to our above
estimate of his birth date) when he applied for the daily bread allowance at
the Manṣūrī Ribāṭ. Even though the cities and towns of Bilād al-Shām and
Egypt had so many endowments with numerous employment opportunities
in this period, to enter this system as somebody on the fringes of the social
world was seemingly far from straightforward. The impression that Burhān
al-Dīn was just finding his feet in the professional world of multiple parttime reciters when he was in his thirties is reinforced by the next documentary
trace that we get of his life. Five years after his appointment in the Manṣūrī
Ribāṭ, he submitted a petition to apply for a place of lodging (‘an yakūna …
munazzalan’) in an unnamed madrasa-cum-ribāṭ in 775/1373 (number 3 in
Table 1.1).46 It is unclear whether this ‘place of lodging’ entailed a remunerated position, as neither the petition nor the response by the endowment’s
supervisor mentions any specific task or a salary. However, it is likely that this
‘lodging’ did not mean that Burhān al-Dīn would dwell in this organisation
as he already had a family, as we know from his Manṣūrī Ribāṭ application
and as he underlined in this petition once again. Rather, this application was
most likely for a position, and as Burhān al-Dīn stressed his background as
reciter of the Koran (‘min ḥummāl al-Qurʾān’) it is likely that this was another
recitation position. We do not know whether he ever got this position as the
response was somewhat lukewarm: in principle he could get this lodging/
position, the supervisor of the endowment wrote on the petition, but if there
was no vacancy he would have to wait until one of the current beneficiaries
moved on or died. It is probably fair to say that Burhān al-Dīn was still struggling at this point, at roughly forty years old, to translate his qualifications as a
reciter into well-remunerated positions.
45
46
#002.
#010 (20.2.775/1373). Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 340 assumes that this document refers to
al-Ribāṭ al-Manṣūri. While this cannot be excluded, it seems rather unlikely as the Manṣūrī Ribāṭ
shows no signs of having included a madrasa. In his al-Uns al-jalīl al-ʿUlaymī has a strong tendency to call multi-functional organisations a ‘madrasa’, but this is not the case for the Manṣūrī
Ribāṭ (al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, II, 43).
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These two applications were for positions in endowed organisations, the
Manṣūrī Ribāṭ and the unnamed madrasa-cum-ribāṭ, and pursuing such
positions was clearly the norm during that period for those working within
the wide folds of scholarship and ritual. We thus see that he petitioned in the
same year, 775/1374, for another position at another endowment in the town,
the Ṭāz Mausoleum (number 4 in Table 1.1 and Map 1.1) – and this time
petition and diploma explicitly refer to him as ‘reciter’.47 As mentioned before,
this mausoleum was founded just over a decade earlier, making it a relatively
new establishment in the town.48 Once again, Burhān al-Dīn underlined his
poverty and the family he had to care for; he offered his services as reciter and,
once again, he promised intercessory prayer after the recitations. The petition
and diploma of appointment are not overflowing with details: neither what
exactly he was meant to recite nor his salary are mentioned. This was because
both Burhān al-Dīn and the endowment supervisor, a certain Malik, clearly
knew what they were speaking of, and they both referred to his appointment
as ‘on the model of those reciters [already] installed’ in the mausoleum with a
‘salary like that of his peers’.49
We do hear more details, as his job at the Ṭāz Mausoleum seemingly
required, inconveniently for him, regular reappointment procedures.
Conveniently for us, we thus have a longer paper trail on this position. For the
following decade four more documents exist that give an insight into what he
was doing in this mausoleum for what salary.50 All four documents refer without exception to his position as reciter (in one document ‘at the tomb’), either
without spelling out what he was meant to recite51 or naming him as Koran
reciter (qāriʾ al-ʿushr).52 Apart from recitation, two of the Ṭāz documents
mention him as the Keeper of the Koran in the mausoleum (khādim al-rabʿa).53
The shifting job descriptions match the two salaries that we get for his work at
the Ṭāz Mausoleum: when he was appointed as reciter at the tomb and Koran
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
#310.
On this mausoleum cf. Burgoyne, Mamluk Jerusalem, 399–411.
#310/1, ll. 6 and 7 and #310/2, l. 8.
#007 (777/1376), #303 (780/1378), #005 (784/1382) and #014 (785/1383).
#007 (tomb), #303 and #014.
#007, #303 and #005. Al-Subkī describes ‘qāriʾ al-ʿushr’ as the person who recites Koran before a
teaching session starts (al-Subkī, Muʿīd al-niʿam, 156).
#303 and #005.
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reciter at the same time in 777/1376 he earned thirty-five dirhams per month.54
However, a diploma of appointment eight years later only referred to him as
a reciter, and his salary dropped to fifteen dirhams per month.55 It is highly
likely that Burhān al-Dīn thus continuously held positions in this mausoleum
for some fifteen years from when he was forty years of age up to the end of
his life.56
Five years after he had started in the Ṭāz Mausoleum, in 780/1379, he was
appointed as a reciter at yet another endowment, the Awḥadīya Mausoleum
(number 5 in Table 1.1 and Map 1.1).57 Little is known about the size of
the endowment of the Awḥadīya Mausoleum, and judging from the meagre
documentary and narrative record it was no hotbed of teaching activities.58
The crisp diploma of appointment handed to Burhān al-Dīn (really quite a
grandiose term for such a small sheet of paper) is a highly informal document
which stands out from the other more carefully produced diplomas that he
received. It seems to have been written in haste, and there is also, in contrast to
most other diplomas, no petition from Burhān al-Dīn. This might be linked
to the fact that the previous post-holder was fired because he was unqualified
(‘li-ʿadam ahlīyatihi’) and a replacement was urgently needed. Burhān al-Dīn
was to receive a salary ‘in accordance with the endower’s stipulation’, but we
regrettably do not learn what this stipulation was. The endowment deed of
this mausoleum has not come down to us, nor has any other document on an
appointment in this mausoleum, but it is fair to assume that this rather modest
mausoleum was not among the best-paying employers of Jerusalem. Donald
Richards has suggested that an isolated numeral ‘five’ written at the lower end
of the sheet refers to a monthly salary of five dirhams.59 This would be a very
54
55
56
57
58
59
#007.
#014.
Two documents (#005 and #007) refer to ‘al-faqāha’ and ‘al-faqīh’ (jurisconsultant). This reference is highly unusual as it would entail a very different scholarly training from that for recitation.
Most likely, these terms must here not be read here as referring to a position, but rather as an honorific, similar to the use of the term qāḍī (judge) in many documents, which does not necessarily
mean that the individual in question actually held a judgeship.
#203.
On this mausoleum founded by the Ayyubid notable al-Malik al-Awḥad in 697/1298 see
Burgoyne, Mamluk Jerusalem, 167–77.
Burgoyne, Mamluk Jerusalem, 167.
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modest salary indeed – as we will see further down, a household such as that of
Burhān al-Dīn needed roughly one dirham per day for buying bread.
As is the case with all his other positions, except that in the Ṭāz Mausoleum,
we do not know how long this appointment lasted. While there was paperwork
for hiring someone, there was no equivalent for when a position ended. We
thus do not know how many positions exactly Burhān al-Dīn held at any given
time, for instance whether he still held his positions in the Manṣūrī Ribāṭ and
the unnamed madrasa-cum-ribāṭ when he was appointed in the Awḥadīya
Mausoleum. This is an issue to which we shall return, but at any rate it is
possible to state that Burhān al-Dīn was gradually establishing himself as a
reciter in Jerusalemite endowments throughout the 770s/1370s. At the end
of this decade, in his mid-forties, he had been successively (or simultaneously)
the reciter in four different organisations (Manṣūrī Ribāṭ, unnamed madrasacum-ribāṭ, Ṭāz Mausoleum and Awḥadīya Mausoleum).
We see that, on the basis of his success in acquiring positions in fairly
minor organisations, Burhān al-Dīn moves on to a new stage in his professional life in the 780s. He now turns to securing positions in the very heart
of Jerusalem’s sacred Muslim topography, the Ḥaram al-sharīf. Before he
received the post in the Awḥadīya Mausoleum he must already have held
a position financed by one of the many small endowments that make up
the highly complex endowment structure of the Ḥaram al-sharīf.60 In a
document from the year 780/1378 he appears as reciter in an endowment
called Sitt ʿĀʾisha (number 6 in Table 1.1 and Map 1.1).61 In this document, Muḥammad al-Ṣafadī (we have no idea who he was) declares that
he has no claims against Burhān al-Dīn regarding the salary (jāmakīya) for
recitations. Christian Müller has already suggested reading this document as
follows: Burhān al-Dīn, having been appointed to this recitation position,
‘sub-contracted’ it to al-Ṣafadī, who did the actual recitation work for a share
of the salary.62 The document would thus be al-Ṣafadī’s acknowledgement
that he had received his dues from Burhān al-Dīn. As we have seen, subcontracting salaried positions for a lesser salary was a well-established practice
60
61
62
The exact structure of this massive endowment landscape is still under-studied, but the first steps
have been taken in this direction, such as Muḥammad, Idārat amwāl awqāf.
#509 (1.8.780/1378), see Appendix 2.
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 171.
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in the period of the Cairo Sultanate, especially for well-paid ‘full-time’ positions of the pluralists mentioned above, and these payments were often part
of much more complex financial transactions.63 This document shows that
such practices might have also existed for much more modest positions, and
with regard to Burhān al-Dīn this would mean that by his mid-forties he was
sufficiently established to engage in such a practice.64
As a consequence of Burhān al-Dīn becoming increasing more established
as a reciter in endowments, we see that positions on the Ḥaram al-sharīf take
centre stage during the last decade of his life. A year after the sub-contracting
document was produced, he petitioned to be reappointed to a post as reciter of
mīʿād in the Aqṣā Mosque in 781/1379 (number 9 in Table 1.1 and Map 1.1).65
This is the first document that specifically used the term that was so crucial in
his professional specialisation, ‘reciter of mīʿād’. The reason he had to petition
for this reappointment is not clear, but there seems to have been a conflict in
the background. At any rate, he was successful and received the post with a
salary of twenty dirhams per month. As things were going well, four months
later he submitted a petition for another job on the Ḥaram al-sharīf (number
10 in Table 1.1 and Map 1.1). Here, he asked to be appointed as reciter of
ḥadīth and made his claim that he had done so without remuneration for
twenty years.66 Again, he was successful and received this endowed position,
which carried with it a salary of twenty dirhams per month.
Burhān al-Dīn must have kept all or some of these positions within the
Ḥaram al-sharīf endowment structure throughout the last decade of his life.
While we do not have further diplomas of appointment (or reappointment)
to these positions, his continued employment as reciter is evident from four
payment orders (a very rare document indeed) issued between 781/1379–80
63
64
65
66
Petry, Civilian Elite of Cairo, 252 and in more detail the numerous cases where scholars receive
or buy a salaried position (or a share thereof) mentioned in Ibn Ṭawq’s notebook (cf. El-Leithy,
Living Documents, Dying Archives, 413).
The only alternative interpretation of this document would be that Burhān al-Dīn was the supervisor of this small endowment and had paid al-Ṣafadī’s salary. However, there is also a deputy supervisor named in the declaration, Rukn al-Dīn Baybars, from whom Burhān al-Dīn had previously
received the salary. An administrative structure under which an endowment’s supervisor received
the money from his deputy and then had this declaration produced after paying the money to one
of the endowment’s beneficiaries is rather unlikely.
#305 (8.8.781/1379).
#009 (18.12.781/1380).
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and 789/1387–8, the year of his death.67 In these documents the endowment administration orders (or rather endorses) salary payments for Burhān
al-Dīn. These documents are real gems for those wanting to study the history
of bureaucracy, as we find up to ten signatures by different officials of the
endowment administration on one single payment order.68 However, what
sums were actually paid out for which month(s) has completely eluded us so
far and understanding these very brief but highly complex texts is beyond the
remit of this book.69 The main point for us is that the payment orders always
refer to Burhān al-Dīn holding a post (‘waẓīfa’) as reciter either of mīʿād sessions70 or of the Koran.71
Despite all the positions that Burhān al-Dīn had already secured as a
reciter up to the early 780s, there was seemingly the need (or the opportunity)
to work in other fields as well, namely as a primary school teacher. This was
again a position within the Jerusalemite network of endowments, and again
a rather modest one. We only know of it because he is named in the annual
accounts sheet of a primary school that has – uniquely – survived. These are
the accounts for the year 780/1378–9 of a school endowed by an officer named
Fakhr al-Dīn Īyās (entirely unknown to us except that he might be Buyer 41
in the sale booklet) where Burhān al-Dīn appears as the teacher of orphans
(‘muʿallim al-aytām’; number 7 in Table 1.1).72 Such teaching positions in
primary schools were certainly not held by scholars in the inner circle of the
scholarly world and contemporary sources frequently derided these teachers.73
Burhān al-Dīn received a salary of around twenty-nine dirhams per month.74
The day after the accounts sheet was drawn up, the endowment’s supervisor
seemingly wanted to streamline things and issued a diploma that not only continued Burhān al-Dīn’s appointment, but ‘authorised’ Burhān al-Dīn at the
same time to directly collect his salary from the Jerusalemite shops endowed
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
#665 (781/1379–80), #668 (786/1384–5), #835 (787/1385–6) and #666 (789/1387–8).
#666.
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 128 proposes that #665 refers to 20 dirhams, #668 to 20.5 dirhams
and #666 to 20.5 dirhams as well.
#665, #668 and #666.
#835.
#049. This accounts sheet was drawn up 14.4.781/1379. On this school see Richards, Primary
Education.
Ghersetti, Stupid Schoolteachers.
#049: The annual salary is 348 dirhams.
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for the benefit of this primary school.75 One might read this authorisation as a
demonstration of increasing trust in Burhān al-Dīn, granting him prerogatives
in the endowment’s administration. However, this was a double-edged sword:
Burhān al-Dīn now had to collect his salary in person from shop owners who
might have been more or less forthcoming with their dues. In addition, his
monthly salary was fixed at thirty dirhams and the increased responsibility thus
entailed no increase to his salary.76
In the early 780s/1380s, when he was in his mid-forties, Burhān al-Dīn
thus worked as a primary school teacher and had securely established himself in his home town as a reciter (on the Ḥaram al-sharīf as well as in the
Manṣūrī Ribāṭ, the unnamed madrasa-cum-ribāṭ, the Ṭāz Mausoleum and
the Awḥadīya Mausoleum). In addition, he must have held a position in at
least one further organisation in Jerusalem, the Ṣalāḥīya Khānqāh (number 8
in Table 1.1 and Map 1.1). This khānqāh, or ṣūfī hospice, was founded by
Saladin in 585/1189, two centuries before that in which Burhān al-Dīn lived,
and was an organisation separate from the Ṣalāḥīya madrasa.77 It is one of
the rare pre-Ottoman organisations for which we have the text of the endowment deed (though reworked and summarised in an Ottoman court register
from 1022/1614).78 This deed makes clear that being appointed as a ṣūfī in
this khānqāh entailed two central obligations: reciting the Koran and saying
intercession prayers for the endower. The ṣūfīs thus had to recite the Koran
every day after sunset prayer, perform dhikr, and then pray for the endower.
On Fridays they had furthermore to recite the Koran (either in the building of
the khānqāh or in the Aqṣā Mosque) after sunrise and pray for the endower.
Studying seems to have been a lesser priority, as although the ṣūfīs were meant
to read classics (‘kalām al-aʾimma al-mashāʾikh al-ṣūfīya’) every Friday, the
deed already assumed that this might not be the actual practice and implored
them to study at least ‘on some Fridays’.79 The tasks that came with a position
75
76
77
78
79
#003 (25.1.781/1379).
The twenty-nine dirhams per month of the previous year had probably just been the result of
deductions from his salary of thirty dirhams after he had missed some days of work.
On the khānqāh in general see Fernandes, Evolution of a Sufi Institution. On this khānqāh in particular see Hawari, Ayyubid Monuments, 230–4, Frenkel, Political and Social Aspects and Hofer,
Popularisation of Sufism, 44–6.
Published by al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 81–102.
Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 94.
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in this endowment thus perfectly fit the professional profile that Burhān
al-Dīn had developed.
Burhān al-Dīn was probably appointed in the Ṣalāḥīya Khānqāh in or
shortly before the year 780/1378. We do not know the exact year, but four
documents in the Burhān al-Dīn documentary corpus describe him in passing
as ‘one of the ṣūfīs in the Ṣalāḥīya Khānqāh’80 and the earliest one dates to that
year.81 He probably never left this appointment, as the last reference linking
him to this khānqāh dates from 788/1386, one year before his death.82 Burhān
al-Dīn’s salary in the Ṣalāḥīya Khānqāh is not mentioned in the passing references to him as a ṣūfī and the other sources, such as the Ottoman summary of
the original endowment deed, are silent as well. In the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus
we find the best source for this organisation, an accounts book for two months
of the year 791/1389,83 but it only provides the total amount of the salaries for
all ṣūfīs without an indication of how many there were.
Burhān al-Dīn never secured a position in one of the prestigious madrasas
of Jerusalem, but with the Ṣalāḥīya Khānqāh he managed to get a foothold
in one of the most prominent endowments outside the Ḥaram al-sharīf. It is
arguably for this reason that completely unrelated documents started to name
his affiliation to that organisation as a kind of honorific title. That documents
never refer to him by any of his other positions in the non-Ḥaram al-sharīf
endowments makes this especially noteworthy. His appointment in the
Ṣalāḥīya Khānqāh must thus have been a particularly significant position in
the eyes of his social milieu and a major moment in his professional trajectory.
The ṣūfī element of Burhān al-Dīn’s career calls for one final comment.
Donald Little was struck by the references to Burhān al-Dīn as one of the ṣūfīs
in the Ṣalāḥīya Khānqāh, and in his catalogue entries he faithfully drew the
reader’s attention to this one, rather minor, detail.84 These short references
were taken up in following scholarship and amplified so that ‘Burhān al-Dīn
was a ṣūfī as well as a reciter’85 or simply became a ‘ṣūfī-scholar’.86 However,
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
#289, #336, #509 and #699.
#509.
#336.
#774.
Little, Catalogue, 17, 208, 220, 232 and 247.
Lutfi, Six Fourteenth Century Iqrārs, 289.
Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 45.
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there are two problems with this label. Firstly, Burhān al-Dīn held numerous
positions and stipends in the course of his life that we know of. Only one of
them is in a ṣūfī khānqāh, so why single this one out? Moreover, the references
to him being ‘one of the ṣūfīs in the Ṣalāḥīya Khānqāh’ mostly do not come out
of documents appointing him to a position, but personal documents, such as
deeds by divorced wives or his neighbour’s permission to extend the house.87
Secondly, and much more importantly, the notion of this period’s ṣūfīsm as a
mystical form of Islam purportedly clearly distinct from the rest of society is
no longer tenable. Scholarship has shown that ṣūfī practices spread throughout society88 and it is thus debatable to what extent it is useful to frame Burhān
al-Dīn in terms of purportedly ‘mystic leanings’.89
At the beginning of the 780s Burhān al-Dīn thus had been successively
(or simultaneously) reciter in five different organisations (Manṣūrī Ribāṭ,
unnamed madrasa-cum-ribāṭ, Ṭāz Mausoleum, Awḥadīya Mausoleum and
Ṣalāḥīya Khānqāh), reciter in various endowments on the Ḥaram al-sharīf
and teacher in Fakhr al-Dīn Īyās’s primary school. The numerous positions
Burhān al-Dīn held in endowments show what we mean by the term ‘multiple
part-time reciter’. While he was able to secure a place within the Jerusalemite
landscape of endowments as a reciter, all these positions were of a modest
nature. Burhān al-Dīn had to accumulate several of them and he still had to
moonlight in other posts, such as teaching in a primary school.
Ed
i
The positions that Burhān al-Dīn accumulated are positions far below the radar
of the narrative sources that reported on Jerusalem and its scholars. It is precisely this silence of the sources that makes the social practices of Burhān al-Dīn
as visible from his documentary corpus so important. When reading these
narrative texts, the trajectories of such multiple part-time reciters – and those
of other professional groups to be identified in future scholarship – remain
blurry or even entirely invisible. Burhān al-Dīn might have been a scholar, but
his social world has to be reconstructed from the patchy documentary corpus
87
88
89
Divorced wives: #289 and #699; house: #336.
Hofer, Popularisation of Sufism; specifically for Syria see Ephrat, Sufi Masters and the Creation of
Saintly Spheres.
Haarmann, Library, 332.
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in order to be described in any meaningful sense. This change of perspective
shows the social agency of an individual on the edges of the scholarly world in
pursuing employment opportunities in endowed organisations by developing an increasingly clear professional profile. Reconstructing the biography of
such a peripheral ‘below-the-radar’ individual is also crucial for understanding
the full impact of the increasing number of endowments on urban life in this
period. We thus have here an example of probably quite a large stratum of
middling part-timers who were able to make a living in the networks of endowments without ever making their way into any narrative source.
To apply the catch-all category of scholar, and the implications this term
carries for those described in the chronicles and biographical compendia, is
an exercise of limited usefulness for locating Burhān al-Dīn and his books in
the social fabric of Jerusalem during that period. His world, and that of his
fellow part-timers, was far from the world of those holding the prestigious
positions in the madrasas or the prominent positions in the judiciary, such as
Sarī al-Dīn. For the course of the immediate argument pursued in this book,
the main point established here is thus the relatively modest social world in
which Burhān al-Dīn acted. This, in turn, is crucial in order to appreciate
why the large number of books that he owned matters, and why his intensive
documentary practices matter.
2
Beyond Endowment
n the previous chapter we saw how a multiple part-time reciter such as
Burhān al-Dīn was able to navigate the endowment topography in a town
such as Jerusalem. This chapter will extend the argument on the social agency
of such an individual, who did not belong to the elite circle of his society, and
look at a second strategy that he employed to make a living outside endowed
organisations. The latter part of the chapter will then connect his professional
profile (inside and outside endowments) with those aspects of his personal life
that we are able to detect from the estate archive.
Understanding the second strand of his strategy is crucial if we are to
gain a fuller picture of the social world of peripheral scholars – and get new
insights into the socio-cultural practices of peripheral officers in the late
eighth/fourteenth century. This strand will take us away from the world of
endowed organisations into an environment of institutionalised patterns of
interaction. We have here a phenomenon that is entirely different from procuring salaried positions in endowments, and one that is centred on what is probably best called ‘personal stipends’. Within this second strand Burhān al-Dīn
approaches households on the fringes of the military-political elite, offers a
Jerusalem-based ‘recitation/intercessory prayer package’ to a patron and subsequently receives a monthly stipend outside any endowment structure. We
have seen that his first strategy was embedded within the long-term process
of the growing importance of endowments within the urban landscape that
had especially accelerated under the Qalāwūnids. This second strand, in turn,
is much more difficult to place in the different rhythms of historical developments because it has very low visibility. Patronage was certainly part of the longterm socio-cultural practices of households of the military and political elite.
However, we will argue, this specific form of patronage between peripheral
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scholars and officers is a development specific to the late Qalāwūnid and early
Barqūqid periods in the late eighth/fourteenth century. The institutionalised
practice that we see here complements in that sense the study by Mathieu
Eychenne of personal relationships and networks in seventh/thirteenth- and
eighth/fourteenth-century society.1
Burhān al-Dīn’s Social World beyond Endowments
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Scholarship on the relations between scholars and military-political households
in the medieval period has tended to focus on interactions framed by endowments and payments channelled through endowments.2 This, for instance, is
the perspective taken by Michael Chamberlain in his seminal work, where he
almost exclusively focuses on the endowment as the organisational framework
while stipends beyond such organisations are tucked away in the footnotes.3
In the same vein, scholarship specifically on the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents
and on Burhān al-Dīn has strongly focused on endowments, so that it has not
even identified what we call ‘stipends’ as distinct from his endowed positions.
A typical example of such an endowment-centred view argues, for instance,
that, ‘like [those of ] many other professionals, scholars, and day laborers in
cities throughout the region, [Burhān al-Dīn’s] livelihood depended on these
endowed institutions’.4
We have identified no fewer than six such personal stipends that Burhān
al-Dīn procured from various officer-patrons and these stipends played a significant role in his income (numbers 2, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 in Table 1.1
and Map 1.1).5 All these stipends are strikingly similar, almost to the point of
being identical: Burhān al-Dīn is tasked with reciting a mīʿād and then making
an intercessory prayer for the officer-patron (we find, for instance, the phrase
1
2
3
4
5
Eychenne, Liens personnels, 101–51.
Such as the study on Cairo by Loiseau, Reconstruire la maison du sultan.
Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice (for instance p. 51, n. 75). Forms of patronage
beyond organisations also do not feature prominently in the analysis of Barqūqid political practices by Onimus, Maîtres du jeu, in the overview of patronage practices in Little, Jerusalem under
the Ayyūbids and the Mamlūks, or in the summary of military patronage by Igarashi, Charity and
Endowments.
Luz, Mamluk City in the Middle East, 134. Frenkel, Political and Social Aspects follows the same
argument.
Declarations of intent: #603 (774/1372); #508 (782/1380); #004 (782/1380); #012 (783/1381);
#002 (788/1386); Request: #026 (undated).
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‘he [the officer-patron] gains reward and intercessory prayer from the servant
[Burhān al-Dīn] in the noble places’).6 These recitations are always meant to
take place on the Ḥaram al-sharīf (in or close to the Dome of the Rock, the
Aqṣā Mosque or the Chain Gate on the western façade of the Ḥaram al-sharīf).
All documents spell out in great detail where and when exactly (day and time)
the recitation had to take place (sometimes even the texts to be recited in the
mīʿād session are put down in writing, as we have seen). All stipends are provided by peripheral households of the military and political elite that are hardly
traceable in the narrative source corpus. Those three officer-patrons who can
be geographically located were active in southern Bilād al-Shām (though not
in Jerusalem itself ). The stipend is always for a modest sum of either ten or fifteen dirhams. What we have here is thus a group of institutionalised personal
stipends that are held together by numerous similar characteristics, and that
are clearly distinct from the endowment-related positions of the first group.
The differences between the endowment positions and the personal
stipends are not that evident from the documents at first glance – and these
blurred borders are highly significant. This is the case because the patrons of
these stipends strove to imitate ‘real’ endowment positions and to depict the
stipend in terms of an endowed long-term position. For instance, one of the
documents granting Burhān al-Dīn such a stipend depicts it as being hereditary, and Burhān al-Dīn’s son, in the event that he was qualified to do so, was
meant to succeed his father. This officer-patron even tasks a third party, the
imām of the Dome of the Rock, with the ‘supervision’ of this stipend. The
term used for this task, ‘naẓr’, is exactly the same term as that used for the task
of supervising endowments. As is the case in endowment deeds, the diploma
also stipulates how this supervision is to be passed down once the current
imām steps down or dies.7
While these peripheral officers strove to couch their stipends in terms
reminiscent of endowments, they engaged in a practice that was clearly different from distributing positions in an endowment. They might have intended
this stipend to continue for many years or even decades, but an officer-patron
could simply stop paying the money whenever he wished to – in contrast
6
7
#007, l. 10/11. Similar in #010, l. 6/7 and #013, ll. 8–11.
#002.
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to an endowment position, there was no organisational framework and no
mortmain property with which to secure a stipend’s existence in the long run.
Without considering these documents in more detail, it has been tempting to
see them as identical to the diplomas of appointment for endowed positions
that we have seen in the previous chapter. In consequence, the documents on
positions and stipends have just been bundled and described erroneously as
‘documents, dealing mostly with his application for, and his appointment to,
various positions in Jerusalem pious establishments’.8
The confusion in modern scholarship between endowed positions and
personal stipends is closely linked to the terminology used in the documents
and the way this terminology has been interpreted. Three documents that
award Burhān al-Dīn a stipend start with the term ‘marsūm’, and Donald
Little thus intuitively listed them in his catalogue as ‘decrees’.9 Here they
find themselves in an awkward group with lordly decrees, especially the ones
issued by the sultans in Cairo (such as #008 by al-Malik al-Nāṣir b. Qalāwūn
and #034 by Baybars). The translation of marsūm as ‘decree’ might work very
well for the documents issued by the sultans. The low-ranking officers certainly wanted these marsūm also to be seen as lordly ‘decrees’, but in reality
this term does not catch at all the social function of those documents linked to
Burhān al-Dīn.
Christian Müller has already pointed out that the term ‘marsūm’ can refer
to documents with very different legal implications. He argued that several of
them should rather be called ‘diplomas of appointment’ (Ernennungsdiplome)
as they share few functions with lordly decrees, and we have adopted his term
for documents on endowed positions.10 Yet the marsūms on stipends refer to
very different practices and are more informal than the label ‘diploma’ implies.
It is for this reason that we do not use the term ‘diploma of appointment’ for
these marsūm ‘decrees’, but opt for ‘declaration of intent’.
That neither the label (lordly) ‘decree’ nor (endowment-related) ‘diploma
of appointment’ works for these documents is clearer still when we turn to
those two declarations of intent that do not start with the term ‘marsūm’,
8
9
10
Haarmann, Library, 327.
#002, #004, #012.
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 137–46. In our case e.g. #203 and #214.
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but with ‘yaqūlu’ (‘he says’).11 For this reason Donald Little put them into
an entirely different group in his catalogue. Christian Müller called these
yaqūlu documents ‘declarations’ as they are nothing more than self-binding
declarations without the involvement of third parties. This is also evident in
terms of formality, because they often do not carry witness signatures, which
are omnipresent in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus, and those that do carry such
signatures are much less standardised than those seen on other documents.12
We obviously agree wholeheartedly with this characterisation of ‘our’ two
declarations. Where we differ is in relation to the three documents for stipends
that open with the word ‘marsūm’ – Little’s ‘decrees’ or Müller’s ‘diplomas’.
We argue that these three are, de facto, no different from the two declarations.
All five documents are expressions of exactly the same practice and all five have
thus to be seen, in terms of social and political history, as a coherent group of
documents – declarations of intent.
Once we start to see the personal stipends as a group, a clear pattern of
socio-cultural practices emerges. The six officer-patrons providing the stipends13
are almost invisible in the narrative sources and they were clearly the heads
of minor households within the political structure of the Cairo Sultanate.
These personal stipends allowed such officer-patrons of modest standing to
have pious recitations performed in their name within one of the most scared
spaces in the realm. The alternative approach, to set up an endowment for
this purpose, as their more prominent peers such as Sayf al-Dīn Ṭāz did, was
beyond the financial means of this group of households. Offering patronage
via stipends thus allowed these officers to insert their names into the Ḥaram
al-sharīf ’s soundscape along with those of their more prominent peers.14 What
we have here is thus an institutionalised socio-cultural practice of peripheral
households in the province that would have escaped us had we focused exclusively on endowments to understand the patronage offered by the military
and political elites. These practices have eluded us, as the narrative sources
11
12
13
14
#603 and #508.
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 131–6.
We have five declarations of intent (#002, #004, #012, #508, #603) and one further request to an
officer regarding an existing stipend (#026).
On the topic of pre-Ottoman soundscapes, see the first reflections by Frenkel, Mamluk Soundscape.
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hardly take notice of the low-ranking officer-patrons or the beneficiaries at the
margins of the scholarly world – never mind the relationship between them.15
Once we start to see Burhān al-Dīn’s social practice in more detail we
are able to acknowledge the agency of such an individual. The documents
on the stipends depict a world of grandiose officers granting or bestowing on
him positions, so that scholarship has tended to rank the agency of scholars
rather low in such patronage relationships. There is instead a much more fascinating world of an individual who actively procured personal stipends from
individual patrons. Just as ‘court’ chroniclers were not just socially dependent
mouthpieces of their royal patrons,16 Burhān al-Dīn certainly was strongly
positioned in his relationships with his various patrons. Burhān al-Dīn’s
agency in convincing peripheral officer-patrons to issue such declarations of
intent for personal stipends is at first glance unclear, as none of these documents carries his petition. This is a practice clearly distinct from the diplomas
of appointment in endowments, where the vast majority carry Burhān al-Dīn’s
petition on the front.17 Yet clear patterns emerge, most importantly that he did
not approach households across Egypt and Bilād al-Shām, but – as we have
seen – specifically targeted officers who resided in southern Bilād al-Shām: two
of them lived in Gaza and a third officer-patron resided in al-Ramla.18 The
absence of petitions and the geographical proximity make it likely that Burhān
al-Dīn approached these low-ranking officers in person to offer his recitation/
intercessory prayer package. This must have happened either when these officers passed through Jerusalem or when Burhān al-Dīn travelled to nearby towns
such as Gaza and al-Ramla to procure new patrons. The personal stipends that
Burhān al-Dīn procured show indeed a very ‘enterprising’ individual, to return
to Donald Little’s term.
For the peripheral officer-patrons, the act of providing stipends in one of
the most sacred sites controlled by the Cairo Sultanate was highly meaningful
in spiritual and social terms. They clearly did not have the means to set up
15
16
17
18
On the learned activities of those officers who made it into the narrative texts see Mauder, Gelehrte
Krieger (English summary: Mauder, Education and Learning).
Banister, Professional Mobility; Hirschler, Medieval Arabic Historiography.
Such as #007, #009, #010, #013, #305 and #310.
On patronage and investment in the urban infrastructure of medieval Gaza see Amitai, Development
of a Muslim City.
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endowments, unlike their more prominent peers. They were probably also not
able to procure the services of any of the renowned scholars of the town to perform these recitations for them in exchange for their modest stipends. We have
seen that they tried to compensate for their inability to set up endowments
by couching their stipends in terms of endowments. In a similar vein, they
also strove to compensate for the lack of glamorous scholar-clients by describing their humble client Burhān al-Dīn in rather hyperbolic terms. One of the
officers, Shihāb al-Dīn Ḥaydar, described Burhān al-Dīn in his declarations
of intent, for instance, as ‘the lofty seat, the master, the meritorious judge’
(‘al-majlis al-ʿālī al-mawlawī al-qaḍāʾī al-fāḍilī’).19 Documents produced
within Jerusalem, by contrast, use much less exalted titles for Burhān al-Dīn,
typically along the lines of ‘the virtuous, ascetic and worshipping shaykh’
(‘al-Shaykh al-ṣāliḥ al-ʿābid al-zāhid’).20 The officers strove to imitate the
more grandiose world of endowments not only in textual terms, but also in
terms of materiality. Staying with the document by Shihāb al-Dīn Ḥaydar,
this is also materially one of the most impressive objects that Burhān al-Dīn
ever received. At fifty-nine centimetres in length this scroll is the longest document in the Burhān al-Dīn documentary corpus and the text was written upon
the sheet with very generous line-spacing. The terminology and the materiality of this document were clearly meant to impress those who saw the scroll
and imply that a prominent officer was hereby tasking a famous scholar. The
aim was to reproduce the documentary splendour of the endowment-related
decrees of the political elite and to attach themselves to the material documentary world of their prominent peers.
If we now chronologically map Burhān al-Dīn’s strategy of procuring personal stipends onto the first strand of him acquiring more and more positions
in the endowments of Jerusalem, we see that the timeline fits neatly. As we saw
above, he spent most of the 770s building up his standing in more and more
endowed organisations, and in the 780s he was able to move to endowed positions on the Ḥaram al-sharīf. After Burhān al-Dīn had secured these multiple
modest positions his prospects for further employment were rather limited,
as the better-paid positions in endowments required more scholarly training
19
20
#004, l. 5. On the term majlis in documents see Guo, Commerce, Culture and Community, 22–4.
#303 and #005.
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than he probably possessed. The timeline of his personal stipends thus has to
be set against this background: he only procured one such personal stipend in
the 770s,21 but in the 780s he received four of them (the document for the sixth
stipend is undated, but most likely also refers to the 780s when he was juggling
many positions and stipends).22 He thus not only used his positions in different endowments to acquire endowed positions on the Ḥaram al-sharīf, but
he also successfully intensified his activities to procure personal stipends from
peripheral officers across southern Bilād al-Shām. Considering the intimate
link between the political elites and the world of ṣūfism, it is highly likely that
Burhān al-Dīn became an even more sought-after reciter after he had attached
himself to the Ṣalāḥīya Khānqāh. In addition to those stipends known to us,
there were most likely more attempts by Burhān al-Dīn to procure stipends
from other officers. Some of them might have been successful, but for some
reason the declaration of intent has not come down to us, and other attempts
certainly failed and left no paper trail.
Burhān al-Dīn acquired his first such stipend in 774/1372 when an
otherwise unknown officer, Salāma b. Abī Bakr al-Fāriqānī, identified as the
‘chamberlain in Gaza’, declared his intention to pay him the modest sum of
fifteen dirhams a month (number 2 in Table 1.1 and Map 1.1). In exchange,
Burhān al-Dīn was to recite mīʿād sessions in the officer’s name on Tuesdays
(in the Aqṣā Mosque after morning prayer) and Fridays (in the Dome of the
Rock after morning prayer, then at the Chain Gate after afternoon prayer
and finally once again in the Dome of the Rock between sunset and evening
prayers).23 Six years later, in 782/1380, we see further stipends: first, a certain
Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Shādī, identified as ‘al-janāb al-karīm’ from al-Ramla
and otherwise again entirely unknown, promises the very modest sum of ten
dirhams per month (number 12 in Table 1.1 and Map 1.1). Burhān al-Dīn
was to recite in his name at the Chain Gate three times a week: Tuesday mornings, Wednesday mornings and Friday after the noon prayer. In this document
we also find one of the lists of the texts that Burhān al-Dīn was to recite.24
21
22
23
24
#603 in the year 774/1372.
#508, #004, #012 and #002.
#603.
#508. This officer seemingly endowed a zāwiya in al-Ramla (al-Khaṭīb, Qiṣṣat madīnat al-Ramla,
84).
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26
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28
29
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Within ten days another officer, the above-mentioned Shihāb al-Dīn Ḥaydar,
issues his impressive scroll and declares his intent to pay Burhān al-Dīn at
least fifteen dirhams per month (number 13 in Table 1.1 and Map 1.1).25 He
wanted Burhān al-Dīn to recite on four days a week: Tuesdays (in the Dome of
the Rock between sunset and evening prayers), Thursdays (again in the Dome
of the Rock between sunset and evening prayers), Fridays (at the Chain Gate
after the noon prayer) and Saturdays (in the Aqṣā Mosque between sunset and
evening prayers).26
A year later, Burhān al-Dīn procured his next personal stipend in 783/1381
from the officer ʿAlī b. Qōjā al-ʿAlāʾī (number 14 in Table 1.1 and Map 1.1).27
Al-ʿAlāʾī tasked Burhān al-Dīn with reciting mīʿād for his ‘spiritual reward’
(thawāb) every day of the week after morning prayer opposite the Dome of the
Rock.28 Five years later, in 788/1386, the officer ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Aqbughā Yankī,29
described as the ‘former chamberlain in Gaza’, promises him a stipend of ten
dirhams per month (number 15 in Table 1.1 and Map 1.1). This document
does not refer to a new stipend, but it does mention that Burhān al-Dīn is to
‘continue’, so he must already have held this stipend. This is one of the documents in which we find a list of the texts that Burhān al-Dīn was to recite. For
this officer-patron Burhān al-Dīn was to recite three days a week in the Dome
of the Rock: Thursdays (after sunset prayer), Fridays (before noon prayer)
and Sundays (after morning prayer).30 Finally, we have the undated request by
Burhān al-Dīn addressed to another officer-patron, a certain Ibrāhīm b. ʿUmar
Ṣārim al-Dīn (number 16 in Table 1.1 and Map 1.1).31 In this request, Burhān
Ibn Ḥajar, Inbāʾ al-ghumr, I, 156 reports that a new governor of Sinjār was appointed, a certain
Ḥaydar b. Yūnus, known as Ibn al-ʿAskarī. who might be identical with this officer (we thank
Jo van Steenbergen for this reference).
#004.
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 145, n. 438 assumes that this was not an officer because the relational name (nisba) linking him to a Sultan is missing. However, ʿAlī uses the titles ‘al-mawlawī’
and ‘al-makhdūmī’, in addition to the interlinear ‘al-janāb’ between lines 6 and 7. These points
make it likely that this ʿAlī hailed from the military and political elite.
#012.
Al-Bayrūtī, no title, Oxford Bodleian Ms. Marshall 36, fol. 62v reports for the year 772 that
Aqbughā Yankī, one of the ten amirs, was banished to Tripoli (we thank Jo van Steenbergen for
this reference).
#002.
#026. The name of ‘al-Mamlūk Ibrāhīm b. ʿUmar al-Ṣārimī’ written in the margins of lines 2 to 4
has caused considerable confusion in scholarship. As al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 206 already
pointed out, we would normally expect to find the petitioner’s name in this position, which is
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al-Dīn writes that he currently recites for him in the Aqṣā Mosque four days a
week after morning prayer (on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays).
He asks his patron to agree to a streamlined schedule of recitations in his name:
on Mondays after sunrise at the Chain Gate, after noon prayer on Tuesdays
in the Aqṣā Mosque, and on Fridays after morning prayer, also in the Aqṣā
Mosque.
On account of Burhān al-Dīn’s increasing connections with the peripheral military and political elite in the region, we also observe that he branched
out into another professional activity. In the early 780s/1380s he is appointed
as legal proxy (wakīl) by an officer called Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Sayf al-Dīn
Bustumur (number 11 in Table 1.1).32 In this function Burhān al-Dīn was,
in particular, to look after the officer’s modest entitlement of one dirham
per day from the ‘Dīwān al-Qumāma’, which is linked to the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre.33 In line with what we saw on the declarations of intent for
personal stipends, this officer also somewhat exaggerated Burhān al-Dīn’s
scholarly credentials and the wikāla document called him a scholar of ḥadīth,
a ‘muḥaddith’.34 Burhān al-Dīn was beyond doubt a reciter of ḥadīth and on
the basis of the many posts and stipends he held one has to assume that he
must have been quite talented. Yet there is little indication in those documents
produced within Jerusalem that there was any claim that he was a scholar of
ḥadīth transmission or even ḥadīth interpretation that would warrant the use
of the term ‘muḥaddith’.35
32
33
34
35
clearly not the case. Little, Catalogue, 52 interprets this name as ‘the addressee’, but it would be
fairly unusual for a petitioner to address his patron as ‘al-mamlūk’. Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen,
132, n. 377 interprets the name as that of the issuer (though Ṣārim al-Dīn did not issue this document), but also states that it is the name of Burhān al-Dīn (133). The most likely scenario is that
Burhān al-Dīn wrote this request and sent it to his patron, who endorsed it (admittedly in a very
unusual way) with his name in the margins and sent it back. This is especially likely as this request
must have been returned to Burhān al-Dīn for his personal archive and have finally ended up in the
Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus. (On this issue, see Chapter 3.)
#490 (781/1380).
The ‘Dīwān al-Qumāma’ levied taxes on Christian pilgrims (al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya,
II, 140 and al-Ṣafadī, al-Wāf ī, I, 312 [biography of Ibn Nubāta, d. 768/1366]). On such taxes see
Lutfi, Al-Quds al-Mamlûkiyya, 134–6; on ahl al-dhimma in the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents see
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, al-Taʿāmulāt al-qaḍāʾīya. In contrast to our reading of this document, Müller,
Kadi und seine Zeugen, 170 argues that Burhān al-Dīn himself was entitled to one dirham per day.
#490, l. 5.
The only other document where this term is used is #843, a receipt for payment of rent
(see Appendix 2).
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If we consider the positions in endowment and stipends together, Burhān
al-Dīn had an impressive number of jobs. As we have seen, the problem we face
is that we do not know how long most of them lasted, and it is thus impossible
to say with certainty exactly how many part-time positions he held at any given
point. However, it is possible to take a sample year and make an argument
about his positions and stipends for that period. For this purpose we can take
the year 782/1380–1. To avoid overestimating we will discard the earlier positions from the 770s/1370s in the Manṣūrī Ribāṭ and the unnamed madrasacum-ribāṭ, as well as the personal stipend that he had received in 774/1372
from Salāma b. Abī Bakr al-Fāriqānī, as we do not know whether they were still
ongoing. Even with this rather cautious approach, we see that he most likely
held no fewer than nine positions and stipends in the year 782/1380–1. These
are those in the Ṭāz Mausoleum (we have a diploma of reappointment from
late 780),36 in the Awḥadīya Mausoleum (he was appointed in late 780),37 in
the Ṣalāḥīya Khānqāh (a document from 782 describes him as one of its ṣūf īs),38
as reciter of mīʿād on the Ḥaram al-sharīf (we have a diploma of reappointment from 78139 as well as a payment order for this year40), as reciter of ḥadīth
again on the Ḥaram al-sharīf (we have his diploma of appointment from 781)41
and as teacher in Fakhr al-Dīn Īyās’s primary school (we have his diploma of
appointment from 781).42 In addition, he held two personal stipends from
officer-patrons (two declarations of intent date to 782)43 and worked as legal
proxy for a third officer (the document dates to late 781).44
With his success in procuring an increasing number of appointments in
endowments and of personal stipends from the late 770s onwards, Burhān
al-Dīn’s schedule must have been rather busy. In our sample year 782/1380–1,
the two stipends alone required him to recite on Tuesday in the morning as
well as between sunset and evening prayers, on Wednesday in the morning,
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
#303.
#203.
#289.
#305.
#665.
#009.
#003.
#004 and #508.
#490.
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between sunset and evening prayers on Thursday, after the noon prayer on
Friday, and between sunset and evening prayers on Saturday. Add to this the
daily tasks for his recitation positions in various endowments as well as his job
as a primary school teacher, and his life must have been packed to the limit.
There are indications that he struggled to manage this schedule. For instance,
the last diploma of reappointment for the Ṭāz Mausoleum mentioned for the
first time that he was to recite for the duration of two hours.45 The four previous diplomas for this mausoleum had nothing to say on this matter except
from generic references to the endowment’s stipulations.46 Had Burhān al-Dīn
started to cut corners to reconcile all his obligations? Are we seeing here a
grumpy endowment supervisor scolding one of his men who tended to rush
his recitations? That one of the declarations of intent by an officer-patron saw
the need to warn him not to miss a single day might also be interpreted in the
same way.47
Previous scholarship has expressed doubts that an individual was actually
able to juggle so many tasks.48 The fact that we find a crutch among the items
sold in the auction (obj7 in the sale booklet) might indicate that Burhān al-Dīn
walked with a limp and that this made his punishing schedule harder still.
There are two possible solutions as to how he carried out the tasks without
cutting too many corners. One possibility is that he sub-contracted tasks,
and we have seen one document that arguably indicated this practice,49 but
this practice would obviously have meant him forgoing a percentage of the
modest salaries. The other and more likely solution returns us to the stipends
he received from officer-patrons, as they provide more details on working patterns. The two stipends he received in the year 782 indicate that things were
complicated, as they required him to undertake recitations at the same time
(Friday after the noon prayer).50 As he procured these two stipends within
ten days, these two Friday recitations must have clashed. The solution for this
clash in his schedule might have been that he performed both recitations at
45
46
47
48
49
50
#014 (785/1383), l. 10.
#310, #007, #303 and #005.
#004.
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 171: ‘chronological overlaps that seem to make it impossible that
all tasks could be fulfilled simultaneously’.
#509 (780/1378).
#004 and #508.
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the same place, the Chain Gate. Burhān al-Dīn thus most likely simply condensed these two recitations into one reading of the texts in question. As he
still spoke the required intercessory prayers after this recitation for each of the
two officer-patrons, he fulfilled his ‘contractual’ obligations. In that sense the
undated request to an officer-patron to change times and places of recitations
might have been driven by the need to condense two or more obligations into
a single recitation. The life of a multiple part-time reciter seemingly required
pragmatic and creative solutions.
If we now start to look at the wider picture, we see that Burhān al-Dīn
was able to convert the sanctity of Jerusalem into employment opportunities
and became a successful participant in the town’s spiritual economy. This
economy was very much driven by the investments that Jerusalem attracted,
as we have seen above, in the form of endowed organisations, but Burhān
al-Dīn’s case shows that there were also mechanisms that have been less visible up until now, and future scholarship will certainly bring up further such
mechanisms. One example worth pursuing, one particularly fitting for a book
on books, is the endowment of individual books, in contrast to endowments
of full-scale libraries. We are still in the early stages of understanding the preOttoman history of libraries in Jerusalem, but work by Bashir Barakat has
unearthed many relevant codices endowed by members of the military and
political elites.51 Arguably, we have here cases of modest officers endowing
individual codices to insert themselves into existing libraries. Burhān al-Dīn’s
strategy thus drew on one aspect of a much wider spectrum of socio-cultural
practices in which low-ranking officers’ households inserted themselves into
the material and social landscapes of Jerusalem.
That we are able to see the case of Burhān al-Dīn simply comes down to
the survival of the extraordinarily rich documentary corpus linked to him.
These documents are of particular importance, as in the entire Ḥaram al-sharīf
corpus the only declarations of intent by officer-patrons for stipends (whether
couched in terms of marsūm or yaqūlu) are the five linked to Burhān al-Dīn.
To stress it again: that only the Burhān al-Dīn documentary corpus preserves
such documents is not because he was such an unusual character, but because
the survival of this corpus is unique, as we will discuss in the following chapter.
51
Barakat, Tārīkh al-maktabāt al-ʿarabīya.
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What we have here are thus traces of socio-cultural practices beyond the political and scholarly elites that are certainly worthy of further pursuit on the basis
of other documentary corpora. This is especially promising because the field
of Mamluk Studies has started to take note of the role of minor households in
other contexts, such as important archival actors.52 Similar lines of research are
already pursued for other periods, such as Marina Rustow’s work on Geniza
documents for the Fatimid period, where she argues that they give insight into
‘the day-to-day logistics of rule, which the chronicles mention obliquely or
not at all, since they tend to train their gaze on the ruling elite and the military
while ignoring the mid- and lower-level officials’.53
To understand how Burhān al-Dīn’s life fits into in the wider scheme of
things, we need to return to the question raised at the beginning of this section
on the historical contexts of the two strategies that Burhān al-Dīn pursued.
As for his first strategy of securing positions in endowments, the process of
waqfisation and the increasing role of households as central building blocks of
the political system were crucial. These developments are closely linked to the
concept of the ‘military patronage state’, where the field of politics is peopled
by households who compete for influence, economic resources and cultural
capital. Analysing political authority in these terms is closely linked to how Jo
van Steenbergen conceptualised late Qalāwūnid politics as more than turmoil
and chaos.54 This competition between households also led to distinctive forms
of the mediation of power that entailed a blossoming of endowments, which
led to distinctive new layouts and skylines in the cities of Egypt and Syria.55
Against this background, the case of Burhān al-Dīn securing salaried positions
within the endowment landscape of Jerusalem is a typical product of the massive investment by the military-political elites in the urban infrastructure.
This raises questions about the context within which Burhān al-Dīn
was able to secure his stipends. He secured patronage from modest military
households with rather limited political influence which strove to translate
52
53
54
55
Livingston, Paperwork of a Mamluk Muqṭaʿ.
Rustow, Jews and the Fāṭimid Caliphate, 170.
Van Steenbergen, Order out of Chaos.
Van Steenbergen, History of the Islamic World, 241–3. For the example of Gaza see Amitai,
Development of a Muslim City and for the other towns in Palestine see the inscriptions in Sharon,
Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palestinae.
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their limited economic resources into the most splendid cultural prestige
possible. Were these socio-cultural practices specific to the period in question, that is, the late Qalāwūnid (up to 784/1382) and early Barqūqid period
(784/1382–791/1389)? The problem for any such diachronic argument is
that the absence of similar documents from earlier periods cannot be taken as
an indicator that such practices did not exist – this might simply be an indicator of the special status of the documentary corpus linked to Burhān al-Dīn.
However, there are indications that there is at least some diachronic specificity
to this second strand. Clément Onimus has provided a detailed account of
the Barqūqid reign (784/1382–815/1412), when the sultans attempted to
strengthen their position vis-à-vis the households of the officers and to pacify
the political landscape. These attempts ultimately failed; this period witnessed
rather the continuation of the patterns of intensive household competition
from the late Qalāwūnid period, and in many cases even an intensification of
this competition.56
This development of continuing household competition might in turn
be combined with Bethany Walker’s analysis of ceramic artefacts as evidence
of political transformations.57 Walker shows that in the course of the eighth/
fourteenth century the broadening of the group of officers meant also a broadening of artistic patronage well beyond the sultanic household. As a result,
sgraffito ware rose in popularity among peripheral households, and we see
that the style of these artefacts was heavily influenced by the more expensive
items preferred in court culture, such as silk textiles. In a second step, such
vessels were mass-produced and inscribed with generic dedications, allowing
an even wider group of society to participate in their consumption.58 That we
see peripheral officers as patrons of non-endowed recitation sessions can be
seen as a parallel development. Arguably, we have here another socio-cultural
practice that spread widely in the military elite and in which more households
could participate. These recitation sessions were designed with an eye on
the ‘real’ endowed practice. This urge to imitate the more capital-intensive
endowment is particularly evident in how the declarations of intent strove to
56
57
58
Onimus, Maîtres du jeu.
Walker, Ceramic Evidence (we thank Jo van Steenbergen for drawing our attention to this article).
Walker, Ceramic Evidence, 88.
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imitate decrees. Yet just as the new patron of ceramic ware could not afford
silk textiles, the patrons of Burhān al-Dīn (and probably many similar patrons)
could not afford a full-scale endowment. The socio-cultural practice of offering ‘cheap’ stipends was thus arguably a practice adopted by members of the
military-political elite who were not able to establish their patronage relationship with wider society via endowments. Rather, they strove to frame this
practice in terms which seemed to imply a replication of offering patronage
via endowments, but which represented a de facto reconfiguration of how
political power was mediated and who was mediating it.
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So far, we have seen what a peripheral scholar in Jerusalem made of the limitations and opportunities offered by endowment and patronage in the late
eighth/fourteenth century. This reconstruction of Burhān al-Dīn’s professional life and the two strategies associated with it drew on the twenty-four
documents that refer to his working life. There are almost thirty further documents that offer unique insights into the personal life of this multiple part-time
reciter.59 This extensive documentation will allow us to examine how the social
timeline that we have seen so far with reference to paid positions and stipends
played out in other aspects of his life, where he appears as husband, widower,
divorcee, father and house owner. In this section we thus move away from
looking at his life in terms of the wider argument and strive, rather, to sustain
the arguments built up so far on the social world of such an individual with the
unique information that we have on him.
Burhān al-Dīn was the head of a household, with the typical complicated family relationships that we see with so many individuals of his period
(Figure 2.1). In particular his marital relationships were complex, and they
fit with Yossef Rapoport’s dictum that ‘[t]he pre-modern Middle East was
another traditional society that had consistently high rates of divorce over
long periods of time’.60 Burhān al-Dīn entered into marriages with at least four
women: Fāṭima (prosaically called ‘Fāṭima 1’ in the following), Maryam bt.
59
60
Eleven documents produced during his lifetime and seventeen documents on the settlement of his
estate.
Rapoport, Marriage, Money and Divorce, 2.
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ʿUmar,61 Fāṭima bt. ʿAbd Allāh b. Fahd al-Khalīlī and Shīrīn bt. ʿAbd Allāh.
His numerous marriages, combined with the fact that two of his wives had
the same name and, to make things more confusing still, both had a son called
Maḥmūd, has led to confusion in previous scholarship.62 There is no conclusive proof that Burhān al-Dīn had more than one wife at any given moment.
These marriages could have been successive marriages, because one of his wives
(Fāṭima 1) died and two of his marriages (with Maryam bt. ʿUmar and Fāṭima
bt. ʿAbd Allāh) ended in divorce. The two divorces were in the last decade of
his life, and prior to this period he most likely did not have the financial means
to entertain a large-scale household.
Even if the documents do not provide any dates for his marriages, we can
establish a rough timeline that is relevant for the argument we make later on
how he moved closer to the social elite of the town. Burhān al-Dīn certainly
was already married to Fāṭima 1 in 778/1376 when their son Maḥmūd Kamāl
was born,63 but we regrettably do not know when she died as the document
on the division of her estate is undated.64 The marriage with Fāṭima bt. ʿAbd
Allāh must have ended in late 782/1381 when she issued an acknowledgement
deed stating she had no further claims against her former husband from the
marriage, but noting that she was three and a half months pregnant with his
child.65 Fewer than fifteen months later the (probably childless) third marriage
with Maryam came to an end, as is evident from her acknowledgement deed
dated to early 784/1382.66 Burhān al-Dīn must have quickly remarried (or else
had already entered into this fourth marriage at an earlier point), as is evident
from a document produced five months after Maryam’s acknowledgement
61
62
63
64
65
66
#699 (see Appendix 2).
Other documents from the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus show that the practice of giving the same name
to one’s children was not uncommon. We find for instance three brothers called ‘Muḥammad the
elder known as the first, middle Muḥammad known as the second and small Muḥammad known
as the last’ (#355a, l. 9/10).
#622 (22.9.788/1386) mentions that he was ten years old (‘al-ʿushārī al-sinn’).
#897 (undated), see Appendix 2.
#289 (782/1381). In her edition of this document, Lutfi, Six Fourteenth Century Iqrārs, 258–62,
does not have anything on pregnancy in her translation and Little, Catalogue also seems to misread the passage. Little, Five Petitions, 368 erroneously states that the other acknowledgement by
Maryam (#699) mentions that she is pregnant.
#699 (12.2.784/1382), see Appendix 2.
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deed. This is a sale contract in which Shīrīn acquires a female West African
slave and is named as the wife of Burhān al-Dīn.67
We hardly know anything else about his four wives, and this includes their
family background. However, it is clear that two of his wives had considerable
personal wealth: Fāṭima 1 left roughly 2,000 dirhams to her son Maḥmūd
Kamāl, her daughter Khadīja, her husband and her mother when she died.68
This substantial inheritance means that Burhān al-Dīn had either married
a wife who was substantially better off than himself or – more likely – that
Fāṭima 1 was financially successful during their marriage and built up some
wealth. She must have kept this wealth separate from her husband’s affairs.
They lived until her death – as we will see below – in very modest accommodation, for which Burhān al-Dīn was paying the rent. Only after her death,
arguably on account of the inheritance and his increasing professional success,
was he able to purchase a house.
Shīrīn, his last wife, must also have been well-off. She wrote a ṣadāq
(dower) of at least 570 dirhams into their marriage contract (this is how
much she received after he died).69 This is a sum that indicates some wealth,
even though it is certainly some way off that enjoyed by the social elite of
the period.70 Shīrīn could also afford to buy a slave for 480 dirhams, more
than half of what Burhān al-Dīn had paid four years earlier for a house.71 In
addition, when Burhān al-Dīn wanted to extend this house some years later,
Shīrīn bought household objects from him, including all the white copper
goods in the house, a wrought iron plate (ṭabaq kīrān), two medium-sized
copper drinking bowls (ṭāsa) and several engraved copper bowls for curdling
milk (zubdīya). For this she paid the considerable sum of 500 dirhams. This
payment was intended to finance the extension, and Shīrīn made sure that a
contract was drawn up in which Burhān al-Dīn undertook to exclusively use
67
68
69
70
71
#382 (17.7.784/1382).
#897 (undated). This document is a draft version without witness signatures and without standard
items such as expenses for porters and brokers. The way a cash sum of eighty dirhams is shared
shows that the division was meant to follow the sharīʿa rules for this constellation (1/4 for husband, 1/6 for mother, 2/3 of remainder for son, 1/3 of remainder for daughter). Yet, the overall
division of the inheritance does not match these shares and the overall sum (and the respective
shares) must thus be taken as approximative values.
#800b, left, l. 6/7.
Rapoport, Marriage, Money and Divorce.
Slave: #382; house: #039.
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the monies for this purpose. In addition, she not only obliged him to hand
over the ownership of these household objects, but she also forced him to
grant part-ownership of the extension to the two sons she had with him.72
That Shīrīn was well-off is also evident from how she handled monetary affairs
after Burhān al-Dīn had passed away. She was, for instance, in no hurry to
receive the monthly obligatory maintenance payment for her two sons from
her deceased husband’s estate. She only collected her entitlement for the first
month of maintenance half a year later.73 By contrast, the guardian of one of
Burhān al-Dīn’s other sons made sure that he received his payment right from
the first month of entitlement.74 This impression of considerable wealth is
corroborated by the honorific ‘al-Ḥājja al-jalīla’ used for her in documents.75
This title implied, according to al-Qalqashandī, prominent social status and is
not a title that was ever used for Burhān al-Dīn.76
Looking at the timeline of Burhān al-Dīn’s marital relationships, it is striking that the early 780s are once again a crucial period: the death of Fāṭima 1 at
some point after 778/1376; divorce from Fāṭima bt. ʿAbd Allāh in 782/1381;
divorce from Maryam in 784/1382; and in the same year Shīrīn appears in the
documentary record as his wife. This is exactly the period when things started
to go increasingly well for Burhān al-Dīn in terms of his professional career. Is
it by chance that he divorced two wives in this period and married Shīrīn, who
came from a wealthy background? Was Burhān al-Dīn marrying closer to the
social elite after increasing his monthly income? We have little hard evidence
to corroborate this hypothesis, but it is at least clear that the two divorces, from
Fāṭima bt. ʿAbd Allāh and Maryam, were ṭalāq divorces initiated by him. This
is noteworthy as we have many other examples from this period where the
divorce was initiated by women. Normatively, women had limited possibilities
for initiating a divorce, but surviving divorce papers of that period, especially
from the Damascus Qubbat al-khazna corpus,77 show that in practice they
could do so. This is visible in the documentary record of the period in the form
72
73
74
75
76
77
#622 (788/1386).
#313 (4.5.790/1388) for the 5th and 6th month of the year 790 in addition to the back payment
for the 10th month of the year 789.
#676 (20.11.789/1387) for the 10th and 11th months of the year 789 (see Appendix 2).
#382.
Hagedorn, Domestic Slavery, 102/3.
Mouton, Sourdel and Sourdel-Thomine, Mariage et séparation à Damas.
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of khulʿa agreements, where the husband agreed to a divorce in exchange for
the wife renouncing her claim to the dower or deferred marriage gift (ṣadāq).
However, in the case of Burhān al-Dīn it was clearly he who initiated these two
divorces as he had to pay the ṣadāq in both cases.
Burhān al-Dīn had at least one daughter and four sons. There might have
been more children, but the archival logic of the surviving documentary corpus
means that only those who were minors at the point of his death, and who thus
were entitled to monthly obligatory maintenance payments and consequently
were mentioned in the relevant documents, are visible. We can be certain that
he and Shīrīn only had two sons, Muḥammad and ʿAlī, who had received a share
in the house extension. Any child born before the sale of the household objects
would have been mentioned in that contract and any child born between this
sale and Burhān al-Dīn’s death less than a year later would have appeared in the
documents on the maintenance payments for children. In addition, all documents mentioning Shīrīn in connection with children exclusively refer to these
two sons.78 He also had two children with Fāṭima 1, a daughter called Khadīja
and a son called Maḥmūd Kamāl,79 born approximately 778/1376.80 Khadīja
must have been the older daughter, as she was not a minor at the point of
Burhān al-Dīn’s death (unlike with Maḥmūd Kamāl no monthly obligatory
maintenance payments are made for her). In this case we can also be reasonably
certain that he had only these two children with this wife, as the document on
the division of her estate would have mentioned any further children.81
With Fāṭima bt. ʿAbd Allāh he had a son called Maḥmūd al-Subāʿī,82 the
child with whom Fāṭima was pregnant when Burhān al-Dīn divorced her.83 An
acknowledgement deed for Burhān al-Dīn for having paid the maintenance
78
79
80
81
82
83
#052, #108, #183, #188, #192 and #313.
This son is called ‘Kamāl’ in #106 (between Muḥarram and Rabīʿ II 790/1388) and #115
(4.9.790/1388). #118 (7.6.790/1388) has him as ‘Maḥmūd al-mulaqqab bi-Kamāl’. #622
(22.9.788/1386), in turn, has him as ‘Jamāl al-Dīn Kamāl’.
#622 (22.9.788/1386) mentions that he was ten years old (‘al-ʿushārī al-sinn’).
#897 (undated).
#111 shows that Maḥmūd al-Subāʿī (as he is named in the document’s text) was also called Jamāl
(as he is named in the archival note on the document’s verso); see Appendix 2.
The nisba ‘al-Subāʿī’ must have been given to Maḥmūd at his birth, as it most likely refers to the
fact that his mother was only seven months pregnant with him: #289, dated to 4.10.782, states that
she has been pregnant for three and a half months, which takes us back to Jumādā II as the likely
date of conception. #458, in turn, gives his birth as 10.1.783, that is, seven months later. It is on
this basis that we argue that Maḥmūd al-Subāʿī (as he is, for instance, named in #111) is identical to
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Shihāb al-Dīn al-Nāṣirī
Zayn al-Dīn Rizq Allāh al-Nāṣirī
Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm al-Nāṣirī
Khadīja
Maḥmūd Kamāl
b. 778/1376
Maryam bt. ʿUmar Shīrīn bt. ʿAbd Allāh
mar. bef. 788/1386
div. 784/1382
ʿAlī
Maḥmūd al-Subāʿī
b. 783/1381
ity
Pr
Figure 2.1 Family tree of Burhān al-Dīn (dotted lines: marriages)
Muḥammad
es
s
Fāṭima 2 bt. ʿAbd Allāh
Fāṭima 1
mar. bef. 778/1376
div. 782/1380
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for his infant son provides us with Maḥmūd al-Subāʿī’s exact birth date,
10 Muḥarram 783/1381.84 This son was, at least in the period after Burhān
al-Dīn’s death, for reasons unknown to us, in the care (ḥiḍāna) not of his
mother Fāṭima, but of his maternal grandmother Umm Muḥammad.85
Our information on Burhān al-Dīn’s children is very limited, as none
of them made it into any narrative sources and they are not mentioned in
any documents other than those linked to Burhān al-Dīn. However, one son,
Maḥmūd Kamāl, deserves further discussion as he is the only descendant who
appears in our sale booklet of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate. Maḥmūd Kamāl, the
son of the deceased Fāṭima 1, is a bit of a special case in various ways. First of
all, he stands out because the other three children receiving maintenance payments after Burhān al-Dīn’s death (Shīrīn’s sons Muḥammad and ʿAlī as well
as Fāṭima bt. ʿAbd Allāh’s son Maḥmūd al-Subāʿī) were in the care of family
members, either mother or grandmother. Thus, whenever the judge’s trustee
(amīn al-ḥukm), who was in charge of settling Burhān al-Dīn’s estate, paid out
84
85
Fāṭimaʿs infant mentioned in #458. By contrast, Müller, in Kadi und seine Zeugen, 175, assumes
that this anonymous infant by Fāṭima had died.
#458 (18.3.783/1381). According to this deed Burhān al-Dīn had to pay maintenance for his
infant son from 10. Muḥarram 783.
#111/1.
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the monthly obligatory maintenance payments for these three children, their
relatives-cum-guardians are mentioned.86 However, the acknowledgement
deeds for Maḥmūd Kamāl are in the name of a certain Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad
b. Aḥmad b. ʿĪsā, who acted as his guardian, but there is no indication that he
was related to the child.87 Before Burhān al-Dīn’s death Maḥmūd Kamāl lived
in his father’s care88 and he must have ended up without a relative looking after
him after his death.
As mentioned above, Maḥmūd Kamāl is the only child who appears in
the sale booklet of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate, referred to as ‘the orphan Kamāl’
(Buyer 20). It is astonishing to find a minor as a ‘buyer’ as this would have
required full legal capacity, and in fact the payment was deducted from the
monthly maintenance payments that Maḥmūd Kamāl’s guardian Shihāb
al-Dīn Aḥmad received.89 The few modest objects that Maḥmūd Kamāl
acquired look like a survival kit for an orphan who has lost his home: he bought
a mat to sleep on with a cover and a blue cushion, in addition to a wooden
stool, a small carpet and half a Koran.90 The fact that his legal guardian received
slightly higher monthly maintenance payments than the other guardians for
the initial months after Burhān al-Dīn’s death (noted as an additional allowance for clothing, kiswa) reinforces the impression of a child left destitute with
no family.91 In the same vein, his guardian must have been particularly keen to
receive this payment, as the first payment for Maḥmūd Kamāl precedes those
for his half-siblings.92
Burhān al-Dīn lived with his family (whatever the respective composition
of this family was) for most of his life in rented accommodation. We have
three rent receipts for a house (dār) for the years 777–8/1375–7 issued by
the house’s owner Fāṭima (who is not identifiable as either of his wives with
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
On this position, see Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 319–23.
#106, #115 and #118. ‘Muḥammad b. Aḥmad’, mentioned in #676, another acknowledgement
deed, is identical with him.
#622 (788/1386), l. 10 where it is said that Maḥmūd Kamāl is under his father’s ḥajr and wilāyat
al-naẓr.
#106 (between Muḥarram and Rabīʿ II 790/1388).
#106, l. 8 and #180, ll. 15–19: (o24) liḥāf yamanī, bisāṭ ṣaghīr, mikhadda zarqā, kursī khashab,
ṭarāḥa, niṣf khatma.
#106.
#800a, left, l. 6.
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the same name).93 We do not know where this house was located, but the
monthly rent of eight dirhams indicates a very modest dwelling. Such rather
low-priced housing certainly fitted this period of his life when he only held
a few part-time jobs, and it shows that Fāṭima 1 had drawn a very firm line
between her wealth and Burhān al-Dīn’s monies. However, with his increasing success in procuring positions and stipends in the late 770s, and perhaps
the inheritance from Fāṭima 1, he bought his own property in 780/1379 for
the sum of 825 dirhams.94 As we will see in the following chapter, the sale
documents of the previous owners also ended up in his hands (and thus in his
estate archive), so that we can follow how these previous owners had developed this property over the previous decade. Nine years earlier, in 771/1369,
one Abū Bakr al-Nassāj had bought a subterranean ‘Roman vault’ and three
adjacent plots of land from different owners for a total of 450 dirhams.95 After
two years, Abū Bakr sold this vault and the plots as one single property to a
certain Maryam al-Rūmīya (not identifiable as Burhān al-Dīn’s wife Maryam)
for the price of 500 dirhams.96 In the following years Maryam built a house on
this property, which she sold five years later, in 778/1379, for 820 dirhams.
The buyer, Muḥammad al-Zaydī, finally sold the property a few days later to
Burhān al-Dīn. These transactions are by themselves full of fascinating stories
(for instance, al-Zaydī forced Maryam to sell the house after she could not
repay her debt) which are regrettably beyond the focus of our discussion here.
This property was located close to the Qanāṭir Khuḍayr neighbourhood
in the northern part of Jerusalem and a street in that area still carries this name
today (‘H’ on Map 1.1).97 The sale contract names the neighbours (in order
to delineate the property’s borders) and we find among them a carpenter
(Ḥusayn al-Najjār) and the descendants of a teacher in one of the madrasas of
Jerusalem (the Arghūnīya).98 Another document shows that a new neighbour
moved in during the subsequent years and this is again an individual carrying
93
94
95
96
97
98
#843 (12.1.778/1376), #850 (30.6.778/1376) and #109 (2.1.779/1377).
#039/1 (21.11.780/1379), #039/2 (23.11.780/1379) and #039/3 (25.11.780/1379). This property purchase is discussed from a legal perspective in wonderful detail by Müller, Ventes de Biens
Immobiliers; see also Müller, Écrire pour établir la preuve.
#369/1, #369/2 and #369/3.
#369/4 and #369/5.
Al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, II, 53/4 names this neighbourhood and describes the wider area.
#369/1, l. 6/7. On the Arghūnīya see Burgoyne, Mamluk Jerusalem, 356–67.
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a craftsman’s name, Muḥammad al-Qaṣṣāb, the butcher.99 In social terms one
can see how Burhān al-Dīn fitted into this neighbourhood inhabited by professionals and craftsmen in the later part of his life. This house was also located
close to all his different workplaces – though one has to say that Jerusalem was
so small that there were few dwellings that would have been inconvenient.
The Ṣalāḥīya Khānqāh was 200 metres away (number 8 on Map 1.1), the Ṭāz
Mausoleum (number 4) and the Awḥadīya Mausoleum (number 5) lay at a
distance of 450 metres and the Aqṣā Mosque on the Ḥaram al-sharīf was the
furthest, at 650 metres.
The house that Maryam al-Rūmīya had built, which Burhān al-Dīn
bought and extended, was on the plusher side of Jerusalemite properties in
this period. It was, according to the sale contract, a two-storey house with an
external toilet (murtafaq) and a courtyard (sāḥa).100 As Nimrod Luz points
out in his survey of buildings in Jerusalem, the presence of such a courtyard
adjacent to a house was not the norm during this period. Burhān al-Dīn’s
house was thus in Luz’s view more generous than the vast majority of dwellings in that period, even though it was not a ‘luxurious house’ (a category that
Luz discusses separately).101 When Burhān al-Dīn extended the house ten years
later, this extension must have been quite considerable and he had to obtain
the consent of the butcher neighbour, whose property was affected by this
project.102 As we will see below, the house and the courtyard were large enough
to accommodate a crowd of some one hundred individuals during the auction
of Burhān al-Dīn’s belongings.
The ability of Burhān al-Dīn to buy this house is an outward expression
of his talent for accumulating part-time positions as well as stipends and thus a
considerable monthly income. The statement that he was ‘not expected to have
been making a profitable living’103 ignores the enterprising nature of Burhān
al-Dīn. If we return to our sample year 782/1380–1, it is possible to calculate
an approximate salary, even though we do not have exact figures for all the nine
jobs that he most likely held in that year. As we do not have any comparative
#336, l. 3 (22.6.788/1386).
#039.
101
Luz, Mamluk City in the Middle East, 76–8.
102
#336 (22.6.788/1386).
103
Lutfi, Six Fourteenth Century Iqrārs, 289.
99
100
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Table 2.1 Burhān al-Dīn’s salaries and stipends in dirhams (numbers refer to
positions given in Table 1.1)
Place/patron
Salary
1
2
4
7
9
10
12
13
14
15
16
Manṣūrī Ribāṭ
al-Ḥaram al-sharīf /Salāma b. Abī Bakr al-Fāriqānī
Ṭāz Mausoleum
primary school Fakhr al-Dīn Īyās
al-Ḥaram al-sharīf (Aqṣā Mosque)
al-Ḥaram al-sharīf
al-Ḥaram al-sharīf / Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Shādī
al-Ḥaram al-sharīf / Ḥaydar al-ʿAskarī al-Manṣūrī
al-Ḥaram al-sharīf / ʿAlī b. Qōjā al-ʿAlāʾī
al-Ḥaram al-sharīf / ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Aqbughā Yankī
al-Ḥaram al-sharīf / Ibrāhīm b. ʿUmar Ṣārim al-Dīn
raṭl bread/day
15/month
15–35/month
30/month
20/month
20/month
10/month
15/month
15/month
10/month
20/month
Pr
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No.
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data for his salary as legal proxy, this cannot be estimated and is thus left out.
His monthly income from the Ṭāz Mausoleum was at this point thirty-five
dirhams,104 from the Awḥadīya Mausoleum most likely fifteen dirhams,105 from
the Ṣalāḥīya Khānqāh most likely fifteen dirhams,106 as reciter of mīʿād on the
Ḥaram al-sharīf twenty dirhams,107 as reciter of ḥadīth on the Ḥaram al-sharīf
again twenty dirhams,108 as teacher in Fakhr al-Dīn Īyās’s primary school thirty
dirhams,109 from the personal stipend from Shihāb al-Dīn Ḥaydar fifteen dirhams and from the personal stipend from Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Shādī ten
dirhams.110 In total Burhān al-Dīn thus drew a total monthly salary of roughly
160 dirhams that year. As there might have been other positions for which no
documents have survived, and as our estimates of undocumented salaries have
been very conservative, we take this figure to be the minimum.
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
The diploma of reappointment from the year 780/1378 (#303) does not mention a salary, but the
diploma from 777/1376 (#007) cites this salary.
The diploma of appointment from the year 780/1379 (#203) does not cite a salary. As Burhān
al-Dīn’s known salaries were mostly between 10 and 20 dirhams, we take a value of 15 dirhams in
these cases.
We only have indirect references to this position (such as in #289). We thus also take the value of
15 dirhams here, though this is certainly a very conservative estimate.
#305.
#009.
#003.
#004 and #508.
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Such a figure is obviously only meaningful when compared with other
salaries and/or prices in Jerusalem from the same period. For this purpose,
the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus of documents with almost 700 documents
dated to only a twenty-year period (between 780 and 800) would seem a
good source of comparative data.111 Yet this is not the case; almost all salaries
mentioned in these documents refer to Burhān al-Dīn alone. However, there
are some comparative sums that might be helpful in putting his salary of at
least 160 dirhams in perspective. As he was able to rent a (modest) dwelling for a monthly rent of eight dirhams and to buy a (rather lavish) house
for 825 dirhams, this salary was certainly very substantial. This seems to be
confirmed when we look at the commercial estate market, as a shop owner
in Jerusalem during this period seemingly had to reckon on paying forty dirhams a month to rent a shop.112 Turning to staple food, we will see in Chapter
6 that Burhān al-Dīn’s household required some thirty dirhams per month in
order to buy bread.
One comparative salary that we do have is for the Ṣalāḥīya Khānqāh. The
accounts for the year 791/1389, shortly after Burhān al-Dīn’s death, provide
the salary for the supervisor of the endowment (nāẓir), who was simultaneously the scholarly head (shaykh) of this organisation. Such senior positions
in the Ṣalāḥīya Khānqāh must have been among the best-remunerated positions in Jerusalem, as it was one of the heavyweights in the town’s endowment
landscape. Holding its leading administrative and scholarly positions at the
same time meant that the post-holder drew two substantial salaries concurrently. The accounts cover a period of one month and twenty days and the
post-holder is paid 771 dirhams.113 This is equal to a monthly salary of circa
460 dirhams for both positions or (assuming that they carried the same salary)
230 dirhams for each position. Burhān al-Dīn’s 160 dirhams thus brought
him close to the salary of one of the more prominent positions in Jerusalem –
though it seems that he had to work much harder for it.
111
112
113
The best overview of the corpus is Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 27–44.
A rent of 40 dirhams is mentioned in two documents linked to Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ḥamawī, #788
and #790. (We thank Michail Hradek/Munich for this reference, who dates both documents – in
contrast to Little, Catalogue – to the year 786/1384.)
#774 (791/1389): 10 Dhū al-Qaʿda (11th month of the calendar) to 30 Dhū al-Ḥijja (12th month
of the calendar); Little, Catalogue suggests that the first day reads ‘20’, not ‘10’.
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To provide a second contextual figure for Burhān al-Dīn’s salary: one
year before his death Sultan Barqūq endowed his combined khānqāh and
madrasa in Cairo. For a sultanic endowment in Cairo we can expect salaries
to be above the average for those paid in Jerusalem. The six shaykhs for law
and tafsīr received between 300 and 500 dirhams, well above Burhān al-Dīn’s
income. Yet the shaykh of ḥadīth at this splendid organisation only received
150 dirhams and the shaykh for Koran recitation 100 dirhams. The other
employees who recited the Koran (there were many such positions) received
around thirty dirhams. Burhān al-Dīn’s 160 dirhams once again did not bring
him close to the best-paid positions in this endowment, but they put him
above the salaries that some shaykhs received in this prestigious organisation
at the heart of the Sultanate.114 Most likely these shaykhs also held numerous
positions so that their total income was still well above that of Burhān al-Dīn.
His income did not make Burhān al-Dīn part of the social elites of his time, but
he was certainly able to secure a salary that allowed him some comfort in the
final decade of his life.
That Burhān al-Dīn was a very successful multiple part-time reciter is also
evident from what happened when he died. Firstly, he was given a splendid
funeral that cost 148 dirhams (more than a sixth of the price of an aboveaverage house).115 Secondly, he left his heirs, in addition to his property, more
than 9,000 dirhams’ worth of personal belongings from his household (among
them books worth more than 7,000 dirhams). True, we only have the sale
prices and we do not know how much he actually spent on these objects.
However, there is no compelling reason to assume that there were significant
rises or falls in the value of goods in his lifetime. Among the valuable items
other than books that he left were his overgarments: a black one with fur that
went for 133 dirhams and two blue ones that fetched 100 and fifty dirhams
respectively.116 One can easily picture them as part of his professional attire
as a successful reciter in Jerusalem. The same is true for a less valuable white
114
115
116
Mostafa, Madrasa, Ḫānqāh und Mausoleum des Barqūq, 166/7.
Accounts sheet #800 has a section on expenses, including 48 dirhams for ‘tajhīzuhu’ (‘preparing
him [for the funeral]’) and 100 dirhams for the cemetery (‘jabbāna’), most likely purchasing the
plot of land, perhaps also a gravestone, etc. The term ‘tajhīzuhu’ and the same sum is repeated in
the accounts #793b, right, l. 2/3. We find the term ‘tajhīz’ in this sense also in documents referring
to other individuals such as #400a, ll. 5–6.
Obj77, obj56 and obj36.
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overgarment, a woollen garment, a long white robe, a white robe of honour,
several other robes and two items of headgear.117
During his lifetime, Burhān al-Dīn was able to accumulate personal
objects worth ten times the price of an above-average house in Jerusalem. This
is impressive, but still some way off the attainments of the affluent members of
Jerusalem’s society of that period. One such affluent individual who is visible
from the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus is the trader Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ḥamawī who died
in 788/1386, one year before Burhān al-Dīn passed away. His estate archive
gives a rare insight into the commercial and social world of a Jerusalemite
merchant of that period. These papers show that he conducted trans-regional
commercial transactions to the value of almost 30,000 dirhams.118 Shortly
before his death he ‘gave’ (the legal procedure was much more complicated)
his son and his daughter 10,000 dirhams each. We do not know how much
money was left in the estate after these gifts, but it must have been substantial:
in the year after his death alone his widow received over 2,000 dirhams in the
form of monthly maintenance payments for their children.119
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The micro-historical analysis of the social life of Burhān al-Dīn has shown that
he belonged to a world of peripheral scholars situated at a considerable distance from the elite scholars in the centre. He certainly did not play in the same
social league as the trader al-Ḥamawī, nor with the scholars who held full-time
positions in the great endowments, or many members of the military-political
elite. Yet his example shows that at least some peripheral scholars could draw
on the rich landscape of endowments in Jerusalem and the patronage offered
by minor households to secure a considerable income. This is relevant for the
main topic of the present study, Burhān al-Dīn’s books, in two ways. Firstly,
his book collection required considerable monetary investment, and it is noteworthy that we find so many books on the shelves of an individual who did not
belong to the social elite of his town. We will return to the question of book
prices in Chapter 6, but the presence of so many books in his house indicates
117
118
119
Obj11, obj40, obj12, obj9 and obj71.
One of his ‘accounts books’, #816b, mentions silk worth 28,790 dirhams that he brought to Cairo
in the year 770/1368 (we thank Michail Hradek/Munich for this reference).
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 175–94.
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that significant book ownership was widely distributed across different social
groups. Secondly, Burhān al-Dīn was also never part of the inner circle of
the scholarly community in cultural terms. He authored no text to qualify
him as a prominent participant in the scholarly world of Jerusalem, let alone
Bilād al-Shām or the wider region. And yet he assembled a considerable book
collection that one would have expected to see in the houses of those scholars
known to us from their own works – not in the household of a rather marginal
multiple part-time reciter.
For the wider field of the study of late medieval history in West Asia and
North Africa, the decisive argument made here is the existence of vivid patronage relationships outside endowments. The personal stipends that Burhān
al-Dīn received indicate how households on the periphery of the political
structure of the Cairo Sultanate were able to engage in wider society. As we
reconceptualise practices of document preservation we are identifying multiple actors and multiple sites well beyond the ‘state’ and large households. The
agency of peripheral military households detected in this chapter underlines
to what extent political authority in general was dispersed across a multitude
of actors.
3
Archival Practices and Pragmatic Literacy
he preceding chapters discussed Burhān al-Dīn’s social world in order to
situate his life, and by implication his considerable book collection, within
the wider society of the late eighth/fourteenth century. Before we start discussing the actual book collection in Chapter 5, this and the following chapter
will contextualise the sale booklet of his estate, the documentary centrepiece
of this book. This will be done by considering first the archival and then the
documentary practices that are visible from this booklet within the framework
of the Burhān al-Dīn documentary corpus and the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus at
large. While the discussion is to a large extent a micro-history of this document’s production and preservation, two principal argumentative strands will
be pursued in the background: one on methodology when working with such
lists, and the other on the spread of pragmatic literacy in this period.
Contextualising the booklet in archival terms is methodologically necessary in order to tackle one very basic question: why did this sale booklet survive
in the first place? This is the only such list of a sale of an estate with books
within the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus of over 900 documents. No other comparable list is known from anywhere in Bilād al-Shām and Egypt for the entire preOttoman period. Are we thus just dealing with an outlier, with an exception
that does not provide any general insights into the wider book culture during
this period? This would obviously render pointless the whole argument of the
previous two chapters, that is, our description of Burhān al-Dīn as a non-elite
member of society who was nevertheless deeply involved in the bookish culture of his time. This argument aimed to show that Burhān al-Dīn’s case could
be paradigmatic for a larger group of book owners who have eluded us so far.
If only one such document was ever produced, however, the paradigmatic
dimension of our argument vanishes into thin air.
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It is thus necessary to discuss 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 in order to sketch their respective
archival trajectories. This discussion will show that the uniqueness of this
booklet today is the outcome of specific archival strategies and decisions, not
necessarily because other such lists were never produced (and the same goes
also for other documents unique to him such as the declarations of intent by
his patrons). These archival strategies, in turn, can only be understood if we
deconstruct what we call today the ‘Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus’, look at its numerous sub-corpora in their own right, and start to listen to the multi-layered
stories they have to tell.
The second argumentative strand of this and the following chapter concerns the degree of literacy in a town such as Jerusalem in the late eighth/
fourteenth century. Addressing the fact that an individual who never made it
into the narrative sources of the period owned such a massive book collection
is obviously the basic point of this book as a whole. The widespread practice
of book ownership within sections of society beyond the elites in the centre
tells us a lot about book culture and ‘book literacy’ during this period. This
theme will be addressed in more detail in Chapter 5 when we discuss the book
collection itself.
Here, a different form of literacy is of interest, pragmatic literacy. As
we have seen, the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus includes no fewer than fifty-four
documents linked to Burhān al-Dīn (his estate archive).1 That we find such
a high number of documents on one such individual indicates how deeply
the written word had penetrated society beyond the world of books by this
point. They show how, in relatively average sections of society, writing, sending, receiving, handling and preserving documents was part of daily life. This
chapter will repeatedly touch on this issue, in particular by thinking about
which social actors handled what documents before they went into the Ḥaram
al-sharīf corpus. The sale booklet of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate itself reflects this
wider writerly world. Burhān al-Dīn never authored a book, and as far as we
know he did not copy any books (at least we could not find his name in any
1
Burhān al-Dīn’s ‘documentary corpus’ (see Appendix 1), by contrast, encompasses fifty-two
documents.
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relevant codex currently located in Jerusalem; see Chapter 7). However, in
his estate we find all the writing equipment one needed: pens, pen knives, a
wooden writing case, two other writing cases, a parchment scroll, scissors and
three pen boxes.2 Widespread pragmatic literacy was certainly not a new phenomenon in the region and we have several fascinating corpora through which
to study this phenomenon, such as the Cairo Geniza(s). Yet for the eighth/
fourteenth century the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus is probably the best starting
point for thinking on this issue.
Archival Practices and the Ḥaram al-sharīf Sub-corpora
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The Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus with its 900-plus documents is a peculiar collection. There is no other large-scale collection from the pre-Ottoman Arabic
lands that has such a compact profile in terms of geography (the vast majority
of documents are linked to the town of Jerusalem), content (the vast majority are legal documents) and period (almost 90 per cent are from the eighth/
fourteenth century).3 Most other collections with such a compact profile are
clearly the product of archival reconfigurations of documents in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries (the Egyptian collections of endowment records in
Wizārat al-awqāf and Dār al-wathāʾiq are the most important such collections
for Mamluk Studies).4 In the case of collections that seem to have a centurylong shared trajectory, such as the Cairo Geniza(s) or the Damascene Qubbat
al-khazna, their profile is much more diverse (most importantly including
books and documents) and their trajectories up to the point of their academic
discoveries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century are certainly
much more complex than hitherto assumed.5
As a result of its compact nature, it was fairly tempting to see the Ḥaram
al-sharīf corpus as one single medieval ‘archive’ and thus also to assume that
this corpus had a continuous and linear shared history. In this sense it was a
historian’s dream – one single and compact corpus with a clear provenance.
2
3
4
5
Obj21, obj37c, obj33, obj68b & obj31, obj67, obj84a and obj37a.
Unless otherwise noted, all numerical information on the overall Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus is drawn
from Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen.
Livingston, Managing Paperwork.
Jefferson, Deconstructing ‘the Cairo Genizah’; Jefferson, Age of Discovery; D’Ottone et al., The
Damascus Fragments.
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Donald Little did not discuss this topic at length, but he repeatedly referred in
passing to a conceptualisation of the corpus as either a court archive or a judge’s
archive.6 This suggestion was taken up in subsequent scholarship and became
one of those free-floating assumptions that gradually become widely accepted
without ever being investigated in any depth.7 Christian Müller, however, put
this assumption under closer scrutiny and convincingly argued that the Ḥaram
al-sharīf corpus has quite a different story. It was not the archive of a court or
judge; this collection of documents was, rather, put together in the framework
of an investigation into a corrupt judge involved in various malpractices. This
Jerusalem judge, Sharaf al-Dīn ʿĪsā b. Ghānim (d. 797/1395), was accused of
misappropriating assets of foundations and properties of notables. As a result,
his ‘line manager’, the above-mentioned Damascene judge Sarī al-Dīn (and
preacher in the Aqṣā Mosque), started to collect documents to investigate
Sharaf al-Dīn’s conduct of affairs and to look into specific cases. This investigation led nowhere as Sharaf al-Dīn died before its conclusion and his main
accomplice Jamāl al-Dīn Maḥmūd, the major-domo of the sultan in Cairo,
met the same fate shortly after. With their deaths the documents assembled in
the course of the investigation must have lost their function, but they stayed
together throughout the following centuries and constitute the majority of the
documents (roughly 60 per cent) in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus.8
With the notion of a simple court or judge archive laid to rest, the Ḥaram
al-sharīf corpus now becomes an even more intriguing site of inquiry into
practices of collecting and preserving documents. On the one hand, as the
Ḥaram al-sharīf documents do not constitute one single and compact archive
they have the ability to tell rich stories of archival practices from the period
before they went into the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus. On the other hand, and
far more importantly, it is far from clear whether the documents we call the
6
7
8
Little, Catalogue, 12/13 (‘There is the distinct possibility, then, that the Ḥaram documents
constitute the remains of archives kept by the Shāfiʿī court in Jerusalem’); also Little, Ḥaram
Documents as Sources for the Arts and Architecture, 62. Little, The Use of Documents, 11/12 (‘being,
I believe, remnants from the archives of a late fourteenth century Shāfiʿī judge’); also Little, Five
Petitions, 350 and Little, Two Petitions and Consequential Court Records, 171. He later revised this
position, e.g. Little, Ḥaram Documents Related to the Jews, 242.
For instance, in Lutfi, Six Fourteenth Century Iqrārs, 248/9 and Hagedorn, Domestic Slavery, 98
(‘surviving section of the Shāfiʿī court archive of Jerusalem’).
Müller, Ḥaram al-Šarīf Collection; Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 509–27.
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‘Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus’ today had a shared history over the centuries – just
as is the case with the ‘Cairo Geniza corpus’ (or rather corpora), as Rebecca
Jefferson has so elegantly shown.9 As we will see, there is a fair chance that the
Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus has a much more complex history, where different
holdings started to acquire this one coherent label at a later date. Both points,
archival plurality and archival trajectory, have a direct impact on how we read
our sale booklet and how we understand its survival.
This inquiry has to be situated within the much wider debate on the
archive (or rather archival practices) in the field of Middle Eastern history. The
point of departure of this debate goes back to Michael Chamberlain, who in
the early 1990s polemically proposed a notion that had implicitly been around
for many decades and that he summarised in his dictum: ‘As a general and
necessarily loose principle, where in the high and late medieval Latin West
collections of documents were on occasion lost by accident, in the Middle
East it was by accident that they survived.’10 His argument met with a very
critical response that underlined the fact that an exceptionally high number of
original documents have survived – certainly more for the early Middle Ages
in the Middle East than in the Latin West.11 However, as Francisco Apellániz
has noted, the production and survival of documents is not necessarily identical to the archival preservation of these documents. Apellániz forcefully argues
against what he calls the ‘materialist explanation’ of brandishing more or less
fragmentary documentary collections as proof of the existence of the Middle
Eastern medieval archive per se.12 In a similar vein, it has been proposed that
the debate on archives should be closed altogether and replaced with a move
towards an examination of ‘cultures of documentation’.13
The debate triggered by Michael Chamberlain has by now developed
well beyond simply pointing to the existence of documents or clinging to
the modern conceptualisation of the archive. Rather, we have two closely
intertwined, and to some extent contradictory, directions of research that are
9
10
11
12
13
Jefferson, Age of Discovery.
Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice, 16.
El-Leithy, Living Documents, Dying Archives, 391; Bauden, Mamluk Era Documentary
Studies, 17; Rustow, Petition to a Woman, 23; Rustow, Lost Archive.
Apellániz, Breaching the Bronze Wall, 38–85.
Pickett and Sartori, Archetypical Archive.
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directly relevant for our discussion here. On the one hand, historians have
started to think about the traces of previous archival collections in those
‘non-archival’ collections that we have today. The main example of this is
Marina Rustow’s forceful argument on the Fatimid archive on the basis of
documents from the Cairo Geniza.14 On the other hand, there is a discernible
trend that considers the pre-Ottoman archive not primarily as a stable spatial
entity centred around one actor, but rather in terms of archival practices.15
These practices were inscribed in specific cultural and social fields well beyond
the central bureaucracy in Cairo. In this conceptualisation the ‘archive’ thus
becomes a set of multifaceted and polycentric processes that are spread much
more widely across society. Daisy Livingstone has conducted the most important work in this regard by identifying the archive of an iqṭāʿ holder in the
Qalāwūnid period and discussing endowment-related archival practices at the
very end of the Cairo Sultanate.16
Any such consideration of archival practices in this way should be linked
to the current reassessment of the pre-Ottoman period mentioned in the previous chapters. In the field of political history, Jo van Steenbergen has been central to reconceptualising the Cairo Sultanate as a polity with structures far less
centralised than we had assumed.17 Of particular relevance for thought about
archival practices is the analysis of political authority as a military-patronage
state organised around numerous competing elite households.18 If we start to
look at this period not primarily in terms of a purportedly highly centralised
state but in terms of households, this has a direct impact on the question of
who handled and preserved documents: the elite households were often the
primary sites of archival practices.19 In that sense, Nandini Chatterjee’s dictum
14
15
16
17
18
19
Rustow, Lost Archive; Several contributions in D’Ottone et al., The Damascus Fragments, discuss
the same issue for the Damascene Qubbat al-khazna.
El-Leithy, Living Documents, Dying Archives; Hirschler, From Archive to Archival Practices;
Livingston, Managing Paperwork.
Livingston, Paperwork of a Mamluk Muqṭaʿ and Livingston, Documentary Constellations.
Van Steenbergen, Revisiting the Mamlūk Empire.
Van Steenbergen, Mamluk Sultanate as a Military Patronage State; Van Steenbergen,
‘Mamlukisation’ between Social Theory and Social Practice; Van Steenbergen, Mamlūk Sultanate.
Hirschler, From Archive to Archival Practices. This emphasis on households as crucial sites of archival practices obviously contradicts Marina Rustow’s argument (in Lost Archive) on the central role
of the Fatimid chancery to some extent. These different lines of argument might be simply down
to diachronic change, but our guess is that we might end up with a vision of a more mixed system
in the various periods.
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on South Asia that the Mughal archives were simply ‘at home’ resonates
strongly with the mounting evidence for late medieval Egypt and Syria.20
Recent scholarship has started to identify the first household archives
of officers who carefully preserved documents as proof of rights and status.21
These household archives rarely had a stable trajectory up to the present day
and many of these collections are lost or have been heavily reconfigured. It
thus takes particular acumen to identify them, as Boris Liebrenz has done
while working on documents reused for the pasteboards of a book.22 There
are also remnants of other documents that we argue come from household
archives, such as the notebook of the historian al-Maqrīzī (d. 845/1441)23 and
an autograph copy of the Muʿjam by Ibn Ḥajar (d. 852/1449).24 These deeds
had been cut into pieces and the authors reused them as writing material for
their respective work.
If we recalibrate our archival vision from ‘state’ to households, we start
to see that archival practices were widespread across different sites in society
well beyond the archives in the citadels of Cairo and the other major cities. In
order to understand the multitude and complexity of archival practices in a
society such as that of the Cairo Sultanate it is not only necessary to include
spatiality in our analysis: one further crucial notion is that of time. Daisy
Livingston has underlined the importance of archival ‘life-spans’ that are in
turn closely linked to documentary ‘life-cycles’ in studying the preservation
of documents.25 Introducing the notion of time further allows the recalibration of our focus away from the archive with the implied connotation of
long-term (or unlimited) preservation, towards archival practices involving
a multitude of social actors who preserved documents for different purposes
with different time frames in mind. A modest trader’s accounts book, as we
have discussed elsewhere, was thus subject to different archival practices at
20
21
22
23
24
25
Chatterjee, Negotiating Mughal Law, 234.
Livingston, Paperwork of a Mamluk Muqṭaʿ.
Liebrenz, Archive in a Book.
Bauden, Destin des archives, 38; Bauden, Recovery of Mamlūk Chancery Documents.
Ibn Ḥajar, Muʿjam, MS Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Murad Molla 609. We thank Benedikt Reier for
drawing our attention to this codex.
Livingston, Managing Paperwork. For the question of time in studying documents see Bertrand,
Documenting the Everyday for the medieval European context, especially Chapter 1, ‘The
Life-expectancy of Documents’.
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various stages of its life cycle.26 In the trajectory of documents, phases such as
those when they are ‘documents lying around’ are crucial for our understanding of why and how they were preserved.27 Benedikt Reier, in turn, shows
how scholarly documents were reworked in multiple stages to feed into biographical compendia.28
Factoring in time in order to make sense of archival practices is highly
relevant for the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus. The notion of a court or judge archive
with a stable trajectory of 600 years has been laid to rest, but the documents
still have an archival history – or rather, numerous archival histories. To extract
these histories we have to think about the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents in terms
of archival traces of previous archival collections in the plural, and also in terms
of polycentric archival practices. That the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus is in itself not
one single central court archive does not mean that we can sit back and ignore
the potential of what its constituent sub-corpora can tell us about document
preservation in pre-Ottoman West Asia and North Africa. In this perspective,
even the sub-corpus assembled in the course of Sarī al-Dīn’s investigation can
be understood as an archival collection with a short time span for the purpose
of holding the judge to account. The documentary profile of this ‘investigation archive’ was strongly shaped by its function of informing an inquiry into
the malpractices of Sharaf al-Dīn and his associate Jamāl al-Dīn Maḥmūd, and
many documents in today’s Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus are linked to Sharaf al-Dīn
in one way or another (addressed to him, issued by him, discussing matters
related to him, written under his supervision and so on).29 A particular focus of
the investigation into his malpractices, as reflected in the corpus’s profile, was
estate inventories, as this was a process particularly susceptible to embezzlement. Almost half of all the documents in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus are such
inventories – and most of them were produced during Sharaf al-Dīn’s short
tenure of the judgeship between the years 793/1391 and 797/1395.30 Yet there
are also many documents in the investigation archive that have nothing to do
with estate inventories and that were brought in from other archival spaces.
26
27
28
29
30
Aljoumani/Hirschler, Trading Fruits and Legumes.
Livingston, Paperwork of a Mamluk Muqṭaʿ.
Reier, Documents in Books.
Müller, Ḥaram al-Šarīf Collection, 436.
Müller, Ḥaram al-Šarīf Collection, 391.
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Analysing the investigation archive by itself will thus yield many new
archival trajectories, but there are also many Ḥaram al-sharīf documents that
do not belong to this particular archive. These documents add further dimensions of archival plurality that are crucial for the discussion of the Burhān
al-Dīn documentary sub-corpus and our sale booklet. For instance, the Ḥaram
al-sharīf corpus contains Sultanic decrees, mostly on the endowment of the
Ḥaram al-sharīf, with no connection whatsoever to the investigation. They
include decrees issued by al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Baybars some 150 years prior to
the investigation, by al-Nāṣir Muḥammad Ibn Qalāwūn a century earlier and
by al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Jaqmaq fifty years after the investigation, and another
issued seventy years after it by al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Khushqadam.31 Apart from
the ‘Sultanic decree subcorpus’ (and it is highly likely that this is indeed an
independent sub-corpus with its own history), another group of over two
dozen documents is concerned with the day-to-day administration of the
Ḥaram al-sharīf endowment in the early fourteenth century. The documents
in this ‘administrative endowment subcorpus’ are all linked to Palestinian villages endowed to the Ḥaram al-sharīf.32 One of the most visible sub-corpora
is the Persianate sub-corpus of seventy-six documents, of which twenty-one
are related to the Ādūjī b. Yāzilī family. These Persianate papers date from the
end of the thirteenth century onwards, with a cluster from the first half of the
fourteenth century – up to a century before the investigation into Sharaf al-Dīn
started. They were mostly issued in the regions ruled by the Mongol Chubānid
and (probably) Jalāyirid dynasties. Again, this ‘Ādūjī family subcorpus’ certainly has no connection to the investigation archive – and also not to the
Sultanic decree sub-corpus or the administrative endowment sub-corpus – and
must have its own fascinating story.33 All these ‘frozen’ sub-corpora have
not been properly researched yet as remnants of once-independent archival
collections.34 A crucial task of our field will thus be to ‘excavate’ those – and
31
32
33
34
Baybars: #034 (664/1266); Ibn Qalāwūn: #008 (701/1302); Jaqmaq: #308 (844/1441?);
Khushqadam: #001 (866/1462). On the Sultanic decrees see Muḥammad, Marsūm al-Sulṭān
al-Ashraf Īnāl.
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 160–2; Richards, Qasāma in Mamlūk Society.
Zahir Bhalloo (Hamburg) is working on these documents in the framework of his project ‘The
Persian Documents from al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf in Jerusalem, 1300–1353’.
On the idea of the ‘frozen’ archive and its excavation see Livingston, Managing Paperwork.
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further – archives from within the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus and many other
modern-day corpora – to conduct archival archaeology.
There are further very distinct and substantial sub-corpora within
the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus where a link with the investigation archive is
unlikely. One of them is the ‘al-Yaghmūrī household archive’, which consists
of documents linked to the household of the officer and short-time governor of Jerusalem Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Yaghmūrī (d. 811/1408).35 Two
sub-corpora are of particular relevance for the present discussion. These two
groups of documents – we call them ‘estate archives’ – are each centred on
an individual: the wealthy trader Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ḥamawī and our multiple
part-time reciter Burhān al-Dīn.36 The number of documents in these subcorpora is impressive: ninety-one sheets (al-Ḥamawī) and fifty-four sheets
(Burhān al-Dīn).37 What we have in both cases are clusters of documents that
are clearly distinct from the enormous number of estate inventories that go
back to the investigation archive. The vast majority of the estate inventories are
the only document we have pertaining to a given individual and there are no
further documents on them in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus. There is, however,
no doubt that many of these estate inventories must have triggered a lengthy
process of settling the individual’s estate and thus many more documents.
Repeatedly, these inventories sketch a highly complex network of financial
obligations whose elucidation would require much more paperwork than
the single inventory available to us. A certain Nafīsa who traded agricultural
products is just one example. Looking at who seemingly owed her money
and to whom she owed money, we can see that her (lost) estate archive must
have been quite large.38 Yet all those documents that must have once formed
Nafīsa’s estate archive are gone and all we have is what was deemed necessary
by those building up the investigation archive, the inventory of her estate. The
sub-corpora of al-Ḥamawī and Burhān al-Dīn are thus not special because
their production was unique, but because they survived as entities – their
special status was thus the outcome of specific archival practices.
35
36
37
38
So far we have identified documents #023, #024, #600, #602 and #841 as belonging to this household archive.
Research on al-Ḥamawī’s accounts is part of the Ph.D. thesis of Michail Hradek (Munich).
The number for al-Ḥamawī is taken from Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 175.
Lutfi, Documentary Source.
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The role of the ‘formal’ sub-corpus of individual inventories within the
investigation archive is evident, as these inventories were required to get to
the bottom of what Sharaf al-Dīn was up to. But, there is no immediate link
between this investigation and the Sultanic decree sub-corpus, the Ādūjī
family sub-corpus, the administrative endowment sub-corpus or the two
estate archives of al-Ḥamawī and Burhān al-Dīn. Why should the contract for
the sale of a slave belonging to one of Burhān al-Dīn’s wives, Shīrīn, be part
of the investigation archive, or the papers for his divorce from Fāṭima? While
the investigation archive is beyond doubt a central element in the story of the
Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus, it is not the same as the collection as a whole. We have
to think about the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus as an object with many different
parts with different micro-histories, a ‘distributed object’ so to say.39 It is thus
time to look at its constituent parts, its sub-corpora, in their own right and
bring to light their very different trajectories and background stories. While we
will do this here for the Burhān al-Dīn sub-corpus, the archival micro-histories
of the Sultanic decree sub-corpus, the Ādūjī family sub-corpus, the administrative endowment sub-corpus, the al-Yaghmūrī household sub-corpus and
the al-Ḥamawī sub-corpus – in addition to other sub-corpora that have yet to
be identified, and the archival ‘pre-histories’ buried within the investigation
archive – will only be understood once they have come under the spotlight of
future scholarship.
Ed
i
Archival Sites before the Estate Archive: Households
and Organisations
In order to understand the Burhān al-Dīn sub-corpus, we first need to understand the sites from which the documents were taken in order to build up this
collection. The preceding chapters divided the documents linked to Burhān
al-Dīn into three groups according to their relevance for writing his biography:
those linked to his positions and stipends, those linked to other issues during
his lifetime and those linked to the settlement of his estate. These documents
constitute what we have called the Burhān al-Dīn documentary ‘corpus’ when
using them to write his biography and ‘sub-corpus’ when thinking about their
position within the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus. In the following, we will use the
39
Taking up the terminology of Gell, Art and Agency.
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term ‘estate archive’ to look at the almost identical group of documents from
the perspective of archival history (see Appendix 1 for the two documents that
are part of this estate archive, but not of the documentary corpus). As will be
argued, the judge’s trustee (amīn al-ḥukm) put this estate archive together
after Burhān al-Dīn’s death in order to determine the value of his estate.
To understand the survival of the sale booklet we have not only to extricate
this estate archive from the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus but to go back one step
further: we also need to think about the previous archival provenance of the
documents that went into this estate archive and discuss from where these
documents made their way into the estate archive – their archival genealogy,
so to say. This discussion will bring out the large number of archival sites in
a town such as Jerusalem where different actors, inscribed in specific cultural
and social fields, were instrumental in preserving these documents before they
started to converge in one single estate archive. This will lead to the subsequent
question, namely, at what point did this estate archive join other corpora, such
as the investigation archive, to ultimately form what we call today the Ḥaram
al-sharīf corpus?
Before the judge’s trustee brought the relevant documents together in the
estate archive that he was building to settle Burhān al-Dīn’s case, one of the
pre-estate archival sites where these documents had been kept was the archival collections of endowed organisations. From these organisational archives
originate the four payment orders issued by the Ḥaram al-sharīf endowment
administration40 and the annual accounts sheet of Fakhr al-Dīn Īyās’s primary
school.41 The archival logic for preserving such orders and such an accounts
sheet in the respective organisational archive is apparent, as they were certainly
papers that any supervisor of an endowment would want to preserve for several years in case of an investigation into the endowment’s finances. Indeed,
we find on the back of the primary school accounts an archival note indicating
that it had been part of a larger archival collection: ‘Blessed sheet on what
was spent for the orphans in the primary school of the officer … Īyās … dated
14.4.781’.42 This archival note was visible once the accounting sheet had been
40
41
42
#665 (781/1379–80), #668 (786/1384–5), #835 (787/1385–6) and #666 (789/1387–8).
#049.
#049.
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folded and clearly indicates that this document was part of a larger collection
of paperwork in this endowment. The four payment orders, in turn, show a
coherent rectangular format,43 making it likely that they were produced with
an eye to preservation in an office of the Ḥaram al-sharīf endowment administration or the household of one of its officials.
The existence of such organisational archival sites in Jerusalem is clearly
evident from al-ʿUlaymī’s chronicle of the town. When he penned his work
a century later, he toured the town’s endowed organisations to gather information on their endowments and was thus able, in most cases, to provide the
exact date of foundation. In numerous instances he explicitly stated that he
saw the endowment deed44 or that it existed even though he was not able to
access it.45 In other cases, he highlighted and lamented the absence of deeds46
and observed whether a deed had been lost and replaced with a later maḥḍar
document.47 These deeds were certainly in use for a long time; al-ʿUlaymī was
able to see original documents dating back more than 200 years. As well as the
endowment deeds themselves we can be certain not only that the documents
related to complex property transaction leading up to the establishment of an
endowment, but also that those that continued thereafter were also part of
such long-term archival practices.48
The payment orders and the annual accounts sheet from the estate archive
of Burhān al-Dīn certainly had shorter active archival lifespans than the foundation deeds and other property-related documents when they were still in
their respective organisational archive. Yet their format and the archival notes
written on them show that those who handled these documents did so with
an eye to (at least short-term) archival preservation. From the documents in
Burhān al-Dīn’s estate archive, it seems that the administrators in these organisations were willing to hand over original documents to the judge’s trustee. The
accounts for the primary school as well as the payment orders were certainly
the original documents and not copies specifically produced for the trustee.
43
44
45
46
47
48
The horizontal width is between 13.2 and 14 centimetres and the vertical length between 9.1 and
10 centimetres.
For instance, al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, II, 39, 42.
For instance, al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, II, 40, 48.
For instance, al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, II, 40.
For instance, al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, II, 42, 43, 46.
For the archiving of such property-related documents see Livingston, Documentary Constellations.
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The second archival site where documents had been kept before the
judge’s trustee brought them together in the estate archive was Burhān
al-Dīn’s personal archive. Here, we have a rare chance to see a personal archive
‘at home’ in a household that did not belong to the military or social elite of
its time. This archive included first and foremost the documents linked to his
positions and stipends: twelve diplomas of appointment,49 five declarations of
intent,50 al-Ṣafadī’s declaration that he had no claims against Burhān al-Dīn51
and Burhān al-Dīn’s request to change the time or place of his recitations.52
Three documents show that his divorce businesses from Fāṭima bt. ʿAbd Allāh
and Maryam were settled,53 one document concerns the estate of his deceased
wife Fāṭima 1,54 and in a further seven documents he either rents a house55 or
buys/extends his house.56
The logic of why Burhān al-Dīn preserved these documents for an
extended period is, in most cases, apparent: the diplomas and declarations
were crucial for proving his entitlements in case of dispute. Indeed, we see that
Burhān al-Dīn repeatedly refers in his petitions to previous documents that
he claims to have in his possession. For instance, when he petitioned for his
position in the Ṭāz Mausoleum to be continued he always referred to himself
in the third person and made a point of mentioning the ‘documents that he
[that is Burhān al-Dīn] has in his possession’ regarding his current position as
reciter.57 If his correction from singular to plural was more than a rhetorical
device he must have had in his possession more documents than we know
of today.58 The logic for archival preservation is also evident in his request to
change the time and place of recitations, as this document updated the conditions of a previous declaration of intent for this stipend (again a document that
we do not have today). Al-Ṣafadī’s declaration on the sub-contracted job, as
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
#003, #005, #007, #009, #010, #013, #014, #203, #303, #305, #310 and #490.
#002, #004, #012, #508 and #603.
#509.
#026.
#289, #458 and #699.
#897.
#109, #843 and #850.
#039, #336, #369 and #619.
#007, l. 7/8: ‘mā bi-yadihi min al-taqrīr al-taqārīr fī al-turba al-sharīfa bi-al-qirāʾa’.
The only preserved document on the Ṭāz Mausoleum dated earlier than petition #007 in the estate
archive of Burhān al-Dīn is #310.
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well as the paperwork from the ex-wives, were worth keeping as they all proved
that these individuals could not lodge further claims against Burhān al-Dīn.
He evidently also had a strong incentive to archive the sale contract of
his house and his neighbour’s consent to extend it. He was also careful to
keep the sale documents of the owners for the previous decade (first Abū
Bakr al-Nassāj, then Maryam al-Rūmīya and finally Muḥammad al-Zaydī), as
ten years earlier a somewhat sensitive property transaction had taken place.
Abū Bakr al-Nassāj bought one of the courtyards that he consolidated into one
single property (the house had not been built yet) from the Public Treasury.59
Such transactions to individuals offered plenty of opportunities for embezzlement. In consequence, such transactions were subject to particular scrutiny
and were generally conducted in front of a judge.60 The document that was
produced during this process proved the transaction’s propriety and was
thus of particular importance. Its importance is evident from the fact that it
was later sewn together with the subsequent sale contract for the property in
which Abū Bakr al-Nassāj sold the consolidated property to Maryam. This
sewn ‘double-contract’ came into the possession of Burhān al-Dīn and his sale
contract explicitly refers to it.61 Those producing the sale contracts on this
house clearly did so with the expectation that they would be preserved for a
long period of time. For this reason, these are the only documents linked to
Burhān al-Dīn written on sturdy parchment, not paper. However, this choice
of material was to prove ill-fated in the long run as the parchment documents
in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus are among those to have been damaged the most
by insects – paper documents in Jerusalem, as in other cities of the region such
as Cairo, had better survival rates.62
While Burhān al-Dīn’s incentive for preserving documents linked to his
positions, his divorces and his house are evident, the archival logic behind
preserving the receipts for rent payment for the long term is, at first glance,
elusive. As he had moved out of the rented property and bought his own
house, it was rather unlikely that the landlady could still drag him before a
59
60
61
62
#369/2.
Müller, Ventes de Biens Immobiliers.
#039/2.
Little, Catalogue, 277; see Rustow, Lost Archive, 25–31 for Cairo.
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judge over unpaid rent.63 Preserving unnecessary paperwork is certainly not a
practice unique to Burhān al-Dīn, which reminds us that the phase of ‘documents lying around’ has to be taken seriously when thinking about document
preservation.64 In fact, other documents too might come under this rubric
of documents lying around. This is particularly true for those papers that do
not seem to have legal validity but are, rather, informal drafts and accounts
produced in the process of preparing the final document. For instance, the
document on the estate of his deceased wife Fāṭima 1 carries no signatures
by notary witnesses and is clearly a first overview. The draft character of this
document is also evident from the fact that this list was written on the back
of a re-purposed document (entirely unrelated to Burhān al-Dīn) that must
have been cut into pieces.65 The phenomenon of reusing old paperwork is
by contrast not visible in those documents of Burhān al-Dīn (and the wider
Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus) that can be considered final documents.
The third pre-estate archival site where documents linked to Burhān
al-Dīn had been kept was Shīrīn’s personal archive. Burhān al-Dīn and Shīrīn
lived in the same household, but there is no doubt that she had a strong interest
in keeping her wealth and paperwork under her control and separate from his.
Only two of Shīrīn’s documents went into the estate archive, the sale contract
for the slave and the contract in which Burhān al-Dīn sold household objects
to her.66 These documents were legal proof that the slave and the household
objects were Shīrīn’s property and not part of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate. The contract on the household objects was also proof that her two sons were entitled to
part-ownership of the house extension. There were certainly more documents
in Shīrīn’s possession, in particular the marriage contract with Burhān al-Dīn
that must have set out the amount of her deferred marriage gift (ṣadāq) in case
of divorce.
63
64
65
66
The preservation might, however, be linked to the fact that he was paying the rent while the estate
to which this house belonged was in the process of being settled. Consequently, these documents
might have been sensitive, and one of them carries the signature of a witness (#843) and another a
judge’s note (#850).
Livingston, Paperwork of a Mamluk Muqṭaʿ.
#897. We still see on the top right corner that at least two sheets of paper were pasted together
to produce the original document, which was then cut into pieces to make paper for drafts
(see Plate III.16).
#382 and #622.
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Both Burhān al-Dīn’s and Shīrīn’s personal archival collections are particularly fascinating as they give an insight into what archival practices looked
like in a household beyond the military and social elite – and how deeply
entrenched pragmatic literacy was. Such documentary collections must have
been widely spread across society, and the al-Ḥamawī sub-corpus is another
such group of documents that urgently deserves closer scrutiny from an archival perspective. In addition, the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus is teeming with further
documents providing insights into the paper-soaked world of households in
this period. Document #792, for instance, is a very informal list of dozens
of documents with debt claims that the owner held against others. It thus
functioned as an archival handlist for navigating what must have been a very
substantial household archive. This list, and many other pieces of evidence
such as the above-mentioned late-medieval diary of Ibn Ṭawq in Damascus,
with its continuous references to documents, indicate the masses of paperwork held in household archives that have since vanished (or that we have not
yet found). Such household archives from Jerusalem preserved within a larger
collection are particularly fascinating as the best-known cases so far come from
Egypt and in particular the Geniza, such as the documentary assemblages of
Nahray b. Nissīm from the fifth/eleventh century67 and of Abraham Ben Yijū
from the sixth/twelfth century.68
The documents that Burhān al-Dīn preserved (and the same goes for
Shīrīn’s documents) are thus of crucial importance for understanding this
world of small-scale archival locations. These documents are in material terms
less consistent than those that were produced in organisational contexts. In the
latter case we see that there was a tendency to produce documents of similar
format to facilitate their storage and such organisational archives also tended
to use archival notes.69 Remnants of such organisational archives thus often
provide material clues of their archival past. Remnants of personal archives, by
contrast, are much less likely to bear such traces. Burhān al-Dīn, for instance,
did primarily preserve documents which he received and over whose format he
had no control: rent receipts from his landlady, diplomas from administrators
67
68
69
See in particular Goldberg, Trade and Institutions.
See in particular Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage.
Anna Steffen (CSMC, Hamburg) is undertaking a study of these archival notes.
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in endowments, declarations from officer-patrons, the old sale contracts for
his property, and so on. While the logic for preserving them is thus apparent
from analysing their content, their materiality provides no indication of their
shared archival past.
The Formation of the Estate Archive
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With the death of Burhān al-Dīn the archival status of documents linked to
him changed drastically. Different archival actors certainly discarded many of
the documents at various points over the following years and decades, as they
had become irrelevant. In this sense they joined the vast majority of documents
ever produced, since during any archiving process discarding documents is as
important as preserving them. However, one group of documents linked to
Burhān al-Dīn was still needed in order to settle the size of his estate and its
division among his heirs. In consequence, these documents most likely went
from their previous three archival sites into a new archival context, the estate
archive in the house of the judge’s trustee. As Christian Müller has shown on
the basis of the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus (to be more exact, almost exclusively
on the basis of Burhān al-Dīn’s and al-Ḥamawī’s sub-corpora), such a trustee was first and foremost responsible for the day-to-day management of the
inheritance for minors and absent heirs according to a judge’s decisions. This
included paying out the obligatory maintenance payment (farḍ). This trustee
could also play a much more active role in managing the estate (such as lending
money from the estate, returning pawned objects and paying rent for shops)
and, of particular relevance for our purposes here, in sorting out the estate in
the months after the death had occurred.70
In the case of Burhān al-Dīn, this trustee was a certain Shams al-Dīn
Muḥammad al-Adhraʿī, who thus must be seen as the person who shaped
the estate archive. Al-Adhraʿī must have had several men who were working
for him, as is evident from one of the accounts for settling Burhān al-Dīn’s
estate, which says that fifteen dirhams were paid to the men of the trustee.71 We
know some members of his retinue by name, such as a certain Shams al-Dīn
70
71
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 319–23.
#800a, left. The document has only rajjāla, but we see in other documents from the Ḥaram
al-sharīf corpus (such as #175a, left, l. 28 and #175a, right, l. 27) the term rajjālat al-ḥukm, which
we interpret as those working for the judge’s trustee.
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Muḥammad al-Ṣayrafī, who appears in the paperwork as receiving payments
from buyers, or a certain (Ibn) ʿAshā, who wrote the sale booklet.72 In the
lengthy process of settling the estate, al-Adhraʿī and his men not only brought
together the documents linked to Burhān al-Dīn from the three previous archival sites, but they also added those seventeen documents produced during the
course of the process. These documents include, primarily, the two decisions
by the deputy judge on the amount of the maintenance payment 73 and the nine
deeds of the guardians of Burhān al-Dīn’s children acknowledging that they
had received such payments.74 In addition, our sale booklet and four accounts
linked to this sale, as well as a document concerning a loan from Burhān al-Dīn’s
estate to a third person, were added to this growing estate archive.75
The estate archive in al-Adhraʿī’s household thus absorbed documents
from the previous three archival sites and kept growing with the documents
produced in the process of settling Burhān al-Dīn’s estate. We can understand the social logic for him building up this estate archive by turning to the
documents of the trader al-Ḥamawī in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus – arguably
another estate archive that al-Adhraʿī and his retinue built up.76 Here, we see
that al-Adhraʿī was officially appointed to settle al-Ḥamawī’s complex business
affairs.77 Getting his head around who owed what to al-Ḥamawī and what, in
turn, al-Ḥamawī owed and to whom certainly required al-Adhraʿī to consult
numerous contracts, deeds, receipts and so on from al-Ḥamawī’s lifetime,
which accounts for the large number of commercial documents linked to
al-Ḥamawī that we have today. When al-Adhraʿī and his men were assembling
the al-Ḥamawī estate archive they were able to get hold of accounts dating
back more than twenty years. Thus the building up of an estate archive must in
some cases have been a very protracted and complex affair that meant combing
through a large house archive and assembling further documents from across
the city (and beyond). From documents in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus we get
further glimpses of how those responsible for handling paperwork in medieval
72
73
74
75
76
77
For al-Ṣayrafī, see documents #793, #800 and #812; (Ibn) ʿAshā also bought items in the auction of
Burhān al-Dīn’s estate and identified himself as the sale booklet’s scribe (see Buyer 70).
#052 and #111.
#106, #108, #115, #118, #183, #188, #192, #313 and #676.
#061/#180/#532 (sale booklet), #812 (accounts) and #016 (money lending).
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 184–6.
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 321/2.
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Jerusalem proceeded upon the death of an individual. In one of them, the
trustee recounts that upon entering the house of the deceased he found a list
with debts and claims. This list was then entered into the process of settling
the estate so that debts could be paid and claims resolved.78 In another case, the
estate inventory is drawn up shortly before the death and the inventory refers
to different pieces of paperwork recording outstanding payments.79
The process of sorting out the estate of the deceased was evidently important because the inheritance could only be divided among the heirs after the
financial affairs had been settled. This was thus a very sensitive period during
which the diligence and propriety of the trustee was central to the amounts
that the heirs would later receive. The complexity of this process might explain
why Shīrīn, for instance, took a legal proxy (wakīl) to represent her during this
period, whereas in earlier contracts she had acted on her own without a proxy.80
That the auction of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate was only the starting point of
a much longer process for al-Adhraʿī is evident from the paperwork that he
and his men produced. At other auctions of estate libraries, as we know from
narrative sources, the objects were sold for cash only.81 Though this practice
secured instant payment it probably fetched lower prices. In the case of the
sale of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate – and seemingly this was the general practice –
buyers could settle the price at a later point (and thus they probably tended to
make higher bids). It is because of this procedure of delayed payments that we
have not only the sale booklet, but also four further accounts and lists linked
to this sale (the documentary network discussed in Chapter 8). The fact that
numerous documents of different types were produced to get hold of the
cash shows that the procedure was not entirely straightforward. At least some
buyers must have been reluctant to fulfil the obligations they had entered into
during the auction. For instance, in the first list of payments al-Adhraʿī and
his men were able to record fifty-two payments, but even here twenty-four of
these payments were only partial payments that required further chasing up.
78
79
80
81
#741 (793/1391), death of ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿĪsā al-Maghribī.
#146 (795/1393), Muḥammad b. Ḥusayn al-Qāriʾ.
A certain ‘Shaykh Ismāʿīl’ (Buyer 47) is named as Shīrīn’s proxy slightly more than a month after
her husband’s death (#532a, left, ll. 21–33; 789/1387). The earlier contracts without a proxy are
#622 (788/1386) and #382 (784/1382).
Sakhāwī, Ḍawʾ, VI, 100 (biography of ʿUmar b. ʿAlī b. Aḥmad b. al-Mulaqqin who attended this
auction).
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All this chasing up had to be done while they were also busy sorting out other
matters. The expenses recorded in one of the accounts (#800) give a picture of
the things that needed attention: the washing of the corpse and the cemetery
needed to be sorted out, debts needed to be settled, claims of his children and
his widow paid out, porters brought in, candles for the auction bought and
so on.
Arguably, the delay between the death of an individual and the final settlement of his or her estate also explains why the amounts of the maintenance
payments for children tended to fluctuate in the initial months after the death.
In the case of al-Ḥamawī we have very substantial fluctuations, and these were
probably linked to the changing size of the estimated estate in the course of
the settlement.82 In the case of Burhān al-Dīn we also see that in the period
between his death and the final settlement the maintenance payments fluctuated. A deputy judge took a first decision on the amount of the payment slightly
more than one month after Burhān al-Dīn’s death. He issued two separate, but
almost entirely identical, documents on the same day, one for Shīrīn’s sons ʿAlī
and Muḥammad (#052/1, see Plate III.2a) and one for Maḥmūd al-Subāʿī, the
son of Fāṭima bt. ʿAbd Allāh (#111/1, see Plate III.5a). According to the two
documents the three sons were meant to receive twenty dirhams per month
each. The document for the fourth son, Maḥmūd Kamāl, is missing, but an
acknowledgement deed from this period (#106, see Plate III.3a) shows that he
received the slightly higher amount of twenty-five dirhams per month. Some
four months after his first decision the same deputy judge added a revised decision on the documents (#052/2 and #111/2) in which he raised the monthly
payments to thirty dirhams per month. It was probably only at this point
that the settlement of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate was concluded and that the final
entitlement of all heirs, including his children, could be calculated.
It was during these five months, before the estate of Burhān al-Dīn was
settled, that al-Adhraʿī and his men must have built up the estate archive. To
do so they arguably went to Burhān al-Dīn’s house and took those documents
that were necessary for understanding whether there were outstanding salaries
and stipends (the diplomas and declarations, as well as the request to change
the time and place of recitations). Al-Adhraʿī also took those documents that
82
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 191.
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showed that no other people had claims against Burhān al-Dīn (the three declarations by his ex-wives and al-Ṣafadī). Finally, he made sure that he acquired
the documents necessary to sort out the ownership of Burhān al-Dīn’s house.
While he was at it, he may also have picked up other documents that we find
in the corpus that have no bearing on settling the estate, such as the receipts
of rent payments. While al-Adhraʿī was sorting Burhān al-Dīn’s papers, Shīrīn
certainly made sure that he also saw the two documents showing her ownership of the slave and the household objects so that her property did not become
part of her husband’s estate.
The next step for al-Adhraʿī and his men in settling the estate was to
obtain documents on positions for which Burhān al-Dīn’s own archive
seemingly did not hold the diplomas or where the information on the salary
was inadequate. For this, al-Adhraʿī went to endowments and requested the
relevant documents. As he himself was working in the administration of the
endowment of the Ṣalāḥīya Madrasa,83 he was certainly able to ask the right
questions and get the documents he needed: the four payment orders from
the Ḥaram al-sharīf endowment administration and the annual accounts
sheet of Fakhr al-Dīn Īyās’s primary school. In total, he collected at least
thirty-seven documents before starting his work on settling Burhān al-Dīn’s
estate. In the following months the new documents produced during the
process of settling the estate joined the older ones: the decisions by the deputy
judge instructing him how much monthly maintenance to pay; the deeds by
the legal guardians acknowledging these payments; the deed on the money
he lent from Burhān al-Dīn’s estate; and, finally, the paperwork linked to
selling the estate, our sale booklet and the four lists and accounts in which
he and his scribe al-Ṣayrafī recorded who had paid his dues and who had
not yet paid. In the end the estate archive thus comprised at least fifty-four
documents linked to the financial affairs of Burhān al-Dīn assembled from
various archival sites. Again, it is evident that only a part of the estate archive
has come down to us and that it must have originally been larger, including,
for instance, promissory notes that are now lost.84
83
84
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 320.
On these notes, of which we know from accounts #800, see Chapter 8.
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The archival nature of those documents that were being produced in the
process of the judge’s trustee settling the estate is much more apparent than in
the case of the documents that were previously preserved in Burhān al-Dīn’s
and Shīrīn’s personal archives. As we have seen, the latter were in a wide variety
of formats and did not carry archival notes. By contrast, al-Adhraʿī and his
men, such as al-Ṣayrafī and (Ibn) ʿAshā, acted within a social context that had
clear ideas about the materiality of the documents they produced and their
future preservation. This is particularly evident in the case of acknowledgement deeds, which tend to carry archival notes.85 These notes were systematically placed on the top left corner of the document’s verso to aid retrieval
in the future. The documents were thus part of a larger archival collection
grouped together for practical purposes. Al-Adhraʿī and his men needed such
finding aids in order to navigate paperwork, as they had a lot of it: they made
payments to three different guardians for the estate of Burhān al-Dīn alone
(Shīrīn, Maḥmūd al-Subāʿī’s grandmother Umm Muḥammad and Maḥmūd
Kamāl’s guardian Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad).86 These guardians came to collect
their monies on quite a regular basis (the documents indicate that this occurred
roughly every second month). In addition, al-Adhraʿī handled several other
estates; as seen above, we definitely know of al-Ḥamawī’s estate, so that his
dossier(s) for such payments must have been quite thick. That he must have
handled a lot of papers is also evident from the occasional mistakes he made.
For instance, on one of the documents linked to Burhān al-Dīn we see that he
had initially written an erroneous archival note ascribing it to ‘the orphans of
al-Ḥamawī’.87
The materiality of the documents gives us some clues as to how the trustees organised the numerous estate archives they would be building up at any
given moment. For instance, it is commonsensical that they would have kept
the acknowledgement deeds of the legal guardians on payments received in the
same dossier as the documents issued by judges on how much maintenance the
trustees were actually to pay out. In the case of Burhān al-Dīn we have the two
above-mentioned documents by the deputy judge for the maintenance
85
86
87
#106, #108, #115, #118, #183, #188 and #192.
Shīrīn and Umm Muḥammad were not legal guardians (waṣī), but were fostering (ḥiḍāna) the
children in their care.
#016, see Plate III.1b (middle of page).
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payments for ʿAlī and Muḥammad (#052) as well as for Maḥmūd al-Subāʿī
(#111). It is indeed very likely that al-Adhraʿī kept both decisions in the same
dossier as the acknowledgement deeds, since the decisions carry the same archival notes as the acknowledgement deeds and they do so in the same position
(the top left of the verso). That these judicial decisions and the deeds were kept
in one archival context is made more likely by the fact that all these documents
have a very similar format.88 At this stage it comes as no major surprise that the
document on al-Adhraʿī lending money from Burhān al-Dīn’s estate to a third
person also carries an archival note, again at exactly the same position as those
of the decisions and the deeds. That this money-lending document belonged
to the same archival dossier is also highly likely, as it again has the same format
as the decisions and the deeds.89
The trustee’s estate archive ceased to receive new documents one year after
Burhān al-Dīn’s death. After the settlement of his estate we see that al-Adhraʿī
continued to issue estate-related documents for two more months.90 For the
following months, until late 790/1388, four more acknowledgements of payments by a new trustee, a certain Muḥammad al-Ḥusbānī, exist for the Burhān
al-Dīn corpus.91 Thereafter we have complete radio silence on any matters
linked to Burhān al-Dīn. This documentary silence did not occur because the
entitlements of his children had come to an end. Their guardians certainly
continued to receive such payments for many more years and acknowledgement deeds continued to be issued – they just no longer became part of this
archive as the estate itself had been conclusively settled. It is striking that only
two months after the last surviving document for Burhān al-Dīn’s estate was
issued, the last document was issued in the estate archive on al-Ḥamawī, and
here again we find complete documentary silence thereafter.92 Again, payments were certainly made over the following years and acknowledgement
deeds continued to be issued, but they were no longer placed in the estate
archive of al-Ḥamawī.
88
89
90
91
92
The two decisions #052 and #111 are between 18 to 18.5 centimetres by 22 to 26 centimetres,
which is also the range for most deeds with archival notes, though they can be slightly wider
(up to 19.5 centimetres) and longer (up to 28 centimetres).
#016 (19x26 centimetres).
#016/2 (?.4.790/13889 and #313 (4.5.790/1388).
#118 (7.6.790/1388), #108 (3.7.790/1388), #115 (4.9.790/1388) and #183 (4.9.790/1388).
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 192 (#582, 25.11.790).
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In all likelihood, the estate archives of Burhān al-Dīn and al-Ḥamawī were
handed over to the judge some months after the estates had been settled. At
this point the two estate archives with all their old documents had become useless for the trustee’s purposes, as he had successfully reached a final settlement.
This trustee, whether al-Adhraʿī, al-Ḥusbānī or somebody else, continued to
pay the maintenance for the children of Burhān al-Dīn and al-Ḥamawī and
to collect the new acknowledgement deeds. These acknowledgement deeds
must have been preserved in different dossiers and all these deeds are lost (or at
least they are not in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus) – as is the case for thousands
(or tens of thousands?) of other acknowledgement deeds that must have been
issued in eighth/fourteenth-century Jerusalem alone.
The estate archive is a remarkably ambiguous phenomenon when thinking
about archival practices and the household as an archival site in the medieval
period. We are not dealing here with a highly personal archive, such as those of
Burhān al-Dīn and Shīrīn. Nor are we dealing with an organisational archive
like those found in endowed organisations such as madrasas or khānqāhs.
This ambiguous status is linked to the fact that the position of the judge’s
trustee was, as Christian Müller has shown, seemingly not a firmly institutionalised position in Jerusalem at this point. There is no consistent title for this
role and there could be more than one trustee in any given period.93 The paperwork that this trustee produced was thus clearly part of a legal process and had
significant legal relevance, yet the site of this archive was most likely his own
household. Just like the investigation archive, estate archives were not collections brought together with any expectation that they would be preserved for
many centuries. It is precisely because they had such a short shelf life that such
archival practices highlight the significance of the household as a central site of
archival preservation.
From Estate Archive to Ḥaram al-sharīf Sub-corpus
What we have seen above is that the estate archive of Burhān al-Dīn (and that
of al-Ḥamawī) has a trajectory that is radically different from that of other
sub-corpora within the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus. We still know next to nothing about the archival history of, let us say, the Sultanic decree sub-corpus
93
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 319–23.
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or the administrative endowment sub-corpus. Yet it is evident that their
trajectories are very different and that a completely different set of archival
actors were involved in shaping these respective sub-corpora as we see them
today. In consequence, each of these sub-corpora has its own very peculiar
profile in terms of the kind of documents it preserves. The entire Ḥaram
al-sharīf corpus preserves three acknowledgement deeds in which divorced
women attest that they have no claims against their ex-husbands94 – two of
which refer to Burhān al-Dīn.95 The corpus preserves two yaqūlu declarations
in which officers promise to pay a scholar a salary96 – both of them refer to
Burhān al-Dīn.97 It preserves eight petitions with responses on their backs98 –
six of them refer to Burhān al-Dīn.99 Every single diploma and declaration
issued by an endowment or an officer for an individual that is today preserved
in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus refers to Burhān al-Dīn.100 Yet neither the
Burhān al-Dīn sub-corpus nor that of al-Ḥamawī contains what one might
have expected in the context of the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus as it has hundreds
of them, an estate inventory.
We will return to this point later on, but it is important to underline
here that the extent of the survival of specific kinds of documents is linked to
idiosyncratic archival practices. There were, certainly, thousands of acknowledgement deeds written by divorced women in the eighth/fourteenth century
in Jerusalem, yet only those linked to Burhān al-Dīn have survived. In the same
vein, petitions with a response on the back were a widespread form of written
communication. That so few survived is no indication that few were produced: it reflects, rather, the filter of archival practices. Any archive we work
on is ‘shaped by power relations in both past and present and between past and
present, and by the institutions through which power is mediated’.101 To this
we can add numerous other factors, such as simple neglect and chance, that
impact on the shape of any collection. It would thus be audacious to rely too
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 86.
#289 and #699. The third deed is #680.
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 133.
#508 and #603.
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 153.
#007, #009, #010, #013, #305 and #310. The other deeds are #025 and #215.
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 142.
Brown et al., Documentary Practices, 12/3.
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much on the shape of the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus for argumentative purposes,
in particular on the absences from this corpus. For most of its history we
simply do not know who the archival actors were and thus what hidden power
relations were written into its sub-corpora, which ultimately came together to
form what we call today the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus.
The independence of Burhān al-Dīn’s and al-Ḥamawī’s estate archives
from the investigation archive is thus crucial in order to show that they were
subject to their very own archival filters. That these two sets of documents did
not join the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus as part of the investigation archive is also
evident from the timeline of archival events. The investigation into Sharaf
al-Dīn’s tenure of the judgeship and thus the formation of the investigation
archive only started seven years after Burhān al-Dīn’s and al-Ḥamawī’s estate
archives had been closed. One might be tempted to construct a link between
the investigation into Sharaf al-Dīn’s practices and Burhān al-Dīn himself.
For instance, Sharaf al-Dīn was the scholarly head (shaykh) of the Ṣalāḥīya
Khānqāh when Burhān al-Dīn held a position there.102 Yet there is not the
slightest sign of impropriety concerning the settlement of Burhān al-Dīn’s
estate, and the same goes for that of al-Ḥamawī.
If al-Adhraʿī’s estate archives on Burhān al-Dīn and al-Ḥamawī had their
own histories, when did they join the investigation archive and the other subcorpora of the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus? We can only speculate as to how and
why this happened, as the later history of the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus, before
its academic discovery in the 1970s, has not yet been studied.103 This discovery already shows that the history of this corpus is possibly more complex
than that of one single corpus moving through the centuries: even within the
Islamic Museum the documents that today constitute the Ḥaram al-sharīf
corpus were discovered in two distinct batches, in 1974 and 1976. We obviously do not know how these two batches came into being. However, before
the 1970s discoveries someone must have already started to work on these
documents as the second batch was accompanied by modern paper slips with
notes on fifteen of the documents.104 Today we also know that there was a
102
103
104
Little, Catalogue, 10.
Northrup and Abul-Hajj, Collection of Medieval Arabic Documents; Little, Catalogue, 1–4.
Little, Catalogue, 1/2.
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third batch that was not discovered in the 1970s, the Ḥaram al-sharīf plus
corpus discussed in the Introduction.
We do not know how, when and in how many batches and bundles the
documents came into the Islamic Museum, which was founded in 1922.105
However, there are at least indications that what we know as the Ḥaram
al-sharīf corpus today might not have been on the Temple Mount in the
nineteenth century.106 When the French archaeologist Charles ClermontGanneau made a survey of monuments and inscriptions in Jerusalem in the
early 1870s he also heard that pre-Ottoman documents were held in the citadel
(today often called ‘Tower of David’).107 He did not see these documents,
but his report has some credibility as he had it on the authority of a member
of the Abū al-Suʿūd family. This family owned an important family library
with a long pedigree and their members were certainly well-versed in the written culture of the town.108 As we do not know of other pre-Ottoman-period
documents from Jerusalem – those held by the town’s Christian organisations
would certainly not have been deposited in the citadel109 – it is probable that
the documents of the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus were part of (or identical to)
what this nineteenth-century writer called an ‘archive’ in the citadel.
A possible, though highly hypothetical, scenario thus seems to be that
several groups of pre-Ottoman documents were preserved in Jerusalem at different sites. These were distinct groups such as the investigation archive, the
estate archives of Burhān al-Dīn and al-Ḥamawī, the decrees by sultans from
Cairo, the administrative endowment archive and the family archive of the
The archival trajectory of the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents certainly has to be seen as part of the
wider history of archival (re)configurations in Jerusalem in the nineteenth and the twentieth
centuries; see for instance the Open Jerusalem project, http://www.openjerusalem.org/ (last
accessed 8 June 2021).
Scholarship has so far not discussed this issue, but the hegemonic (and often implicit) assumption
is clearly one of ‘long-term preservation’ somewhere on the Ḥaram al-sharīf (see e.g. Müller, Kadi
und seine Zeugen, 22).
Clermont-Ganneau, Archaeological Researches, I, 237: ‘The Arabic Archives in Jerusalem – The
Mussulman Abu’s So’ūd told me that the archives of the Mehkemeh of Jerusalem did not contain
any documents which date more than three centuries back; all the documents of an earlier period
than this having been removed into the Kalʿa (the Citadel), where they are at this day.’ Al-ʿĀrif,
al-Mufaṣṣal, 312 translated the ‘documents’ in this passage as ‘sijillāt’. On this basis, supposedly
lost ‘Mamluk sijillāt’ have regrettably become an established fact in subsequent scholarship, e.g.
ʿAmrū, Qalʿat al-Quds, 43.
On this family see Barakat, Tārīkh al-maktabāt al-ʿarabīya, 72/3.
For one such collection, see Pahlitzsch, Documents in Intercultural Communication.
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Ādūjī family. At some point these different groups of documents must have
been joined. This might have happened in the Ottoman period when some
administrator or scholar brought together the various groups of what had by
then become ‘old’ and arcane-looking documents. Or this amalgamation might
have happened only in the Mandate Period. This is at least the case for the
Aqṣā Mosque Library, which was founded in the 1920s and brought together
the codices scattered across various sites on the Ḥaram al-sharīf.110 The Islamic
Museum was founded in exactly the same period and one can easily imagine
that documents scattered across the Ḥaram al-sharīf and beyond were brought
together. We thus do not know when exactly the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus was
formed, and the only date visible to us is when the documents in the first and
second batch received the running classmarks from 1 to 883 in the 1970s. At
any rate, the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus is in all likelihood a corpus that resulted
from archival reconfigurations that took place much later than the production
of these documents or the investigation into Sharaf al-Dīn.
For the purpose of this book, two points coming out of the discussion on
the archival trajectories of the documents linked to Burhān al-Dīn are particularly relevant. First, the fact that our sale booklet is the only such document
to survive within such a large number of books does not necessarily make it
an outlier. If we misunderstand the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus and see it as one
coherent historical group of documents, we might reasonably wonder to what
extent this list and its books are representative of wider developments at all; out
of over 900 documents we only have this one single document listing so many
books. That a document is the only one to survive does not mean, however,
that it was the only one to be produced. All diplomas and declarations issued
by endowments or officers for an individual in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus
exclusively refer to Burhān al-Dīn, but it is evident that endowment supervisors and officers issued many more such documents. These are lost, most likely
because the archival sites in which they were preserved did not have as long a
life cycle as the household archive of Burhān al-Dīn and, more importantly,
the subsequent estate archive. The absence of other sale booklets is thus a
question that needs to be discussed in the context of the archival history of
110
Salameh, Primary Sources, 2/3.
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documents in Jerusalem. It cannot be taken per se as an argument for the
purportedly exceptional status of Burhān al-Dīn’s list.
The second main point pertains to pragmatic literacy. The estate archive
of Burhān al-Dīn contained no fewer than fifty-four documents. This is
already a very large number, but we can be certain that his life triggered more,
probably many more, documents. The formation of the estate archive had a
massive impact on which of his documents have come down to us – only those
needed to settle the estate. All other documents were deemed to be irrelevant
and many of them had come to the end of their archival lifespan when Burhān
al-Dīn died. To this we must add documents that Burhān al-Dīn himself discarded over the course of his life, such as the many receipts on rent payments
that he must have received, for example. We find a trace of one such further
document, which has since perished, in the sale booklet itself. In addition to
the 273 book lots and the eighty-six lots with household objects that were sold,
there was also one document on sale from Burhān al-Dīn’s household. This
was a bill of exchange (ḥawāla) in his favour.111 Whoever bought it in the auction subsequently cashed it in and the bill must then have disappeared – it is at
least not in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus. It thus joined the fate of at least dozens
of other documents that passed through Burhān al-Dīn’s hands but are not
visible to us. These documents might have been burned or reused as wrapping
material, or they might reside today in the pasteboard of some codex.112
The estate archives of Burhān al-Dīn and al-Ḥamawī, the family archive
of the Ādūjī family, the investigation archive, the archive of sultanic decrees,
the al-Yaghmūrī household archive and the administrative endowment archive
were only a few of many more archival constellations. That these few archival
sites covering such a short period have left us 900 documents shows that tens of
thousands of other documents were issued in this period and that the number
of documents circulating in medieval Jerusalem must have been staggeringly
high. This pragmatic documentary culture certainly relied upon a widespread
and high degree of literacy. To cite just one example: the accounting sheet for
the primary school for orphans in which Burhān al-Dīn taught has separate
111
112
#532b, right, ll. 29–31.
For one such household archive in a pasteboard see Liebrenz, Archive in a Book.
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budgetary items for ink and pens as well as for paper. Even these orphans were
prepared early on to deal with the writerly world in which they lived.113
Those documents from the Burhān al-Dīn documentary corpus that have
survived give us a unique insight into how deeply rooted and widely spread documents were for even the most mundane transactions, such as rent payments,
beyond the spheres of the social and political elites. If we are to complain about
bureaucracy today, we should consider this: when Burhān al-Dīn applied for
his daily allowance of four loaves of bread a day at the Manṣūrī Ribāṭ, he first
wrote a petition. Once he had submitted that petition, somebody, most likely
the endowment’s supervisor, wrote in the margins ‘It shall be scrutinised!’114
In response, a report was prepared that showed that the death of the previous
recipient made it possible to allocate the allowance to Burhān al-Dīn. This
report was written on a separate sheet of paper and subsequently glued to the
petition. Once the enlarged document was ready the endowment’s supervisor
received it again, and he wrote his order that Burhān al-Dīn was entitled to the
allowance over the join of petition and report.115 Four texts, a written report
produced, paper sheets glued together – all for a daily bread allowance. In
the same vein, the four payment orders issued by the Ḥaram al-sharīf endowment administration are, as said before, real gems in terms of the history of
bureaucracy. A single order can carry up to ten signatures by different officials
of the endowment administration.116 It is not difficult to imagine poor Burhān
al-Dīn trudging from individual to individual, desperately trying to get all of
them to sign this order in order for him to receive his salary. The world of the
written word in the late eighth/fourteenth century did not encompass large
book collections only, but also perplexingly intensive documentary practices
in day-to-day life.
113
114
115
116
#049; Richards, Primary Education. On primary education in this period see Hirschler, Written
Word, 82–123.
#013. We are here following the reading of Diem, Philologisches, 42–6.
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 138 and 440 (n. 145) proposes a different timeline, most importantly that the order was written before the lower document that was glued to the petition.
However, as the order was written over the join we follow Diem.
#666.
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This chapter has contextualised the sale booklet by looking at its archival trajectory, and this has allowed us to develop two principal arguments. The first
argument is crucial in methodological terms. Namely: that this list is today
unique does not mean that comparable book collections were rare. The fact
that similar lists did not survive in the rich Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus is not proof
that Burhān al-Dīn’s book collection was an exception. Rather, the archival
context shows that this document was preserved as part of a small estate archive,
not as part of some large Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus. The question, therefore, is
not why we do not have more of these lists in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus, but
rather why similar estate archives have not survived in greater numbers (or
have not yet been identified in greater numbers).
The second argument leads towards the book’s claim regarding literacy.
This chapter has shown how widespread pragmatic literacy was and how even
the most mundane transactions were recorded in writing as a matter of course.
Even more importantly, many of these documents went into archival collections that were kept by numerous actors across the urban topography. We
thus see that different individuals, groups and organisations actively preserved
(and discarded) textual artefacts that had been produced in the course of
their activities. The very fact that the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus is not a simple
archive but the result of complex processes of amalgamation provides a unique
opportunity to take a look at the highly complex landscape of documentary
cultures and archival practices. This all-pervasive presence of documents and
archival collections shows that Jerusalem, as much as other towns and cities in
the region, was home to a society characterised by a strikingly high degree of
pragmatic literacy.
4
Lists and Inventories: The Sale Booklet’s
Documentary Logic
aving established that Burhān al-Dīn is representative of wider sections of
his period’s society and that the sale booklet is not a documentary outlier,
we can now turn to the booklet itself. The consideration of the archival context
of Burhān al-Dīn’s sub-corpus, and thus the sale booklet too, has allowed us to
see its documents as more than random sheets among the hundreds of Ḥaram
al-sharīf documents. Having reconstituted its archival context, we can now
think in more detail about what this document was actually meant to do and
not do when it was being produced. Using highly generic labels to describe it
as a ‘book list’ is most unhelpful in this process. Rather, this is a document that
was produced for specific purposes that had a strong impact upon what was
included and what was left out. Such a sale booklet would naturally represent
the books in a given collection quite differently from a book list produced as
a catalogue or in the framework of an endowment. The tendency to subsume
very different book lists under a highly generic label that obliterates their specificity is also a phenomenon in book studies regarding other parts of the globe.
For instance, Joseph Dennis has shown, in his work on School Library Book
Lists in Ming and Qing Local Gazetteers, that what scholarship had previously
called ‘library catalogues’ are in fact a colourful variety of very different lists.1
The compilers of these lists wrote them with very different intentions in mind,
and many of these ‘catalogues’ do not reflect the actual books held in a library
at all, but rather what the compiler thought should be in a decent Confucian
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H
1
https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/research/projects/school-library-book-collections-ming-qingand-republican-china (last accessed 3 March 2021).
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school library. In order to avoid classifying our sale booklet as a simple list, this
chapter will thus discuss the aim behind the writing of the booklet, how it has
to be seen as part of a wider documentary network, and how it recorded the
information on books.
The methodological issue at stake is thus the documentary logic of the
sale booklet itself. What exactly was this list’s function and how is it linked to
other documents? An example might clarify why we will spend so much time
on this problem. Our sale booklet also contains many household objects, such
as chairs, pillows and mortars. On this basis, Ulrich Haarmann assumed that
‘the atmosphere in which this lowly shaykh lived and worked emerges from
our document’,2 implying that we can use the list to write a straightforward
history of a household’s material world. Such a suggestion sounds even more
exciting four decades later now that the ‘material turn’ has entered the historical disciplines with full force and a fascinating book can be written on a list
of trans-oceanic luggage that is much shorter than the sale booklet.3 Yet, as
we have seen in Chapter 2, Burhān al-Dīn sold numerous household objects
to his last wife Shīrīn just a year before he died to raise money for his house
extension project.4 The objects she bought clearly included many household
objects that were much more valuable than those we see in our booklet. They
certainly remained in the household, but as they went into Shīrīn’s ownership
the documentary logic of the booklet means they go unmentioned. What we
see is thus not the household of a ‘lowly shaykh’ at all, but instead a view that is
highly skewed by what this booklet actually was, and was not, meant to do – its
documentary logic.
Documentary Practices before the Archive: Three Sheets,
Twelve Pages, One Document
The first point to discuss with regard to the sale booklet is as basic as it is
crucial. Thus far, we have simply stated that the sale booklet consists of three
sheets, but whether these three sheets constitute one single document is in
reality a far more complex issue. The three sheets have distinct identities in the
2
3
4
Haarmann, Library, 329.
Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage.
#622 (788/1386).
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modern Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus and each carries a different classmark, #061,
#180 and #532 (see Plates I.1–I.6). Sheet #061 explicitly mentions Burhān
al-Dīn and his estate in the heading, but no such link with Burhān al-Dīn
exists for the two other sheets – at least not at first glance. Those assigning
the classmarks in the 1970s (Amal Abul-Hajj, Linda Northrup and Donald
Little)5 considered the three sheets to be three distinct documents – thus three
different classmarks. It was nonetheless evident that the three sheets share
many features, and in his subsequent catalogue Donald Little put them under
one heading, ‘Mufradāt’, and stated that they might actually constitute one
single document.6 Ulrich Haarmann sat on the fence in his brief article about
this sale booklet, stating that ‘our list … includes, besides nr. 61, possibly also
nrs. 180 and 532’, adding that ‘there remains the possibility that these two
sheets refer to different holdings’.7 On the basis of the different classmarks
subsequent scholarship has increasingly assumed that the three sheets are distinct documents without explicitly discussing the issue.8 Christian Müller also
saw them as distinct documents and argued that Ulrich Haarmann’s cautious
suggestion was wrong, as ‘#532 does not refer to the same estate as #061 and
includes also household objects’.9
So, let us explain why we consider the three sheets to be a single document.
First of all, the materiality is strikingly similar. All three sheets have the same
daftar (booklet) format and are of very similar size.10 The daftar format, characterised by being about a third higher than wide, is admittedly widespread in
the documents in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus and thus certainly an insufficient
basis for a convincing argument on any sheets belonging together.11 However,
such daftar papers and booklets were usually vertically folded two times
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Northrup and Abul-Hajj, Collection of Medieval Arabic Documents; Little, Catalogue.
Little, Catalogue, 359/60. Yet, in subsequent articles he tended to discuss them separately, such
as Little, Ḥaram Documents as Sources for the Arts and Architecture, 71 where he discusses #061
without mentioning the other two sheets.
Haarmann, Library, 327 and 328.
Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 50 and Luz, Mamluk City in the Middle East, 134.
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 123 (see also 172 and 429).
Little, Catalogue, 360 erroneously gives the measurements of #180 as ’18 x 20.5’ whereas the correct length is 28 centimetres.
Müller, Ḥaram al-Šarīf Collection, 444/5. Allowing for a variation of three centimetres, he counts
170 documents with this format among the c. 419 estate inventories that he discussed in that
article.
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before the scribes started writing on them, resulting in four columns. Our sale
booklet, by contrast, was only folded once, resulting in only two columns. In
fact, speaking of ‘columns’ is not very helpful for our list and it is better to
think of it in terms of simple ‘pages’ as we will see in a minute.
A further striking material similarity between the three sheets is that they
all have holes in their upper halves (see Plate I.7). These holes are not the
result of insect damage, but of archival actors who pricked the documents
to thread through a string for holding documentary bundles together. Three
documents from the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus still carried such strings when
they were photographed in 1978 (see Plates I.8a–I.8c).12 The survival of
these strings is remarkable considering that the documents were by this point
almost 600 years old. Regrettably, two of the three strings have since disappeared.13 The documentary bundles in the archival collections that went into
the modern Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus were certainly once tied with many more
strings. In his catalogue Donald Little states that ‘several such bunches [of
documents] were, in fact, found tied together in the Ḥaram al-sharīf with the
string still intact’, but he regrettably only recorded three strings and he did not
record which documents had belonged to any of these three tied bundles.14
The holes in the sale booklet’s three sheets are thus nothing unusual at all,
but in documents of the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus holes come in many different
shapes and at slightly varying positions – a topic that has hardly been studied
so far.15 The holes in the three sheets, however, are all in exactly the same position and have exactly the same shape.16
Apart from materiality, a second reason why we consider the three sheets
to be one single document is that they are all informed by the same approach
to organising the page. This starts with the script, which is in our view the
same,17 but goes well beyond that. Most importantly, the layout on all three
12
13
14
15
16
17
#507, #774 and #836.
#507 and #774.
Little, Catalogue, 335. The only strings he recorded were those belonging to #507, #774 and #836.
On these archival holes in documents from the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus, see Livingston, Managing
Paperwork as well as the ongoing projects by Anna Steffen (CSMC, Hamburg) and Michail Hradek
(Munich), who is working on the holes in the documents linked to the trader Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ḥamawī.
For an example of differently shaped holes, see the round holes in #785, #787, #788 and #790.
See for instance how similar words such as ‘dīwān’ (#061a, right, l. 8 and 15; #180a, right, l. 4;
#532b, right, l. 25) and ‘Burhān’ (#061a, right, ll. 8 and 15; #180a, right, ll. 3 and 8; #532b, right, ll.
30 and 32) are written.
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sheets is identical: the name of the buyer serves as ‘heading’ (highlighted in
yellow in Plate I.9); beneath it is a list of the objects this buyer bought (the lots)
(highlighted in blue in Plate I.9); under each lot (of one or several objects) we
find the price (highlighted in grey in Plate I.9); and on the left of the last lot we
find the sum total this buyer had to pay (highlighted in orange in Plate I.9).18
In the entire Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus we do not have any other sale booklet that
is organised by the names of the buyers.19
That these sheets are linked is also evident from one of those moments
when things got messy. This is the fault of one of the participants in the auction, whose name was registered on sheet #061. He had bought a book (or
rather several parts of the ḥadīth collection Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim), and the document’s scribe duly noted this lot and its price under the buyer’s name.20 This
buyer subsequently changed his mind, so that the scribe had to carefully erase
the price beneath the title, and wrote ‘transferred’ in its place. He also reduced
the overall sum this buyer had to pay from 109.5 to eighty-seven dirhams
(thankfully without erasing the original price), showing that the price for this
book had been twenty-two and a half dirhams (see Plate I.10). We find exactly
the same title, ‘parts of Muslim’, under the name of another buyer, who is,
conveniently for us, registered on sheet #532.21 Not only the title but also the
price is exactly the same (twenty-two-and-a-half dirhams), so that the case of
this ‘transferred’ object shows beyond doubt that the two sheets #061 and
#532 are part of one and the same document.
Finally, there is compelling external evidence in the shape of the four other
accounts and lists linked to the sale and discussed in Chapter 8. All four list
the names of individuals and sums paid or owed. These lists have been crucial
18
19
20
21
The sum total is indicated by the abbreviation ‘s-h’ ()سه, meaning ‘his sum total’ ()حسابه. For the use
of this abbreviation see for instance the mathematical treatise by Abū Bakr al-Ḥaṣṣār (6th/12th century), al-Bayān wa-al-tidhkār, fol. 7a. That this abbreviation was used in all three sheets is another
indicator that these three sheets belong together. Many other lists in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus
do not use this abbreviation, but rather use the phrase ‘min al-darāhim’ (for instance #176, #177,
#179 and #480; on this see also Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 114).
The closest we get are documents linked to a sale from the estate of al-Ḥamawī, but here we see
different documentary practices: they are either organised by the objects (followed by buyer and
price; #777, #778, #786) or by buyer (followed by the overall sum, but without mentioning the
objects; #780).
#061a, right, l. 27 (Buyer 5; just after entry ‘book 31’ in our list).
#532b, left, l. 7 (Buyer 58; entry ‘book 235’).
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for making sense of the sale booklet as well as for identifying buyers, and we
will repeatedly refer to them in the following. Three of them are among the
most important additions to the Burhān al-Dīn documentary corpus, as up
until now scholarship had not linked them to him.22 For our purposes here,
these accounts are helpful as we see that the individuals listed in them always
match those in the sale booklet. In payment list #812, for instance, fifty-two
payors are mentioned, all of whom we find as buyers in the sale booklet. What
is important for us is that these fifty-two individuals are distributed across
the three sheets of the sale booklet, #061, #180 and #532. As we observe the
same phenomenon in the other three accounts and lists (#968 with over eighty
names, #793 with over seventy names and #800 with forty names) they provide
irrefutable evidence that the three sheets constitute one single document, the
sale booklet of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate.23
The only element that made us initially hesitate is that the colours of the ink
and paper of sheet #180 differ slightly from the colours of sheets #061 and #532.
However, this colour difference is arguably not linked to the sheets’ production,
but to different preservation trajectories: the sheets were most likely preserved
at some point over the past 600 years in different locations with differing exposure to light and variations in humidity. This separate preservation context is
especially likely as sheet #180 shows some insect damage while we do not see any
such damage on the two other sheets. Alternatively, sheet #180 might have been
preserved in the same bundle as the other two sheets, but was simply the top
item of the bundle and thus more exposed to material damage.
It is thus beyond doubt that these three sheets constitute one single document or – more helpfully – one booklet with three sheets. So, let us look at how
this scribe actually put this booklet together, as this was certainly a widespread
practice during this period. If we put the sheets together, we see that #061
was the top sheet, followed by #180 in second position and #532 in third (see
Plate I.11). However, this description is slightly misleading as our scribe did not
write the sheets separately and then put them together. Rather, he first produced
a booklet of blank sheets and only then started to write. He did so by putting
22
23
#793, #800 and #968.
Further arguments showing that the three sheets were one document linked include the fact that
Burhān al-Dīn’s son Maḥmūd Kamāl appears as Buyer 20 on #180a, left, ll. 15–19 as ‘the orphan
Kamāl’.
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three blank sheets on top of each other and then he vertically folded them in the
middle to produce a daftar booklet (see Plate I.12 for the look of such a daftar
in general).24 Each sheet now made four pages (two on the front and two on the
back), and in contrast to other daftar booklets the scribe did not fold it again
to make two columns on each page. Rather, he now had a simple booklet with
a total of twelve pages. The scribe clearly folded the sheets before he wrote the
list as the script always stops before the fold (right-hand pages) or starts from the
fold (left-hand pages) – if he had folded the sheets after writing the list, some
words, or some letters at least, would have appeared on or run over the fold.
After producing a blank booklet, the scribe filled the first page (Plate I.13),
but his choice of the first page meant that the booklet’s fold was on the lefthand side (the usual orientation of books in left-to-right writing systems such
as English). It would have been very unusual for an Arabic writing scribe to
open the booklet now with this orientation and continue writing on the subsequent page. Rather, he turned the booklet over so that the fold was now on
the right-hand side (just as any other Arabic book). In this way, the second
page became the ‘front’ page of the booklet and the scribe now followed the
standard logic of right-to-left scripts, opening the booklet and filling its pages
one after the other (see Plate I.14).25
Once we have restored the sheets to their original order it becomes obvious that several features that seemed puzzling when looking at the three
sheets separately now make sense. For instance, sheets #061 and #180 each
has a blank page (#061b, left and #180a, right), and it might thus seem as if
each of them came to an end after three pages had been filled. This apparent
lack of continuity has certainly contributed to previous scholarship seeing the
sheets as separate documents. Yet, once we reconstitute the original booklet,
these blank pages make perfect sense as they are now the two last pages of the
booklet (one of these blank pages is visible in Plate I.14 at the very end).26 If we
24
25
26
See Little, Catalogue, 333 and Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 120–6 for daftars in the Ḥaram
al-sharīf corpus.
This system of filling the pages of a booklet was by no means the only way, as other documents
in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus, such as accounts by the trader Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ḥamawī, show
(see Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 181/2).
The page order is as follows: page 1 – #061a, right; page 2 – #061a, left; page 3 – #061b, right; page
4 – #180a, left; page 5 – #180b, right; page 6 – #532a, left; page 7 – #532b, right; page 8 – #532b,
left; page 9 – #532a, right; page 10 – #180b, left; page 11 – #180a, right; page 12 – #061b, left.
Plate Section I
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The Sale Booklet
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I.1 Sale Booklet, sheet 1a with pages 1 (right) and 2 (left)
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #061a, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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I.2 Sale Booklet, sheet 1b with pages 3 (right) and 12 (left)
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #061b, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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I.3 Sale Booklet, sheet 2a with pages 11 (right) and 4 (left)
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #180a, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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I.4 Sale Booklet, sheet 2b with pages 5 (right) and 10 (left)
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #180b, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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I.5 Sale Booklet, sheet 3a with pages 9 (right) and 6 (left)
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #532a, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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I.6 Sale Booklet, sheet 3b with pages 7 (right) and 8 (left)
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #532b, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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I.7 Threading holes, sheet 1a, upper half
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #061a, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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I.8a Bundle string photographed in 1978
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #507, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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I.8b Bundle string photographed in 1978
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #774, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
I.8c Bundle string photographed in 1978
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #836, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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I.9 Typical layout of entry in the sale booklet (sheet 3a): name of buyer (yellow), object/title
of book (blue), price (grey), sum total (orange)
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #532a, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
I.10 Corrected entry in sale booklet (sheet 1a): erased price for parts of Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim (blue),
corrected sum total (yellow)
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #061a, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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I.11 Order of sheets in the sale booklet (digitally altered image)
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I.12 Blank sheets of sale booklet in daftar format before the scribe started to write (digitally
altered image)
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I.13 Sale booklet in daftar format after the scribe had filled the first page (#061a, right)
(digitally altered image)
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I.14 Sale booklet in daftar format after the scribe had filled all pages (digitally altered image)
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I.15a Sheet number in sale booklet, sheet 2a
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #180a, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
I.15b Sheet number in sale booklet, sheet 3a
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #532a, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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I.16 Keeping track of payments in the sale booklet (sheet 3b): ‘received’ vertically written
across a name (blue), strikethrough (yellow), ‘weighted’ (green)
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #532b, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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number the twelve pages of the booklet – something none of its medieval users
would have done – page ten (#180b, left) is the only page in the booklet that is
not filled to the bottom with text, but it breaks off after three quarters of the
page. Page eleven and page twelve in turn are completely blank. Restoring the
booklet’s original shape has also solved two enigmatic signs in the document
that we had been unable to make sense of for a long time. In the top left
corner of the recto of sheet two (#180, the booklet’s ‘page four’) and sheet
three (#532, the booklet’s ‘page six’) we find symbols that are not linked to the
buyers’ names, the objects or the prices (see Plates I.15a, b). However, if we
put the sheets into the right order, it becomes apparent that they are numbers
that the scribe put on the sheets to indicate their order. The symbol on sheet
three can clearly be read as ‘3’, and we find the same numeral on other Ḥaram
al-sharīf documents.27
Using such a sheet-numbering system was important, as the sheets were
not sewn together but were instead simply nestled into each other. That the
sheets remained discrete items is evident from the subsequent list of receivables
#968 that lists eighty-five individuals, all of whom we find in the sale booklet.28
This debtors’ list is in fact a condensed version of the sale booklet, and the
interesting bit is the order of the names in this list. They show that the writer
of #968 copied the names of the buyers and the total sums they owed from the
sale booklet. More precisely, the order of names shows that he first took sheet
#061 and copied all its names on recto and verso, then took the third sheet #532
and again copied all the names, and finally did the same for the second sheet
#180.29 In other words, we see the logic of the three-sheet booklet as one unit,
but we also see that its sheets continued to be used as independent objects;
hence its scribe had been careful to indicate their order with sheet numbers.
Another subsequent estate-related document from the documentary network
27
28
29
For instance, the symbol is on #077, which is connected to #306 (Little, Catalogue, 373/4). We
thank Daisy Livingston for drawing our attention to this document. Other examples include #773,
#774 and #775. It is interesting, furthermore, to note that the signs used for ‘2’ and ‘3’ are identical
to those that we find on Saljuk coinage; cf. al-Ḥusaynī, al-Nuqūd al-islāmīya fī al-ʿahd al-saljūkī.
The sale booklet contains eighty-seven names and we believe that the two missing names were
simply left out by accident.
The order of names in #968 compared to the booklet is: #061a, right/b, left/a, right; #532a, left/b,
right/b, left/a, right; #180a, left/b, right/b, left. The scribe of #793 also proceeded in the order
#061, #532 and #180 for listing the debtors.
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around the sale booklet, #793, is an accounts sheet with receivables, expenses
and payments that also contains a list of names, and here again we have a scribe
using the three sheets of the sale booklet separately rather than leafing through
them in the format of a booklet.
We now know that the three sheets belong together, so we must also ask
whether any sheets are missing. The possibility that our list is incomplete is
obviously very problematic if we are to make any statements about what books
Burhān al-Dīn owned. Ulrich Haarmann was troubled by this and suggested
that this document ‘conceivably [included] other sheets which are not now
extant’.30 However, it is clear by now that this is simply not the case. We have
seen that the booklet’s final pages are blank, showing that no further sheets
were used to register the sales during the auction. More important is the evidence of the four accounts and lists linked to the sale. Here, we see that all the
individuals named are identifiable in the three sheets of the sale booklet. As we
have seen, all fifty-two payors in payment list #812, for instance, are identifiable in our three sheets. If there had been more sheets to the sale booklet, the
four accounts and lists of the documentary network around the sale booklet,
including #812, would have listed at least some names that we do not find on
our three sheets.
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Having established that the three sheets belonged together and that the booklet has come down to us in its entirety, it is time to turn to the purpose of this
sale booklet and the objects it lists.31 This question is particularly pertinent as
the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents have so far been mostly studied from a legal
perspective: Donald Little’s catalogue of the documents is organised according to criteria of shurūṭ literature and the study by Christian Müller focuses
on judicial practice.32 Our sale booklet is not primarily a legal document,
and, rather, needs to be discussed from the perspective of social history. This
brings us back to the methodological point made above: presuming that this
30
31
32
Haarmann, Library, 327/8.
The recent work by the Munich Arabic Papyrology Database on types of documents goes in
another direction, as it focuses on formal criteria and not on the documents’ functions. See for
instance Potthast, Diplomatik mamlūkischer Verwaltungsdokumente.
Little, Catalogue; Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen.
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list directly and unproblematically mirrors the household objects in Burhān
Dīn’s home would be a decontextualised reading of this list’s documentary
logic and thus misleading. We have to go back one step further: it is not only
that some objects were missing because Shīrīn had bought them, but, much
more importantly, this list is by its nature not an estate inventory listing all the
possessions of a deceased individual. There are many estate inventories in the
Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus on account of their massive presence in the investigation archive sub-corpus, but our sale booklet is not one of them.
Estate inventories constituted the first step in settling the deceased’s
estate and were drawn up either shortly before or soon after the individual
had died. The second step in this process was to divide the estate according to
the deceased’s will and the rules of Islamic law; the third step was to safeguard
the rights of those heirs who were not yet able to take ownership of their
share, children or absent heirs.33 The estate archive of Burhān al-Dīn is mostly
concerned with the first step, but this step was far more complicated than just
drawing up an estate inventory. That there is no estate inventory for either
Burhān al-Dīn or al-Ḥamawī might be linked to the fact that their personal
and business affairs were simply too complicated to be compressed into one
single document.34 Consequently, the judge’s trustee, al-Adhraʿī, embarked
on a lengthy process of drafting various documents to sort out their affairs. In
the case of Burhān al-Dīn, as we have seen, this period lasted five months and
we assume that this final point is the same moment that the deputy judge made
his revised (and so far as we know final) decision on the monthly maintenance
payments for Burhān al-Dīn’s children.35
At an early stage in the course of settling the estate, al-Adhraʿī also organised the sale of objects from Burhān al-Dīn’s household, and the following
chapter will look at this sale in more detail. Such sales were not unusual, and
we have several documents linked in one way or another to such estate sales in
the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus. The principal aim of such sales was to facilitate the
33
34
35
For an expert discussion of estate-related procedures see Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, especially
389–466, and also Little, Documents Related to the Estates of a Merchant.
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 434 underlines the fact that the absence of such inventories should
not necessarily be read as indicating that such documents were never produced, as we miss them in
several other cases as well.
#052/2 and #111/2.
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division of the estate among those entitled to a share according to the Islamic
law of inheritance.36 It is easier to divide cash than to quarrel over the value of
objects. The exact form of documents produced during the sale of an estate
depended on numerous factors, such as the individual scribe, the number of
items sold and the value of these items. In addition, scribes produced draft versions first and subsequently rewrote them into neater shape. We will examine
below how our booklet was positioned in this process of producing different
documents for a sale.
In the process of this sale, al-Adhraʿī had the document produced to which
we have designated the untechnical term ‘sale booklet’, but which in reality
might have had a much more precise function. In his handbook for notaries
from the ninth/fifteenth century, al-Asyūṭī describes the process of settling
the estate as consisting of three stages that in turn entailed the production
of three different documents.37 One of these is the ʿarḍ document that, according to his definition, was meant to list the sold objects, the buyers’ names and
the total sums – all the elements that we find in our sale booklet. The only
element that we find is missing when comparing it with al-Asyūṭī’s definition
is the names of the brokers.38
Our sale booklet does not carry a date, but evidence from other documents
indicates that the sale must have taken place in late 789/1387, one month after
Burhān al-Dīn’s death at most.39 Before conducting the auction, al-Adhraʿī
must have established which objects were actually part of the estate and which
belonged to other owners. This entailed, for example, taking Shīrīn’s sale contract of household objects aimed at separating her belongings from Burhān
al-Dīn’s estate.40 This had a massive impact on what we see in this list. There
are few valuable household objects, such as the engraved copper bowls that
Shīrīn had bought; rather, we see a list of the leftovers. These include two glass
jars with copper casing that went for a quarter of a dirham, fans sold for half a
dirham, a chain, a stone and comb that together fetched two and a half dirhams,
36
37
38
39
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Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 429–34.
Al-Asyūṭī, Jawāhir al-ʿuqūd, 459–63.
Al-Asyūṭī, Jawāhir al-ʿuqūd, 462.
Payment list #812 must have been written on the day of the auction at the earliest. Al-Adhraʿī
started this list on 3.11.789/1387, slightly more than a month after the assumed death date of
Burhān al-Dīn in late Ramaḍān (ninth month).
#382 and #622.
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and two razors with a knife that went for three dirhams.41 Among the more
valuable objects on sale, apart from the books, were Burhān al-Dīn’s garments
(his black fur overgarment fetched 133 dirhams and his blue overgarment sold
for 100 dirhams), wooden chests (at 160 dirhams the most expensive objects),
a sword for eighty dirhams and carpets that sold for seventy-five dirhams.42
If the household objects in the sale booklet are not representative of the
material world of Burhān al-Dīn’s household, what about the books? Can we
take the list as reflecting what books he actually owned? There is no evidence
to suggest that any previous transaction of books took place that was similar
to that of Shīrīn’s household objects. As such, a transaction would have had
a direct impact on settling Burhān al-Dīn’s estate, and we can expect that any
such document would have reached us via the estate archive that al-Adhraʿī
built up. However, it has to be stressed that this sale booklet is not a legal
document. No one is named as issuing it, there is no date, and it is devoid
of the otherwise omnipresent witness signatures. This is, rather, an informal
list that al-Adhraʿī used for the practical purpose of settling Burhān al-Dīn’s
estate. Most importantly, the list does not give any indication of whether all
the books and objects owned by Burhān al-Dīn were put up for auction. There
is a fair chance that the heirs did not want to convert all his assets into cash and
decided to divide some of these books and objects among themselves as some
of them might have had particular emotional significance for the heirs. We do
not have any documents explaining who received what in the end, but this
possibility must be kept in mind.
However, even if we cannot necessarily take this as a complete list of all
the books Burhān al-Dīn owned, it is fair to assume that only a few books were
missing. Since what we see is a massive book collection with hundreds of books
and a value of more than 7,000 dirhams, it is highly unlikely that a significant
part of his library remains invisible to us. Moreover, the fact that this booklet
is not a legal document, such as a will, might actually even be advantageous.
As has been argued for the use of documents for English book history, wills
41
42
Jars: obj86; fans: obj15; chain/stone/comb: obj46; two razors/knife: obj80.
Black overgarment: obj77; blue overgarment: obj56; wooden chests: obj3; sword: obj28; carpets:
obj13, 18, 22, 64, 65, 69.
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are more difficult to use as inventories as they generally only list a selection of
books owned by the testator.43
The documentary context of the sale booklet is thus rather encouraging as
to its usefulness for understanding Burhān al-Dīn’s world of books. The three
sheets belong together, the list is complete, and the likelihood that a significant
number of books was taken out of the estate before the auction is low. The
next point to establish is that this list is not a transcription produced during
the auction itself. The list is very well and consistently organised, there are
hardly any corrections (the ‘transferred’ object mentioned above is one of the
few exceptions),44 and the scribe knew exactly how many pages he would need.
If one makes a booklet of sheets stacked on top of each other, folds them in the
middle and runs out of space on the last page, it is impossible to add a further
sheet without this being evident in the order of pages. This booklet must thus
have been written after the auction drawing from an original ‘live’ transcript.
The layout of this (lost) draft transcript must have followed the course of the
auction and thus been organised by the lots on offer rather than the buyers,
like our sale booklet. This is how other lists of sales in the Ḥaram al-sharīf
corpus are indeed organised.45 Our sale booklet must thus have been the result
of a scribe sitting down after the auction and calmly reorganising the list of lots
by buyer. This rewriting also reflected a fair degree of social engineering. It is
certainly not by chance that those who seem to come from the wider populace
are at the end of the protocol, such as a certain Abū Yazīd al-ʿAjamī (Buyer 80)
who spent three dirhams on a knife and two razors. By contrast, those who
carry the honorific titles of the scholarly, military and political elite (such as
shaykh, maqarr and sayyidunā) are at the top of the list.
We chose the name ‘sale booklet’ to emphasise that the core function
of this document was to serve accounting purposes.46 Its scribe was a certain
43
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Harris, Role of Owners.
Another mistake must have happened when the scribe copied the original ‘transcript’ of the auction. For entry ‘book 189’ he erroneously first wrote ‘al-Majmūʿ li-Ibn’ before he realised his
mistake, crossed it out and wrote the correct ‘al-Lumaʿ li-Ibn Jinnī’.
For instance, #770/b.
Haarmann, Library, 328, interprets the list as a possible ‘first draft’, which is in our view emphatically not the case, and describes it as ‘records of sold objects’, which has to be refined in light of the
four accounts and lists linked to the sale (of which he was not aware). The sale booklet is thus at
best a record of ‘reservations’ as the respective sale was only concluded once the price was actually
paid.
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Muḥammad (Ibn) ʿAshā, who is only known because he was at the same time
one of the buyers (Buyer 70). He identified himself in the list as ‘its scribe’,47 and
he must have worked for al-Adhraʿī. He produced this clean booklet to keep
track of who owed how much and who had paid his dues in the weeks after the
sale. This is evident from two terms and numerous vertical strokes that were
added to the sale booklet at a later point. As we have seen, the sale booklet can
be read in conjunction with payment list #812, which simply lists the names of
the buyers and the amount they had actually paid. For instance, the first name
in #812 is Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ghazāwī, who paid 157 dirhams. We find this same
person in our sale booklet as Buyer 57, who is indeed registered after the auction as owing the sum total of 157 dirhams.48 In the sale booklet – and now it
gets interesting – we see that his name has a vertical strikethrough (highlighted
in yellow in Plate I.16) and in addition the term ‘qubiḍa’ (‘received’) is vertically written across the name (highlighted in blue in Plate I.16). We observe
this phenomenon with forty-one buyers, though with some variation as we
find some names with the term ‘qubiḍa’ and strikethrough (seventeen) and in
other cases only the term ‘qubiḍa’ (eight) or only the strikethrough (sixteen).
These notes in the sale booklet on who paid his dues must have been added
with reference to payment list #812 as well as the three other accounts and lists
(see Chapter 8). The sale booklet must thus be read in conjunction with this
documentary network of accounts and lists to understand its documentary
features.
The sale booklet provides even more details on the payments. In the process of keeping track of who had paid his dues, al-Adhraʿī also noted down
whether the individual’s payment had been settled in ‘weighted’ dirhams by
writing another term, ‘wuzina’, close to the sum total of those who had paid
(highlighted in green in Plate I.16). This shows that many buyers paid with
silver coins of irregular weight where the only chance to determine their value
was to weigh them – a standard feature of this period’s coinage systems.49 It
is for this reason that ‘live’ transcripts of estate sales, including information
on the costs of the auction, often list the ‘money-changer’, whose expertise
47
48
49
#532a, right, l. 10: ‘kātibuhu’.
#532b, left, ll. 1–3.
On this issue for Egypt see Schultz, Monetary History.
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was required to determine the actual value of the coins of different weight
and purity that were handed over. However, since the Ayyubid period highly
regulated silver coins had also been in circulation in Bilād al-Shām, allowing
payments to be undertaken by counting coins rather than weighing.50 We
assume that those sums paid without the scribe noting down ‘wuzina’ refer to
payments in such regular coins.
That this list’s function was primarily situated in the world of accounting
is also evident from the few interlinear insertions that we find beyond the list’s
standard items (name of buyer, list of the objects bought, price of each object
and sum total). In one instance al-Adhraʿī or one of his men noted the current
state of one of the buyers’ accounts, ‘265 [dirhams] received, 291 [dirhams]
outstanding’.51 In other instances it was noted that a third person had paid part
of the buyer’s sum total.52 Our sale booklet was thus neither an ad hoc transcript of the auction nor a legal document with an intended longer life cycle.
That the sale booklet is such an ‘in-between’ protocol has several consequences for the information it contained. In contrast to legal documents the
list only needed to be comprehensible for al-Adhraʿī, his scribe(s) and probably the deputy judge al-Ṣarfanī, who seems to have supervised the settling
of the estate (apart from being Buyer 4). In consequence, the information on
many buyers’ identities was often recorded in a very condensed format that
was clearly only intended as an aide memoire for people al-Adhraʿī and his
men knew quite well. It was thus sufficient for them to identify an individual
only via his role in the process of settling the estate, such as ‘the guardian’
(‘al-Waṣī’, Buyer 24). In the same way, books are identified in a very succinct way, often with not more than one single keyword, such as al-Wasīṭ
(book 102), even though there are numerous book titles with this keyword.
As will become evident in the following chapters, in many cases it is thus far
from straightforward to identify to what book a keyword refers and to what
individual a ‘name’ refers.
50
51
52
Heidemann, Economic Growth and Currency.
#061a, left, ll. 15–19 (Buyer 10, Burhān al-Dīn b. Qāsim). The payment he made is indeed registered with ‘265’ in #812 (here he is Payor 22) and #793.
#061a, left, l. 6 (Buyer 8, al-Shaykh Burhān al-Dīn); #061b, right, l. 11 (Buyer 11, Ibn al-Muhandis):
entry ‘book 101’; #532a, left, l. 10 (Buyer 44, Zayn al-Dīn Ibn al-Naqīb).
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The sale booklet also does not dig too deeply into more complex lots of
books. For five lots with a total of nineteen books the scribe simply mentions
that ‘incomplete/damaged books’ (kharm) are sold, but does not provide any
detail as to what these books might have been.53 This sale booklet produced for
accounting purposes also did not entice the scribe to describe in much detail
multiple-text or composite manuscripts, which he simply lists as ‘majmūʿ ’.54
In other cases he provided more detail, but these were again the bare minimum
that he needed to identify what was sold. He thus wrote that a majmūʿ was
‘large’, or that it was written in ‘Turkic language’, or that it pertained to specific
fields of knowledge such as lexicography and ḥadīth.55 In the same vein, he was
perfectly fine with just noting the sale of ‘two books of medicine’ without any
indication of titles.56 Finally, the scribe mentioned rather laconically in several
instances after a title that the book contained further titles (wa-ghayruhu).57
Apart from its status as an in-between protocol, the second issue that
impacts on the scribe’s choice of what to include and what to leave out is that
this list was part of a much wider documentary network. We have the four
accounts and lists linked to the sale, and without these four documents the
sale booklet would have remained much more enigmatic. In addition, the four
accounts and lists give fascinating insights into how protracted and complex
it was for the trustee to chase the buyers up to actually pay their dues (see also
Chapter 8). This is not the place to give these additional documents the detailed
analysis they deserve, but it is important to briefly profile them. All these documents are lists of some kind and they are written in a highly informal way. Like
the sale booklets they do not carry any signatures; they were thus not written
as legal documents, but as informal paperwork to keep track of receivables,
payments and expenses incurred during the sale. They all look similar at first
glance, but closer analysis shows that they served different functions: #968 is
a condensed version of the booklet and was meant to give a crisp overview of
who owed how much; #812 was a payment list recording actual payments;
53
54
55
56
57
Book 95 (9 books), book 147 (1 book), book 164 (2 books), book 165 (3 books) and book 218
(9 books).
Book 83, book 155, book 171 and book 255.
Large: book 154; Turkic: book 179; lexicography: book 79; ḥadīth: book 177.
Book 140.
For instance, book 136, book 162, book 163, book 212 and book 213.
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Counting Books
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#800 is an account recording payments and expenses incurred during the sale
of the estate; and #793 is a second account that again registered payments and
expenses, but also listed receivables.
In addition to the four accounts and lists, there is one further case where
we see that the sale booklet was embedded in a much wider documentary
network. Al-Adhraʿī did not receive the sum owed by Burhān al-Dīn’s son
Maḥmūd Kamāl (Buyer 20) for his survival kit, fifty-six and a half dirhams, in
cash. Rather, al-Adhraʿī offset the sum, as we have seen, against the monthly
maintenance payment that Maḥmūd Kamāl’s legal guardian received. In
consequence, we see this sum reflected in an entirely different document, the
acknowledgement deed that al-Adhraʿī issued for this purpose.58 The name of
Maḥmūd Kamāl in the sale booklet, however, bears neither a strikethrough
nor the term ‘received’ that would have indicated that his dues were settled.
Nor is this payment registered in payment list #812 or the payment sections
on the accounts #793 and #800. Though we cannot explore this in any depth
here, the fact that a buyer sometimes pays part of the sum due by another
buyer indicates that further transactions took place in the background of the
sale booklet that are not visible to us. Any reading of this booklet thus always
has to factor in that it was part of such a wider documentary network.
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The final step in this chapter is what might seem like a rather tiresome exercise,
namely counting books. This is crucial if we are to understand the documentary logic of the sale booklet. This is much more than a bean-counting exercise,
it is a crucial step in getting a feel for the materiality of the texts in the library.
As much as the analysis of any archival corpus requires clarity on the difference between document, sheet and text, the analysis of a library demands that
terms such as ‘book’, ‘text’, ‘title’, ‘volume’, ‘codicological unit’ and so on are
used with precision. The reason this is so important is that each writer of a
document, and each author of a narrative text, had different preoccupations
and interests when talking about books. When translocating this conceptual
cacophony into our modern studies, we end up in a terminological quagmire
if we do not move beyond commonsensical categories such as ‘book’.
58
#106 (between Muḥarram and Rabīʿ II 790/1388).
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In terms of counting books, there are three main methods of quantification that can be given for a book collection on the basis of our sale booklet.
Firstly, the collection can be quantified according to ‘lots’, that is, either an
individual book or a group of books that were sold as a single lot in the auction (see Table 4.1). In the sale booklet each ‘lot’ carries its own price, for
example ‘The Classes of Koran Recitators, 16.25 Dirhams’, ‘nine incomplete
books, 19 Dirhams’ or ‘a knife and two razors, 3 Dirhams’.59 Burhān al-Dīn’s
book collection was sold in 273 book lots (in addition to the eighty-six lots of
household objects and one lot comprising one document). This is the easiest
number to establish, as it follows the logic of the sale booklet and is roughly
equivalent to what can be called ‘entry’ in other medieval book lists. Yet the
number of lots is not the only, nor necessarily the most helpful, number via
which to understand how many books Burhān al-Dīn’s library contained.
The second possibility is to quantify the collection according to ‘titles’,
that is counting the textual unit irrespective of lot (there can be more than one
title in a lot) and irrespective of the books’ materiality (‘codicological units’).
There are 292 titles in the sale booklet, but this number comes with caveats as
some of these titles are duplicates. More problematically, this number includes
266 ‘proper’ titles, but also those cases where the book(s) are only described
very generically, such as ‘majmūʿ’ (multiple text or composite manuscript),
‘dīwān’ (anthology of poetry), ‘tārīkh’ (history) or even just ‘kitāb kharm’
(incomplete/damaged book). At the same time, the actual number of titles in
Burhān al-Dīn’s library was probably higher, as the multiple text or composite
manuscripts contained more than one title, and perhaps even dozens of titles.
This applies not only to those books explicitly labelled majmūʿ in the booklet,
but also to the almost forty cases where the scribe mentions a title and then
simply puts a ‘wa-ghayruhu’ (‘and more still’) behind it.60 We estimate that
there were somewhere in the region of 350 titles in this library. Yet it is clear
that the sale booklet is less helpful on titles than other kind of book-related
documents. Its function for accounting purposes and its status as in-between
protocol meant the scribe had no reason to register the details of all titles in a
59
60
Book 271, book 95 and obj80a/b.
We depart here from Haarmann, Library, 330, who sees this term as a reference either to additional
titles or to additional books.
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given book. By contrast, the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī book list written a century later
in Damascus shows that the scribe of a list written prior to the endowment of
his books had a far greater incentive to register multiple titles contained in one
single book.61
Finally, we can quantify a book collection in terms of ‘codicological units’,
that is, each physical object is counted irrespective of whether it is a standalone unbound quire, a ‘proper’ one-volume book or one volume of a multivolume book. There are numerous lots with two titles in the sale booklet and
we consider these to be two distinct codicological units, not one book with
two texts. This is because several of these lots unequivocally show that the
scribe was registering distinct objects. In lot 98, for instance, the scribe first
mentions that the buyer acquired a multiple-text or composite manuscript
(majmūʿ ) and then mentions title 98b, al-Faṣīḥ, which was clearly not part of
the majmūʿ. It has to be said that the sale booklet is not a rich source on the
number of codicological units as the scribe had little interest in the materiality
of the books that were sold. In most cases it is entirely unclear whether the title
refers to a single loose quire or a large multi-volume book.
How little material information we get from the sale booklet becomes
clearer when we compare it with another document from the Ḥaram al-sharīf
corpus, #652, which at first glance seems to be unrelated to the story of Burhān
al-Dīn and his books.62 This document was produced because an individual
named Burhān al-Dīn al-Qalqashandī had run into financial troubles. He thus
pledged several of his books to a certain Muḥammad b. Muḥammad, probably
as security for a loan. When Muḥammad’s grandfather died an estate inventory must have been prepared (we do not have this) and Muḥammad made
sure to separate his property from that of his grandfather as they had been
living in one household. In this process of separating the property document
#652 was prepared, and this document also contains the list of the books that
al-Qalqashandī had pledged to secure the loan. Looking at this list – and we
return now to the issue of materiality – one gets the impression that complete
works were rather rare in the bookish world of medieval Jerusalem. There is
only the ‘first’ (volume?) of al-Bukhārī’s history, the ‘second’ (volume?) of
61
62
Hirschler, Monument.
We thank Bashir Barakat for drawing our attention to the importance of this document.
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al-Āmidī’s Aḥkām, the ‘fourth’ (part) of the Kifāya, the ‘second quarter’ of
al-Ḥāwī’s Sharḥ, the ‘first’ (volume?) of Ibn Khallikān’s history, and so the list
goes on. In the case of document #652 there was a clear rationale for describing
the books’ materiality as the document was meant to carefully differentiate
between the property of Muḥammad and that of his grandfather. By contrast,
in Burhān al-Dīn’s sale booklet there was little documentary logic in listing the
objects in much detail. Document #652 thus provides us in some sense with
the material details that are missing from the sale booklet. These details are
particularly relevant as the books described in this list come out of the immediate historical context of Burhān al-Dīn’s library: the previous year, the same
al-Qalqashandī attended the sale of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate library (he appears
in our sale booklet as Buyer 8) and bought three books as well as a robe of
honour.
On account of the function of the sale booklet being an in-between
protocol, reaching any certainty as to the number of codicological units in
Burhān al-Dīn’s library is thus difficult. This is compounded by the second
major problem in this regard, namely that we have not been able to identify
a single codex that actually was present in the library of Burhān al-Dīn (see
Chapter 7). In consequence, we do not have actual objects that would allow
us to understand how the scribe (Ibn) ʿAshā ‘translated’ the materiality of
books into the way he registered them in his sale booklet – evidence that has
been crucial in our previous work on book lists.63 However, when we consider
the information in the sale booklet and supplementary evidence, we arrive
at a number of approximately 350 codicological units. There are 273 book
lots, each containing at least one codicological unit. Seventeen lots have two
titles that we count, as stated above, as two different books, thus bringing
the number of codicological units to 290. Four lots contain ‘damaged books’
with the number in one lot ranging between two and nine, adding a further
nineteen codicological units so that the number stands at 319. To this we have
to add books that most likely consisted of more than one volume. For instance,
the most expensive book in the auction was Rawḍat al-ṭālibīn wa-ʿumdat
al-muftīn by al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277) (book 43). Modern editions have up
to twelve volumes, and the hefty price of 305 dirhams, more than a third of
63
Aljoumani, Maktaba madrasīya; Hirschler, Ashrafīya Library Catalogue; Hirschler, Monument.
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Table 4.1 The sale of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate in numbers
Books
Objects
Document
Lots
Titles
Codicol. units
273
86
1
mid-300s
mid-300s
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what Burhān al-Dīn had paid for his house, makes it extremely likely that we
are looking here at a complete set of numerous volumes. Other books, such as
al-Bukhārī’s al-Ṣaḥīḥ (one set sold for 260 dirhams (book 1) and another for
172 dirhams (book 46)) were also certainly multi-volume works. Yet the materiality of the books provided by document #652 makes it unlikely that we have
too many multi-volume works, so that the estimate of around 350 is realistic.
ity
Conclusion
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This chapter has contextualised the sale booklet by looking at the archival
and documentary practices in which it was embedded. This has allowed us to
develop two principal arguments directly relevant to reading this list. Firstly,
this list is unique today, but that does not mean that comparable book collections were rare. Jerusalem, like other towns and cities in the region, was
an urban society characterised by a high degree of literacy. We have seen how
pragmatic literacy was widespread and how, as a matter of course, even the
most mundane transactions were recorded in writing. One would thus have
expected more such lists to survive in the rich Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus, and
one might be tempted to see the uniqueness of our list as proof that Burhān
al-Dīn’s book collection itself was rather the exception. However, the archival
and documentary contexts show that this document was produced in very
specific circumstances: to settle a complicated estate. More importantly, this
document was preserved as part of a small estate archive, not as part of some
large Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus. The question is thus not why we do not have
more lists like this in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus, but rather why similar estate
archives have not survived (or have been identified).
The second main argument pertains to methodology. Book lists from
the pre-Ottoman period have come down us in different shapes. We have the
example of a library catalogue, of lists in endowment deeds, and a list written
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prior to the endowment of books.64 To simply bundle these under the heading
‘book lists’ is at some points a tactical necessity for pushing the field of Arabicscript book and library studies forward (just as it was with the term ‘Mamluk’).
Yet this grouping is devoid of any analytical meaning as it sidelines the specific
documentary contexts in which they were produced and the impact these
contexts had on how the lists were written. A library catalogue intended for
long-term use as an aid to navigating the book shelves was evidently underlain
by very different documentary practices from those underpinning a document
written in the framework of the legal act of endowing books. Both, in turn,
follow very different sets of documentary logic from our in-between sale booklet. Only when we pay due attention to these contexts can we understand what
has been included and what excluded, and why a specific ‘book list’ takes its
own idiosyncratic form.
64
Library catalogue: Hirschler, Ashrafīya Library Catalogue; endowment deeds: Liebrenz, Waqf of
a Physician; al-Nashshār, Tārīkh al-maktabāt; list written prior to the endowment of the books:
Hirschler, Monument.
5
The Making and Unmaking of a
Prestige Library
n this chapter we finally turn to the library of Burhān al-Dīn itself and the
trajectory of his books after their owner’s death. The chapter is based on
the two central ideas of the previous chapters, namely: the agency of Burhān
al-Dīn in carving out an increasingly comfortable social space with an evergrowing number of positions and stipends in the last decade of his life, and
the documentary and archival logic of the sale booklet’s production and survival. The central argument of this chapter is that Burhān al-Dīn built up his
library to translate his increasing wealth and his new social status into a collection of culturally prestigious objects, something that we will call a ‘prestige
library’. In this sense the collection must be read not only as a reflection of his
intellectual interests, but also as an object that was meant to do something.
The second strand of argumentation pursued here picks up and develops the
question of the survival of this unique document that we started to consider
in the previous chapters. Here we propose that while what has come down
to us of Burhān al-Dīn’s library, the sale booklet, is unique, it is unlikely
that his sizeable library was exceptional within the actual library landscape
of medieval Jerusalem and its rich topography of the written word. Burhān
al-Dīn’s books thus contribute an important dimension to our knowledge of
book culture beyond the realms of the political elite (‘palace library’), beyond
the world of scholarly organisations and beyond the world of scholarly elite
households. His book collection can not be labelled with generic descriptors such as a ‘typical scholarly’ (or ‘Arab’ or ‘Mamluk’ or ‘Muslim’) library,
but this collection must be analysed and interpreted in its specific social and
cultural setting.
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In a first step, the library’s size will be set in perspective in order to consider
how representative such a personal book collection was in eighth/fourteenthcentury Jerusalem. We will then discuss in what ways this considerable library
fulfilled the specific cultural and social function of a prestige library and how
this function was in turn reflected in the books’ profile. The intellectual profile
of this library will also be analysed to understand the reading interests of an
individual of some wealth who was neither part of the social elite of Jerusalem
nor of the town’s scholarly inner circle. In a final step, 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 not
only gives us a unique snapshot of what books such an average individual
owned, but it provides us, via the auction community, with a wealth of data on
subsequent book ownership. More than sixty buyers purchased books from
Burhān al-Dīn’s estate, and it is thus possible to trace the next stage of ownership in these books’ trajectories. Some went into the collections of well-known
scholars or members of the political elite, but in many other cases we see that
the next stage of these books’ trajectory was another household that again
remained below the radar of the narrative sources.
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Whether we count Burhān al-Dīn’s book in terms of lots, titles or codicological units, he undoubtedly owned a large and, as we will see in the following
chapter, valuable collection. To get a sense of proportion we can set this library
in relation to the other documented libraries from Bilād al-Shām. We now have
three documented book collections from this region. In addition to Burhān
al-Dīn’s library, there are the Ashrafīya library endowed in mid-seventh/
thirteenth-century Damascus and the library of the scholar Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī
from late ninth/fifteenth-century Damascus. The Ashrafīya library had some
2,000 books on its shelves whereas Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī owned a library with over
six hundred books (codicological units). The Ashrafīya functioned as a public
library and was set up by one of the city’s rulers, so that the large number of
books is not surprising. The library of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, by contrast, was built
up in the home of a scholar, so it is understandable that its holding was smaller
than that of the Ashrafīya and its royal patron. At the same time, Ibn ʿAbd
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al-Hādī was a very active scholar who himself authored hundreds of books,
so that a substantial collection of over six hundred books fits his profile. It is
perfectly reasonable that Burhān al-Dīn, who was less central to the scholarly
world of his time and who never authored a book, had a smaller library.
These numbers show us that the quantitative dimension of book ownership in the pre-Ottoman Arabic-speaking lands is much more modest than
the fantastic figures that we often find in narrative sources.1 Even these more
modest numbers indicate that the towns and cities (and rural areas?) in the
region were highly bookish. With Burhān al-Dīn we are looking at a rather
average social and cultural world, but the number of books this average individual was buying, owning and bequeathing is still staggering in a comparative perspective, as we saw in the Introduction. This staggering number of
books brings us back to a question that we raised in the previous chapters
from the perspective of the document’s survival, that is, to what extent was
such a library typical of personal libraries in pre-Ottoman Jerusalem or even
wider Bilād al-Shām? Here the question is, more specifically, how its large
number of books sits within the overall landscape of the libraries owned by
individuals in Jerusalem. As far as the town’s Arabic libraries are concerned,
Bashir Barakat has written the best study of their history.2 In particular he has
mined the rich Ottoman court registers to provide a fascinating overview of
the rich library landscape in Jerusalem during this period.3 Yet even in this
study traces of the pre-Ottoman periods are very faint, and it is evident how
little we actually know about issues such as owning, trading and collecting
books.4
However, in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus there are a further dozen documents that provide insights into the Arabic libraries of individuals in Jerusalem
that have hitherto not been discussed in scholarship. The main relevant point
coming out of them for our discussion is that the numbers of books in these
documents are substantially lower than what we see for Burhān al-Dīn. With
one exception there are always under twenty titles (or ‘volumes’ or ‘books’,
1
2
3
4
On this issue see Hirschler, Ashrafīya Library Catalogue.
Barakat, Tārīkh al-maktabāt al-ʿarabīya.
Many of the relevant entries are reproduced in Ghosheh, Encyclopaedia Palestinnica, Vol. 16:
Manuscripts and Libraries in Palestine, 1516–1918.
Al-Uzbakī, Tārīkh maʿālim al-masjid al-Aqṣā lists many codices that once circulated in Jerusalem.
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depending on how the scribe of the respective document counted). We find a
slightly higher number in an informal protocol documenting the confiscation
of the estate of a certain Muḥyī al-Dīn Yaḥyā b. Ḥusayn al-Turkī.5 This Muḥyī
al-Dīn was the Shaykh of an otherwise unknown establishment called Zāwiyat
Muḥammad Bāk,6 where he also resided. His estate came into the focus of the
corrupt judge Sharaf al-Dīn.7 Muḥyī al-Dīn’s profile is strikingly similar to that
of Burhān al-Dīn: he too did not make his way into the narrative sources and
was linked to a rather marginal scholarly organisation, but he had clearly built
up some wealth. Among the items listed in the protocol are the contents of
Muḥyī al-Dīn’s library. This is not a detailed list comparable to the sale booklet
for Burhān al-Dīn’s estate, but it has very useful numerical information on the
library, which is described as containing ’34 scholarly books in large and small
volumes as well as quires’ in addition to a Koran in a leather case.8
That we do not find any other book collection in the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents comparable to that of Burhān al-Dīn in quantitative terms indicates
that we cannot present his library of over 300 titles as a straightforward example of book ownership in Jerusalem in the medieval period. Yet, and here we
return to Chapter 3, we have to consider the archival logic of the sale booklet
and of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate archive at large. That the sale booklet is the only
surviving such document in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus does not necessarily
make it an outlier, but goes back to the fact that so few estate archives have
been preserved within the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus. In consequence, Burhān
al-Dīn’s library is exceptional only within the source corpus that we have for
medieval Jerusalem – basically the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents.
That his library was not entirely unique is indicated by those documents
from the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus that contain brief hints at book collections.
For instance, document #706 records a (probably confiscated) estate being
5
6
7
8
#178 (793/1391).
Al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, II, 43 calls it ‘al-Zāwiya al-Muḥammadīya’, located at the western wall
of the Ḥaram close to Bāb al-Nāẓir and endowed by a Muḥammad Bāk Zakarīya al-Nāṣirī in
751/1350. This zāwiya also appears in other Ḥaram al-sharīf documents not linked to Muḥyī
al-Dīn such as #100, #206, #358, #429, #540, #643; see Muḥammad, Ijrāʾāt jard al-mawārīth
al-ḥashrīya.
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 517-9. Other Ḥaram al-sharīf documents concerning him are
#210, #315, #719, #768.
#178a, left, ll. 14–17: ‘kutub ʿilm mujalladāt mā bayna kibār wa-ṣighār ʿidda 34 wa-karārīs’.
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handed over to the men of Jamāl al-Dīn Maḥmūd, the major-domo of the
sultan in Cairo, who was systematically appropriating estates in Jerusalem
together with the town’s shady judge Sharaf al-Dīn.9 Part of this estate was
‘the books left behind’, which does not imply a remarkable book collection.
However, Kyle Wynter-Stoner has shown that these were the books of the
personal library of Ibrāhīm ibn Jamāʿa (d. 790/1388), a prominent scholar of
Jerusalem – books that constituted an important part of the famous library
that Jamāl al-Dīn Maḥmūd endowed some months later in Cairo.10 What we
have here are thus some vague words hidden in a document that in reality refer
to what must have been a massive library. Document #706 is neither the actual
estate inventory nor a sale booklet, but if such a document existed and had
survived, we would have had a fascinating insight into another personal library
of Jerusalem that existed during the lifetime of Burhān al-Dīn.
To what extent Burhān al-Dīn’s library was exceptional within the historical topography of personal libraries in the town is thus a question that the
Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus simply does not allow us to settle. Nonetheless, the sale
of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate allows us at least to get some sense of the bookish
world beyond the silence of the sources. When we look at the post-Burhān
al-Dīn trajectory of his books, we will see that some of the buyers left the
auction with a number of books far greater than the low numbers that we find
in those few Ḥaram al-sharīf documents that give insights into individuals’
Arabic libraries in Jerusalem. These books most likely joined other books in
their new homes and in some cases formed libraries with one hundred books
at least. Yet none of these new libraries is in any way evident in the Ḥaram
al-sharīf documents. The example of Burhān al-Dīn’s books and their trajectories thus already indicates the rich world of personal libraries in a town such
as Jerusalem in this period – a world which systematically stayed below the
radar of the narrative sources, but for which we also have a systematic loss of
documents.
The silence of the sources goes beyond the narrative texts and the documents associated with book ownership. In Chapter 7 we will discuss our
efforts to track down the actual codices that had once been in Burhān al-Dīn’s
9
10
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 439, 519–20.
Kyle Wynter-Stoner’s Ph.D. project at the University of Chicago.
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library. The frustrating result (we did not find a single codex) is probably
also down to the fact that book owners such as Burhān al-Dīn did not tend
to put ownership notes on their books in this period. This means that one
of the most important methods for writing the history of the Arabic-script
book, analysing manuscript notes, might be of very limited usefulness for
writing the history of individuals’ libraries in the pre-Ottoman period. In
other words, without the survival of this sale booklet there would not have
been any other way of knowing of the existence of Burhān al-Dīn’s books.
That this library is a lone star in the dark sky of book history is not because
other large-scale non-elite libraries did not exist. On the contrary: many such
stars once shone brightly, but have vanished from sight with the silence of the
sources and the loss of documents.
Pr
Burhān al-Dīn’s Prestige Library
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That Burhān al-Dīn’s library was part of a wider topography of comparable
libraries brings us to its very purpose. This takes us back to Chapter 1, which
argued that the catch-all term ‘scholar’ is of limited analytical usefulness in
writing a social history. In the same vein, to label libraries ‘scholarly libraries’
will also not get us very far in writing the history of the Arabic book. For
instance, the library of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī in Damascus was as much a ‘scholarly library’ as that of Burhān al-Dīn, yet they fulfilled two distinct functions.
In the case of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī we are looking at a scholar’s working library,
an ‘author library’, so to say, and also a library that was meant to monumentalise a bygone era of scholarship – a library that was carefully built up in the
course of his life and that he intensively used.11 Burhān al-Dīn, by contrast,
probably never authored a work; he spent most of his career without owning
any books, and only had the financial means to acquire books towards the
end of his life. To frame his book collection simply in terms of ‘the library
of a … scholar’12 is thus of limited usefulness for understanding the radical
differences between library projects such as those of Burhān al-Dīn and Ibn
ʿAbd al-Hādī.
11
12
Hirschler, Monument. For Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s scholarly oeuvre see Aljoumani and Hirschler,
Muʾallafat Yūsuf b. Ḥasan Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī.
Haarmann, Library.
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As much as Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s library fulfilled a specific cultural and social
function, building a monument, so did Burhān al-Dīn’s library. We argue that
the function of this library was that of a ‘prestige library’ in the sense that it
was part of an assemblage of material objects well beyond books that Burhān
al-Dīn acquired in the last decade of his life in parallel to him moving closer to
the elite. We have seen that Burhān al-Dīn’s life changed substantially in his
last ten years, once he had established himself in the endowment landscape
of Jerusalem and successfully offered recitation/intercessory prayer packages
to peripheral officers. It was during this time that he bought a home so as to
translate his new social status into more luxurious housing, moved closer to
the social elite through his marriage to Shīrīn, and accumulated belongings
worth ten times the price of an above-average house in Jerusalem. For instance,
clothing sold at the auction alone fetched more than 530 dirhams, including
expensive items such as the black fur overgarment that went for 133 dirhams.13
The list of these items shows an individual who certainly had the means to project his new social status: two pieces of headgear, seven overgarments in various
colours, a woollen garment, a garment in ‘upper Egyptian’ style, a white robe
of honour, two robes, two long robes and a garment described as ‘wide’ that
we know little else about.14
It is within this context of increasing wealth that Burhān al-Dīn also purchased his books. As much as he transformed his material world with regard
to housing and clothing, books started to enter his house in larger numbers.
How crucial books were in displaying cultural and social status is something
that is not visible from the sale booklet by itself, and here the narrative texts
are far superior. The way they describe book ownership and the anecdotes
they use to illustrate this show to what extent books were a crucial marker
of cultural and social elite status.15 This is shown wonderfully for the third/
ninth century by Beatrice Gruendler and for the period closer to Burhān
13
14
15
Obj77.
Headgear: obj71 and obj53; overgarments in various colours (miʾzar, mallūṭata and farjīya):
obj11, obj36, obj52, obj56, obj57, obj70 and obj77; woollen garment: obj40; garment in upper
Egyptian style: obj29; white robe of honour: obj9; two robes: obj51 and obj60; two long robes:
obj12 and obj38; wide garment: obj34.
Liebrenz, Curious Readers, 411 analyses the library of Saʿdī b. ʿĪsā b. Amīr Khān (d. 945/1539) as a
‘vehicle for … the representation of [his] learned and cultured self ’.
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al-Dīn by Doris Behrens-Abouseif, who quotes a statement by a prominent
judge in the late ninth/fifteenth century that he regarded himself as being a
privileged man because he had not only a fine home but also a library of 1,000
select bound books.16
The case of Burhān al-Dīn was arguably similar; as much as his house
and clothing were meant to project his new social status, so were the books
that gradually started to form his prestige library. The books in this library
must have been impressive and they must have gained a reputation within
Jerusalem. The fact that the auction community encompassed some one hundred persons from different social backgrounds, as we will see below, indicates
that Burhān al-Dīn must have built up a library that was noticed. In that sense,
Burhān al-Dīn’s project was successful, as his display of increasing wealth via
upscale housing, luxurious clothing and his prestige library must have come
to the notice of his contemporaries. Arguably, Burhān al-Dīn made sure that
his prestige library had some visibility in his house. Obviously, we do not have
any direct indication of where his books were placed within his house, but
the sale booklet offers some clues. It lists among his possessions two khazāʾin
(obj19 and obj43) that were most likely linked to the storage of books. The
term khizāna is widely used in the period’s narrative sources and documents
when talking about storing books.17 It covers a wide range of meanings stretching from library to library room to bookcase; it is often difficult to pin down
what exactly it refers to.18 In our sale booklet the term obviously does not
refer to the abstract notion of a ‘library’ or a ‘library room’, but to concrete
objects, bookcases. These two cases sold for quite substantial prices, thirty-six
and forty-one dirhams, and it is highly likely that Burhān al-Dīn used them to
store and display his books.
To store books in cases was linked not only to the prestige function of the
library, but also to practical concerns. Smaller book collections could easily be
stored in the chests (ṣandūq, pl. ṣanādīq) described in narrative sources.19 This
is confirmed by the few documentary glimpses that we get into book storage
16
17
18
19
Gruendler, Rise of the Arabic Book and Behrens-Abouseif, Book in Mamluk Egypt and Syria, 151.
Behrens-Abouseif, Book in Mamluk Egypt and Syria.
Hirschler, Ashrafīya Library Catalogue, 87/8.
Hirschler, Ashrafīya Library Catalogue, 86–8.
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in other houses of Jerusalem in this period. In the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents
we find a mention in the protocol of the confiscation of Muḥyī al-Dīn’s estate
in which two chests ‘to store the scholarly books’ are noted.20 While storage
in chests was certainly possible for Muḥyī al-Dīn’s thirty-odd books, it was
hardly an option for Burhān al-Dīn’s collection with well over 300 codicological units. Although he also owned two chests (obj3), it is much more likely that
these books were proudly displayed in the bookcases. This is especially likely
as previous work on book storage in pre-Ottoman Bilād al-Shām has shown
that books held in a ‘public’ library were definitely stored on shelves (probably
bookcases). Bookcases are also the default option for portraying book storage
in the best set of medieval depictions that we have of libraries, the illustrations
of al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt.21
The term ‘prestige library’ is not meant to reduce the meaning of Burhān
al-Dīn’s books to mere tools for displaying wealth and to reduce the significance of his library to nothing but a site of material prestige. There is no
question that these books had multiple meanings for Burhān al-Dīn and he
certainly engaged with them in other ways than displaying them as markers of
social and cultural status. Most importantly, this collection certainly was also
a scholarly resource for him. However, this professional function should not
be overstated: for most of his life Burhān al-Dīn simply had very few books in
his house and this absence of books did not pose any problem for his professional activities. His field of professional specialisation, recitation, could be
pursued without him having access to a large number of written texts. The
texts he recited, especially the Koran and ḥadīth, were texts that he often knew
by heart or for which personal notebooks were sufficient. As we have seen,
Burhān al-Dīn was probably also not an author of books, and this sets him
clearly apart from Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī and his scholarly working library. For this
scholar-author, who authored hundreds of books, it was essential to have a
reference library. While Burhān al-Dīn’s library thus had a scholarly bent to it,
its main function lay rather in its prestige.
20
21
#178a, right, line 19/23: ‘zawj ṣanādīq … wasṭānīya judad waḍaʿa fīhā kutub al-ʿilm’.
Hirschler, Ashrafīya Library Catalogue. See Liebrenz, Curious Readers for a discussion of an early
Ottoman-period illustration.
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The Profile of a Prestige Library
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That Burhān al-Dīn’s books had a very strong prestige element to them does
not mean that they were a random collection of pieces for showing off. Rather,
his library clearly reflected his professional world as a reciter and contained
the thematic subjects that interested a book owner and reader such as Burhān
al-Dīn. As the following discussion will show, his book collection was very
closely aligned to his professional profile, with, most importantly, books linked
to recitation taking a prime place.
In methodological terms, we have established the thematic profile of
Burhān al-Dīn’s library by relying on the titles as given in the sale booklet. This
method of exclusively relying on short titles has its pitfalls, as the booklet does
not provide any further indication of the subject. This is very different from
the Ashrafīya catalogue where the thematic subject was one of the organising principles and where a short title thus always comes alongside a thematic
context. Our sale booklet, by contrast, is a document of accountancy, not of
bookmanship, and it is organised by buyers. Exclusively relying on short titles
is fraught with further difficulties because we have not been able to identify
any actual books that were once displayed on Burhān al-Dīn’s bookcases. This
is very different from the case of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s endowment list where a
large number of books could be identified so that it was possible to externally
verify the thematic profiles of the short titles in his list.
The following discussion is based on thematic categories that we have
ascribed to these works. That such an exercise is problematic is well-known in
historical library studies22 and we want to highlight three caveats in particular.
Firstly, in many cases the title provided in the sale booklet is so generic that it is
impossible to identify with any degree of certainty which book is meant. This
goes, for instance, for entries such as ‘majmūʿ’ (multiple-text or composite
manuscript), which can refer to any topic or title, and for entries such as alMadkhal (The Introduction), which can refer to numerous different books.
The second challenge is that some texts have not come down to us and are not
known from other sources. In consequence, any thematic ascription would
be based on the (fragmentary) title alone and is thus far from self-evident and
22
Liebrenz, Rifāʿīya aus Damaskus, 80–4; Krimsti, Lives and Afterlives, 203.
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Table 5.1 Thematic categories in Burhān al-Dīn’s library
Thematic category
No. of titles
Percentage
Average price (dirhams)
Koran
ḥadīth
fiqh/uṣūl al-fiqh
history
ṣūfīsm
sermons/paraenesis
grammar
poetry
adab
devotion
40
36
23
21
15
14
14
11
10
9
18.5
16.5
10.5
9.5
7
6.5
6.5
5
4.5
4
20
51.5
32.5
26.5
33.5
17.5
24
17.5
19
52.5
Pr
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Note: Calculated on the basis of those 219 titles to which a thematic category could be ascribed;
percentages have been rounded to the nearest .5.
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often simply impossible. Thirdly, reducing the thematic breadth of works into
one single term is an inexact science, as many works are encyclopaedic or at
least highly heterogeneous. Despite these caveats such thematic categories are
helpful as heuristic tools for understanding in broad brush-strokes what fields
a collection covered. In the case of Burhān al-Dīn’s library it was possible to
ascribe a thematic category to some 82 per cent of all titles,23 which is fairly
close to the number of titles to which a thematic category could be ascribed in
the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī library (87 per cent).
The most prominent subject in the library of Burhān al-Dīn are books
linked to the Koran; with forty titles this subject has a hefty share of 18 per cent.
This might seem self-evident in a Muslim-context library, but a look at the
comparator libraries shows that this is not the case. The share in Burhān
al-Dīn’s library is outstandingly high when compared to that in the Ashrafīya
library (2.5 per cent) or the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī library (1.5 per cent). This high
percentage certainly goes back to Burhān al-Dīn’s main field of professional
activity, Koran recitation. Fifteen of these titles are texts on various aspects
linked to the study of the Koran, such as exegesis and, obviously, recitation.
Yet the bulk of the entries in this category are the Koran itself.
23
Calculated on the basis of the 266 ’proper’ titles, of which 219 can be matched with a thematic
category.
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However, in many cases the objects themselves were not very impressive. There were numerous incomplete Korans and these went for rather
low prices. The overall average price for a book (irrespective of number of
texts and volumes) at the auction was twenty-seven dirhams. That the prices
for what must have been very fragmentary Korans started at two dirhams
(book 126) puts them thus at the very bottom of the price range, and the
vast majority went for below-average prices, mostly for fewer than twenty
dirhams. This phenomenon is similar to the case of incomplete Bibles for
which we also find very low prices in the Geniza book lists.24 In the case of
the Koran one gets the impression of the working library of a reciter, rather
than a collector’s prestige library containing lavish exemplars with exquisite
paper, impressive bindings and so on. As Burhān al-Dīn was required to recite
specific sections from the Koran in his recitations it might be that these ‘fragmentary’ Korans were de facto booklets serving recitation purposes. The low
value of these fragmentary Korans suggests that Burhān al-Dīn bought at
least some of the cheaper copies in earlier periods of his life and that books
linked to the Koran had, at least in part, an existence independent from the
prestige function of the library. However, we do also find copies of the Koran
that must have been quite lavish objects, such as a Koran sold for seventytwo dirhams (book 108). Overall, within the upper tier of luxurious books in
Burhān al-Dīn’s library, the Koran did not have such a special place and even
the copy sold for seventy-two dirhams only made it to rank twelve of the most
expensive books.
The field of ḥadīth was a very close second among Burhān al-Dīn’s books,
with thirty-six titles or 16.5 per cent. Again, this might seem self-evident for a
‘Muslim’ library, but the two comparator libraries give a very different picture:
in the Ashrafīya library the field of ḥadīth was, with 3 per cent, at the very
margins; in the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī library the vast majority of titles belonged
to it (62.5 per cent). The latter is easily explained by the fact that Ibn ʿAbd
al-Hādī’s main (and for many years exclusive) field of scholarly activity was
that of ḥadīth. This was definitely not the case for Burhān al-Dīn, who was
neither engaged in scholarly ḥadīth transmission nor ḥadīth interpretation.
24
Olszowy, Cheap Books, 84/5.
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That ḥadīth still came in second place in his library is linked to his professional
profile as a reciter of mīʿād sessions that included ritual recitations of ḥadīth.25
When looking at the titles of ḥadīth in the Burhān al-Dīn library in more
detail, it is striking that one specific form of engagement with the reports on
the Prophet’s sayings and deeds is missing: post-canonical ḥadīth transmission. This is the exact opposite of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s library, which was, in its
textual configuration and its material form, first and foremost a monument to
this line of scholarship.26 There were thus hardly any of the booklets typical of
this line of ḥadīth transmission in Burhān al-Dīn’s bookcases, such as muʿjam
or mashyakha (presenting an author’s shortest and most prized chains of
transmission) or, most importantly, booklets with collections of forty ḥadīths.
There are only two titles that clearly belonged to post-canonical ḥadīth scholarship.27 This near-complete absence of post-canonical ḥadīth booklets might
be linked to the fact that this line of scholarship was, as far as we know, heavily
centred on the ḥanbalī milieu of Damascus, especially the Maqdisī family.28 It
might be that for a community such as the shāfiʿī madhhab in Jerusalem, to
which Burhān al-Dīn belonged, these booklets never played a central role in
their scholarly outlook and scholarly practices – or, alternatively, that they had
fallen out of fashion by the late eighth/fourteenth century.
Rather weakly represented in Burhān al-Dīn’s library is another line of
ḥadīth scholarship that had its heyday in the ninth/fifteenth century in Bilād
al-Shām and Egypt, ḥadīth commentary, with only two titles.29 While the
absence of post-canonical ḥadīth booklets might be explained by madhhab
affiliation, this does not work for the field of ḥadīth commentary, where shāfiʿī
scholars were particularly active. The low number of commentaries in Burhān
al-Dīn’s library is thus another indicator that his interest focused on the recitation of the texts themselves rather than on other forms of scholarly engagement. If Burhān al-Dīn had an interest in ḥadīth he most likely turned to the
primer for ḥadīth studies by Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ (d. 643/1245) (book 224). This work
25
26
27
28
29
#026 and #002.
Hirschler, Monument, especially 50–9. On the development of ḥadīth scholarship in this period
see Davidson, Carrying on the Tradition.
Book 110 (al-Musalsalāt) and book 252 (al-Arbaʿīn al-Wadʿānīya).
Hirschler, Monument.
Blecher, Said the Prophet of God.
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had become enormously popular in Egypt and Bilād al-Shām at this point and
it is no surprise that Burhān al-Dīn had it in his house.30
What we do find on Burhān al-Dīn’s bookcases are the ‘canonical’ ḥadīth
collections, especially the ṣaḥīḥs by al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870) and Muslim
(d. 261/875) as well as the Muwaṭṭaʾ by Mālik b. Anas (d. 179/796). Around
half of the ḥadīth titles are linked to these works if we add ‘derivative’ works,
such as summaries of these collections. That these foundational texts are part
of his library might once again seem self-evident. However, it is striking that
they are so poorly represented in Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s library even though this
library was stacked from top to bottom with books from the field of ḥadīth.
The presence of these collections in Burhān al-Dīn’s house can thus not simply
be explained by this being a ‘Muslim library’ or a ‘scholar’s library’. Rather,
this was exactly the material that was relevant for recitation sessions and thus
of high relevance for this specific book collection.
With the books of ḥadīth we also enter a world of rather splendid objects
as these works must have been very impressive in material terms. Several of
these large-scale ḥadīth collections came in several hefty volumes and it is thus
not surprising that the field of ḥadīth had the second highest price average
among the titles sold at the auction of Burhān al-Dīn’s books. We find six
ḥadīth titles among the ten most expensive books sold over the two days,31
including copies of al-Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ in second and third place. As they sold
for 260 and 172 dirhams they, and similarly expensive works, were the ideal
objects to put on display in the bookcases of a prestige library.
Another splendid object brings us to Islamic law, which comes in third
place among thematic fields, with twenty-three titles or 10.5 per cent. Here
we find al-Rawḍa by al-Nawawī, the massive flagship of shāfiʿī law at this
point. This book went for 305 dirhams, while the average price for a book
was twenty-seven dirhams at this auction. Selling for more than a third of
the price of Burhān al-Dīn’s above-average house, this was certainly the finest
object that he had in his prestige library. In terms of intellectual profile, his
books in this field did not focus on the abstract issues of uṣūl al-fiqh, that is,
the question of what sources are permissible and what methodology should
30
31
Gharaibeh, Sociology of Commentarial Literature.
Books 1, 46, 150, 151, 222, 236.
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be applied to extrapolate rules from these sources. There are only two titles
in this field.32 Rather, Burhān al-Dīn’s interest was in applied law, and here it
quite clearly shows that he was strongly affiliated with the shāfiʿī madhhab, to
which sixteen of the titles belonged. Three other titles were on ḥanafī law and
a single title on mālikī law. The prices for law books other than al-Nawawī’s
al-Rawḍa were rather modest and the majority sold for under twenty dirhams.
With the next field, history, we return to books that contained the texts
Burhān al-Dīn needed when narrating the stories of the virtuous (‘ḥikāyāt
al-ṣāliḥīn’) as he was also required to do during his mīʿād sessions.33 Books
linked to this field take fourth rank with twenty-one titles or 9.5 per cent. That
these books’ profile was closely linked to Burhān al-Dīn’s recitation activities is
also evident from the fact that contemporaneous works were absent. Rather,
those from the early Islamic period and those concerned with Jerusalem
dominate. Among those on early Islamic history are works on early Muslim
expansion (Futūḥ al-Shām and Futūḥ Miṣr) and biographies of leading figures
(Manāqib ʿUmar and Faḍāʾil al-aʾimma), but biographies of the Prophet
Muḥammad (al-Sīra) are the largest group.34 By contrast, there is not a single
historical title authored during the period of the Cairo Sultanate. Yet a slight
local flavour is discernible with a book on the Merits of Jerusalem (Faḍāʾil
al-Quds) and the biography of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn by Ibn Shaddād (d. 632/1235).35
The prices of historical books were average and none of them fetched more
than fifty dirhams.
Another source for stories of the virtuous were the books linked with
ṣūfīsm that come in fifth place with fifteen titles or 7 per cent. These books
clearly show that Burhān al-Dīn was very much at home in the world of ṣūfī
practices and ideas, and we have seen that he was affiliated with the Ṣalāḥīya
Khānqāh. As Ulrich Haarmann has already shown, here we find several ‘classics’ such as al-Riʿāya by al-Muḥāsibī (d. 243/857), the Risālat by al-Qushayrī
(d. 465/1072) and Qūt al-qulūb by al-Makkī (d. 386/998).36 There are also
authors closer to Burhān al-Dīn’s age such as al-Futūḥāt by Ibn al-ʿArabī
32
33
34
35
36
Books 115a and 115b.
#026 and #002.
Books 217, 248 and 57, 12 and 80, 141, 211, 240a.
Books 13 and 49.
Haarmann, Library, 331. Books 40, 195, 245.
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(d. 638/1240) and two copies of ʿAwārif al-maʿārif by al-Suhrawardī
(d. 632/1234).37 It is noteworthy that the Risālat by al-Qushayrī was the most
popular work in individuals’ book collections in medieval Jerusalem. In addition to Burhān al-Dīn’s library we find it in three other homes documented
within the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus.38 Its concise combination of manual and
biographical work seemingly made it a must-have. The prices for books on
ṣūfīsm were slightly above average and we again find copies that certainly took
a prominent place in this prestige library. Among them are the two copies of
the handbook ʿAwārif al-maʿārif, which sold for seventy dirhams apiece and
must have been impressive material objects.
One of the two thematic categories that come in joint sixth place are books
with sermons in the field of paraenesis. This group of books is also closely
related to Burhān al-Dīn’s mīʿād sessions, where such material was highly
relevant. In this field we find six titles by Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200), who was
undoubtedly one of the most popular authors in this field.39 There were even
two copies of Ibn al-Jawzī’s compendium on model sermons, al-Tabṣira, in
Burhān al-Dīn’s library. The prices for books in this field were, together with
those for works of poetry, at the very bottom end of the price range.
As a reciter Burhān al-Dīn also had a sustained interest in grammar, which
we also find ranked sixth. Among the fourteen books in this field of knowledge we find standard works such as al-Alfīya by Ibn Mālik (d. 672/1274),
three copies of al-Faṣīḥ by Thaʿlab (d. 291/904) and al-Lumaʿ by Ibn Jinnī
(d. 392/1002).40 Commentaries were more numerous, and we find five commentaries on Ibn Mālik’s Alfīya alone, including Sharḥ al-Alfīya by Aḥmad
al-Qudsī Ibn al-Raṣṣāṣ (d. 790/1388–9).41 The prices for grammatical books
were slightly below average and few of them went for more than thirty dirhams. There were copies that sold for higher prices and that clearly fitted the
materiality of a prestige library, such as a commentary on al-Zamakhsharī’s
Mufaṣṣal for seventy dirhams.42
37
38
39
40
41
42
Books 161, 104/106.
#652, #768 and #939.
Books 75, 120, 134, 212, 216, 220.
Books 181b, 68/98b/166, 189.
Books 113, 199, 227, 228, 253.
Book 226.
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The ‘thematic’ fields of poetry (eleven titles) and adab (ten titles) are
ranked eighth and ninth respectively. With a combined 9.5 per cent they fall
well above the ratio of such titles in the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī library (3.4 per cent),
but far below the Ashrafīya library, which had the astonishingly high ratio of
49.5 per cent of titles in these two fields. In Burhān al-Dīn’s library we find,
unsurprisingly, three copies of the bestseller among adab works in this period,
the Maqāmāt by al-Ḥarīrī (d. 516/1122), as well as the anthology Zahr
al-ādāb by al-Ḥuṣrī (d. 413/1022).43 Among the poetic works we find classics
such as two copies of the Dīwān of al-Mutanabbī (d. 354/955), but also more
contemporary collections such as those by Ibn al-Wardī (d. 749/1349) and Ibn
Nubāta (d. 768/1366).44 What is striking is that these titles all fetched rather
modest prices and that the fields of adab and poetry (together with sermons)
are at the lower end of average prices. While illustrated copies of al-Ḥarīrī’s
Maqāmāt belong to the top tiers of Arabic bookmanship, the three copies on
Burhān al-Dīn’s bookcases must have been much more modest objects as they
sold for below-average prices, between fifteen and eighteen dirhams.
The last field to be mentioned, in tenth place, is again closely linked to
Burhān al-Dīn’s activities as reciter of mīʿād sessions – devotional texts dedicated to the Prophet Muḥammad, with nine books. What stands out in this
group is that one single text, al-Shifāʾ bi-taʿrīf ḥuqūq al-Muṣṭafā by al-Qāḍī
ʿIyāḍ b. Mūsā al-Yaḥṣubī (d. 544/1149), was held in three copies, clearly
reflecting this work’s enormous popularity.45 In this group are also three books
described as Mawālid, that is on the Prophet’s birth.46 The books in this field
certainly fitted the prestige library profile of this collection as they have the
highest price average. One of the copies of the Shifāʾ sold for 171 dirhams,
a fifth of the price of Burhān al-Dīn’s house, and must have been splendidly
decorated.47 The two other copies must have also been beautiful objects as they
sold for seventy-four and seventy-one-and-a-half dirhams respectively.48
43
44
45
46
47
48
Books 26, 194, 267 and 51.
Books 132, 133 and 71, 58.
Books 4, 169 and 230.
Books 59, 61 and 243.
Book 4.
Books 169 and 230.
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All other fields of knowledge are represented in Burhān al-Dīn’s library,
with five books or fewer, including theology with five titles or 2.5 per cent.
This field was clearly not a major concern for Burhān al-Dīn and this figure
matches the low ratios of theology in the Ashrafīya library (2.5 per cent) and
the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī library (4 per cent). Fields such as medicine (two titles),
logic (two titles), lettrism (one title) and oneiromancy (one title) were of rather
marginal importance for Burhān al-Dīn as well.
However, even among these marginal fields there are some interesting phenomena. For instance, political thought had some minor traction, with four
entries. It is noteworthy that these were in fact only two titles, but each was
held in two copies. These titles were Adab al-dunyā wa-al-dīn by al-Māwardī
(d. 450/1058) and Sirāj al-mulūk by Muḥammad b. al-Walīd al-Ṭurṭūshī
(d. 520/1126?).49 From the documented book collections it is evident that the
Sirāj was popular in Bilād al-Shām as we also find two copies on the shelves of
the Ashrafīya library.50 In addition, we again see the Sirāj coming up in the few
other book-related documents in the Ḥaram al-sharīf. We have seen above the
informal protocol documenting the confiscation of the estate of Muḥyī al-Dīn
mentioning thirty-four books.51 In that document no book titles were mentioned, but thankfully we also have an account of the sale of this estate.52 This
account (see Table 6.3) shows that Muḥyī al-Dīn also had the Sirāj among his
books.
From this discussion of the intellectual profile of Burhān al-Dīn’s books
and their prices it is clear that this library has its very own story to tell. It is to
a large extent a library that reflected the professional profile of a reciter, and
one that is deeply shaped by its function as a prestige library. The comparisons
with the Ashrafīya and the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī libraries from Bilād al-Shām show
how wildly different libraries in one region can look and how inappropriate
sweeping categories such as ‘Muslim library’, ‘Mamluk library’ or ‘scholarly
library’ are for analytical purposes.
There are several aspects that these three libraries share and that are worth
emphasising because of their repercussions on how we see the Arabic-Muslim
49
50
51
52
Books 25/41 and 119/153.
Hirschler, Ashrafīya Library Catalogue, entries 559 and 1571.
#178 (793/1391).
#768 (793/1391).
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35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
3
4
5
6
7
8
es
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2
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Figure 5.1 Burhān al-Dīn’s library, chronological distribution of datable works by
hijrī century (according to author’s death date)
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written tradition. The first of these shared characteristics concerns the
chronological distribution of the titles of Burhān al-Dīn’s library according
to when they were authored (Figure 5.1). Here we see that the immediate
past of Burhān al-Dīn, the eighth/fourteenth century, plays a very limited
role, with four titles.53 By contrast, the seventh/thirteenth and the sixth/
twelfth centuries are very strongly represented, with thirty-two and thirtythree titles respectively. After that we have a very steep decline in numbers
for the fifth/eleventh century (fourteen), the fourth/tenth century (ten), the
third/ninth century (thirteen) and the second/eighth century (three). This
chronological distribution is very similar to what we see in earlier Damascene
libraries, such as the Ashrafīya library, and Damascene personal book collections, such as those discussed by Colette Establet and Jean-Paul Pascual.54 It
is particularly noteworthy that what had once been called ‘classical age’ in our
field of study, the first centuries of the hijrī calendar, play a very modest role.
Owners of libraries were much more interested in those works produced in
the two to three centuries prior to the foundation of the library in question
53
54
The following discussion is based on those 109 titles for which an author with known life dates
could be proposed.
Hirschler, Ashrafīya Library Catalogue, 111; Establet and Pascual, Les livres des gens, 154/5.
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Table 5.2 Most popular authors (by entry) in Burhān al-Dīn’s library
Death date
No. of entries
Ibn al-Jawzī
Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī
al-Nawawī
al-Ghazālī
al-Bukhārī
Razīn al-ʿAbdarī
al-Ḥarīrī
al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ
Thaʿlab
597/1200
606/1210
676/1277
505/1111
256/870
524/1129 or 535/1140
516/1122
544/1149
291/904
8
5
5
5
4
3
3
3
3
es
s
1
2
2
2
5
6
6
6
6
Author
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than they were in what increasingly became codified as ‘classical’ works from
the nineteenth century onwards.55
This chronological distribution is also evident when we look at the popularity of authors in Burhān al-Dīn’s library measured by the number of books
that represent them on his shelves (see Table 5.2). The most popular author
(with eight entries) is Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200), whose sermons are particularly well-represented.56 It has to be underlined that Ibn al-Jawzī also ranked
highly in the other documented libraries from Bilād al-Shām (fifth most
popular author in the Ashrafīya library; thirty-one entries in the Ibn ʿAbd
al-Hādī library). The next group of authors in Burhān al-Dīn’s library are those
with five titles and they include Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210)57 as well as
al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277).58 Those who are absent are those authors whom we
consider today as ‘classical’, such as the jurisprudent and historian al-Ṭabarī
(d. 310/923) or the belletrist al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868). We do not find any of their
books in Burhān al-Dīn’s bookcases, on the shelves of the Ashrafīya library or
in the library of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī.
A second commonality of the three libraries that is worth mentioning for
its relevance for modern-day perceptions of the past concerns their regional
55
56
57
58
For the most innovative account of the process of defining classics in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, see El Shamsy, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics.
Books 57, 72, 75, 120, 134, 212, 216, 220.
Books 52, 53, 115a, 115b, 246.
Books 7, 11, 43, 197, 231.
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profile. Those few books authored close to Burhān al-Dīn’s lifetime tend to be
books from Jerusalem. Among the five books authored closest to his lifetime,
three were definitely by scholars of Jerusalem. These were Aḥmad al-Qudsī
Ibn al-Raṣṣāṣ (d. 790/1388–9), Khalīl b. Kaykaldī (d. 761/1359) and Aḥmad
b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Maqdisī (d. 697/1298).59 This strongly regional profile
goes hand in hand with those of the Ashrafīya library catalogue and the Ibn
ʿAbd al-Hādī collection, where we find a similar regional bent. This in turn
brings up Shahab Ahmed’s analysis of the bibliography of a work written
in sixth/twelfth-century Bukhara, which also showed a heavily regionalised
profile of the recent works. Virtually all of the books cited that were written
in the previous 200 years came from the surrounding area.60 The picture that
we get from documented book collections in Bilād al-Shām, and elsewhere, is
thus not indicative of a highly connected and highly mobile scholarly world.
This picture, in turn, is confirmed by Maxim Romanov’s quantitative analysis
of biographical compendia, which demonstrates that the idea of a closely connected trans-regional scholarly world is much more complex than previously
assumed.61
A final point that these libraries share is that the world of libraries in medieval Bilād al-Shām was a rather monolingual one. The Ashrafīya had at least
forty-four Persian titles (2 per cent of the overall collection), but this number
was directly linked to one of its patrons’ Persianate background. By contrast, in
the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī library all of the titles were without exception in Arabic.
The almost exclusive world of Arabic books in Damascus also did not fundamentally change in the Ottoman period, at least not in personal libraries.62
In the library of Burhān al-Dīn we find at least a Turkic (turkī) composite or
multiple-text manuscript (book 179) and potentially two Persian titles (book
85 and book 178). All these titles sold for below-average prices, the composite
or multiple-text manuscript for as little as nine dirhams.
Despite the three shared features with the other documented pre-Ottoman
libraries from Bilād al-Shām in terms of chronology, region and language, the
59
60
61
62
Ibn al-Raṣṣāṣ: cf. book 228; al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, II, 218; Khalil: cf. book 38; al-ʿUlaymī,
al-Uns al-jalīl, II, 164; al-Maqdisī: cf. book 100; al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh al-islām, 691–700, p. 317.
Ahmed, Mapping the World, 24–43.
Romanov, After the Classical World.
Establet and Pascual, Les livres des gens, 155/6.
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really outstanding point is the extent to which Burhān al-Dīn’s library has its
own story. Its books were thematically closely connected to his professional
interests and they indicate little shared ground with the other two libraries
in terms of thematic profiles. Even the ratio of fields such as Koran or ḥadīth
can be worlds apart, depending on the specific social and cultural context in
which such a library was placed. In particular, the specificity of each library
also needs to be considered when analysing the libraries’ functions in order not
to end up with blunt terms such as ‘scholarly library’. True, Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s
library was the working library of a scholar, but its really unique feature was its
function as a bookish monument to a glorious past of scholarship (in the eyes
of its builder). In the same vein, the library of Burhān al-Dīn reflected his professional interest (though it is much less clear to what extent this really was a
working library). The salient function of this library was at any rate something
very different, that is, ownership of a library commensurate with the owner’s
increasing social status, a library to be seen and a library to be displayed.
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The Post-Burhān al-Dīn Trajectory of his Books
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The aim of Burhān al-Dīn to build up a prestige library commensurate with
his professional success was arguably achieved, as it must have had a certain
reputation within Jerusalem. This is evident from the large crowd that its sale
attracted: the list names eighty-seven buyers and there were certainly further
onlookers and bystanders who did not buy anything and thus remain invisible
to us. To this we can add those who ran the auction and of whose presence
we know from the accounts: the trustee and his men, the broker(s), notary
witnesses,63 those arranging the books, those carrying them, and so on. As
we are looking at roughly one hundred participants, it probably helped that
Burhān al-Dīn’s house had the luxury of a courtyard to accommodate this
crowd. The estate was sold in 360 lots (273 book lots, eighty-six lots of household objects and one lot with a document), and one can imagine how long it
must have taken to conclude the proceedings. This probably explains why the
auxiliary expenses also include costs for candles, seemingly to continue the
auction after darkness had fallen. On top of that the accounts mention that
63
#800b, left, l. 6.
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some costs were incurred on the ‘second day’, clearly showing that this auction
did not conclude on a single day.64
The auction community that came together during these two days to
outbid each other for items from Burhān al-Dīn’s household and books
from his prestige library were a colourful crowd of different social groups.
There were members of the military and political elites such as Muḥammad
al-Nāṣirī (Buyer 2), most likely a prominent officer and vice-regent (nāʾib
al-salṭana), who also acted as supervisor of the endowments in the Ḥijāz
and invested in the pious topography of Jerusalem. There was also al-Sayfī
Bulūṭ (Buyer 3), most likely an officer who belonged to the household of
Jamāl al-Dīn Maḥmūd, the major-domo of the Sultan and accomplice of
shady Sharaf al-Dīn, the town’s judge. Among those attending the auction we
also find members of the city’s judiciary, especially judges and deputy judges
such as the shāfiʿī deputy judge al-Ṣarfanī (Buyer 4), his maternal uncle and
shāfiʿī judge Badr al-Dīn Ibn Makkī (Buyer 14), and the ḥanafī scholar and
short-term deputy judge of Jerusalem Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ghazzī (Buyer 57). Not
only those holding the central positions in the judiciary were in attendance,
but the most famous scholars of the town as well, such as Ibn al-Muhandis
(d. 803–4/1401–2) (Buyer 11).
Apart from these members of the political, social and cultural elites, there
are also many individuals who cannot be identified in any narrative or documentary sources. We can thus only place them in society via the information
we get from the sale booklet itself, the names with which they are designated.
The modest amounts they spent indicate some distance from the political
and scholarly inner circles of the town. A certain ʿUmar Zajjāj (Buyer 17),
for instance, whose name indicates that his profession was that of a glazier,
only bought one item at the auction. Muḥammad al-Sakākīnī (Buyer 39),
who most likely dealt in knives or sharpened them, went home with a copper
vessel, a chain, a (sharpening?) stone and a comb. Further down we see other
buyers who seem to have come from rather modest backgrounds and many of
whom were small-scale buyers. The auction community that assembled for
the sale of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate was thus not only impressively large, but also
represented a cross-section of the town’s male Muslim population.
64
#800b, left, l. 2–6.
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Those members of the auction community who belonged to the elite
formed a closely knit group in many ways. It would be a step too far to present
here the numerous ways in which these individuals were related or professionally connected. Yet even from the few documents linked to this sale we see
numerous connections between them. When the buyers had to pay for their
purchases in the days following the auction, they used this opportunity to
settle other financial obligations that must have existed among them. Buyer 6,
ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Ibn al-Naqīb, thus paid twenty dirhams of the 1,295 dirhams that
Buyer 11, Ibn al-Muhandis, had to pay.65 Al-Sayfī Bulūṭ (Buyer 3), in turn,
contributed four dirhams to the fifty-two dirhams Buyer 7, al-Qalqashandī,
was asked to pay.66
The members of the auction community are of outstanding importance
for this study on book culture in medieval Jerusalem. That we have so many
names in the sale booklet of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate provides a rare opportunity to follow trajectories of books, to get a glimpse into dozens of additional
homes and to get to know dozens of further book owners in Jerusalem in the
eighth/fourteenth century. This information is so relevant because the library
of Burhān al-Dīn disappeared with the death of its owner. Libraries such as
that of Burhān al-Dīn were fleeting affairs that have left little trace, but this sale
booklet documents one of those moments when such a library and its books
became visible. For endowed libraries we have longer periods of stability, and
one of the most outstanding cases is Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s library. This monument had a long life cycle and most of its books are still in Damascus today,
still standing or lying next to each other on the shelves of the National Library.
This is in stark contrast to the library of Burhān al-Dīn and other personal
libraries that underwent regular reconfigurations in quick succession. For the
longest stretches of their life cycles books remain hidden from our eyes, but
they become visible when they move: when they enter a library, when they are
endowed, when they are sold, when they are bequeathed, and so on. Burhān
al-Dīn’s books were only one part of a vast stock of books that continuously
moved through a town such as Jerusalem and were constantly reconfigured
in new collections and found new homes. The exceptional beauty of the sale
65
66
#061b, right, l. 11 (see book 101).
#061a, left, l. 11.
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booklet is thus that it gives an insight not only into Burhān al-Dīn’s library,
but also into the subsequent trajectories of his books.
Among the eighty-seven buyers who attended the auction twenty are
not of further interest for the history of the book as they exclusively bought
objects other than books.67 These include numerous individuals who are not
identifiable in any other sources, such as Abū Yazīd al-ʿAjamī (Buyer 80),
perhaps a migrant from the East, who spent three dirhams on a knife and two
razors or Ibn Sharwīn (Buyer 86), who went home with two glass jars with
copper casing for a quarter of a dirham. Some had clearly come to restock their
household, such as a certain Ḥusayn al-Ḥalabī (Buyer 40), who spent eleven
and a half dirhams on a bathing bucket, a copper vessel and a candlestick. In
other cases, the professional background is apparent, such as Shihāb al-Dīn
Aḥmad al-Kutubī (Buyer 29), whose name indicates that he was producing
and/or trading in books. He acquired three pen boxes, a bookcase and several
pen knives for just under seven dirhams. In this group of buyers who did
not acquire books, we thus clearly get a better view of those members of the
auction community who did not belong to the town’s political and military
elites. We also see some identifiable individuals focusing on objects other than
books. Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Miṣrī (Buyer 68) was a notary witness in
Jerusalem from 789/1387 onwards, but also imām and intermittently head
of the treasury (wakīl bayt al-māl) from 795/1392 onwards. He spent more
than fifty-one dirhams on a writing case, a comb box, a parchment scroll, a
scutcher and an expensive carpet. A deputy judge, Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad
al-Karakī (Buyer 28), spent fifty dirhams on a blue overgarment, but did not
buy any books.
Among the sixty-seven buyers who bought books, we have been able to
identify thirty-two. When identification was possible this was either because
narrative sources mention the individual (especially al-ʿUlaymī’s chronicle of
Jerusalem) or because the buyer is mentioned in other Ḥaram al-sharīf documents (especially from the Burhān al-Dīn corpus). Ulrich Haarmann was not
able to identify any buyers, and this was down to the fact that he was only
focusing on the sale booklet and was not working with the four accounts and
67
Buyers 27, 28, 29, 31, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 47, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86.
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lists of the documentary network around the sale booklet (Chapter 8).68 These
documents yielded crucial additional information on many individuals, especially further parts of their name not mentioned in the sale booklet, which
clarified the readings of several names that would have otherwise remained
too tentative for us to venture an identification. That the vast majority of
these individuals are not named in any narrative source should not come as a
surprise. If more sale booklets from estate auctions had been preserved from
Jerusalem in this period, we certainly would have found Burhān al-Dīn as a
buyer of books, but trying to identify him via narrative sources would have
been as unsuccessful as it was for many of the buyers in the sale of his estate.
The most important aspect of the post-Burhān al-Dīn trajectories of his
books is that they went into the ownership of sixty-seven individuals – a strong
indicator of how widespread book ownership must have been in a town such
as Jerusalem. Among those buyers we find some who went home with dozens
of books and others who purchased a single book. In this regard, the small-scale
buyers are of particular interest as they perhaps show that books also moved
into homes with very few books. At the auction, the buyers purchasing books
spent 131 dirhams on average, and we define ‘small-scale’ as those spending
less than half of this sum, that is fewer than sixty-five dirhams. According to
this definition there were thirty-one small-scale buyers at the auction. These
included non-identified individuals such as Shams al-Dīn al-Tūnisī (Buyer
30), who bought one incomplete book for three and a half dirhams. ʿAbd
al-Raḥmān b. Aḥmad al-Ghazzī (Buyer 65), whom we only know as notary
witness from other Ḥaram al-sharīf documents, spent nine and a half dirhams
on one book. The mamlūk of a peripheral official, Taghrī W-r-m-sh (Buyer
73), spent just over twenty dirhams on a book and two wooden stools. Among
the small-scale buyers we have also identified scholars, such as Burhān al-Dīn
Ibrāhīm al-ʿArrābī (Buyer 33), who spent twelve dirhams on one part of an
exegetical work that most likely joined a book collection in his home.
On the other side of the spectrum, we find individuals who must have
been very well-off and could spend lavishly at such an auction. The top buyer
68
Haarmann, Library, 329: ‘The available narrative sources have so far yielded no information on
these fourteen men, nor on the thirty-five and thirty-nine names given in documents 180 and 532
respectively.’
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was the Jerusalemite ḥanbalī scholar Ibn al-Muhandis (d. 803/4–1401/2)
(Buyer 11), who spent 1,295 dirhams on fifty-six books (and some small pieces
of furniture). The numerous books that he bought at this auction alone constitute a considerable library, and in this case we see how a wealthy scholar
was expanding his large library. The books were not to stay in his home for
long; narrative sources write of him that, while ‘he acquired many booklets
(ajzāʾ) and books’, ‘after his death his books were dispersed despite their large
number’.69 Among those spending larger sums on books were also the judges
and deputy judges whom we have seen above, such as the shāfiʿī deputy judge
al-Ṣarfanī (Buyer 4), who spent 194 dirhams on nine books, his maternal uncle
and shāfiʿī judge Badr al-Dīn Ibn Makkī (Buyer 14), who spent 180-and-aquarter dirhams on four books (in addition to a carpet, a bookcase and a cooking pot), and the ḥanafī scholar and short-term deputy judge of Jerusalem
Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ghazzī (Buyer 57), who spent 157 dirhams on three books, and
so on. Apart from the scholarly elite, the members of the town’s military and
political elite were also eagerly buying books. Muḥammad al-Nāṣirī (Buyer 2),
most likely a prominent officer, spent 466 dirhams on eleven books (and a
small table). Al-Sayfī Bulūṭ (Buyer 3), most likely an officer of the household
of Jamāl al-Dīn Maḥmūd, spent 346 dirhams on ten books (in addition to
household items).
The limited data of the sale booklet also offers some insights into the
profiles of the new libraries into which Burhān al-Dīn’s books moved. For
instance, al-Sayfī Bulūṭ’s books – very fittingly – do not suggest an individual
deeply steeped in scholarly debates. Among the ten books he bought, five were
(more or less complete) copies of the Koran, in addition to a prayer book
without a title, a poetic dīwān without a title, a multiple-text or composite
manuscript without a title and an unidentified work with the title Selection.
The only identifiable book that went into his ownership was the ḥanafī law
compendium The Summary.70 The most expensive item he bought was not
a book, but two chests71 – perhaps this officer was looking for an appropriate
way to store or transport a modest book collection.
69
70
71
Al-Sakhāwī, Ḍawʾ, II, 86.
Books 14–22.
Obj3 for 160 dirhams.
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In contrast to the ‘general reader’ profile of this officer, the auction’s top
buyer, the scholar Ibn al-Muhandis, took the chance to buy across virtually all
scholarly fields represented in Burhān al-Dīn’s library, including the only books
on lettrism and oneiromancy, one of only two books each on medicine and
logic, but also numerous books in the fields of ḥadīth, lexicography, poetry,
ṣūfism, theology, law and so on. The scholarly buyer Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ghazzī
(Buyer 57) took a different approach. He only bought three books, but he had
a clear idea what he wanted for his library. All three books were commentaries
on grammatical works, one on al-Zamakhsharī’s al-Mufaṣṣal and two on Ibn
Mālik’s al-Alfīya.72
The sale of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate thus offers a rare chance to see numerous
books on the move through the urban topography of Jerusalem. Map 5.1 visualises what happened. The solid arrows and circles symbolise those books that
went with identifiable, and thus relatively prominent, owners into new libraries. The dotted arrows and circles, by contrast, refer to those books that went
into the libraries of unidentified, and thus socially less prominent, owners. It
goes without saying that we obviously do not know where the buyers really
lived, as such beautiful estate archives as are extant for Burhān al-Dīn have
not been preserved for them. The main point of this map is to highlight the
role of the buyers indicated with dots. The solid arrows and circles are what
one would have expected, book owners belonging to military, political and
scholarly elites (or at least being close to them) with probably rather large book
collections. The dotted arrows and circles denote a bookish world outside such
large libraries, showing rather that book ownership was widely spread across
the town. The social position of those who owned books thus ranged from
the town’s scholarly and military elite in the centre to numerous individuals at
a great distance from the centre who never made it into the historical record
apart from their brief appearance in this sale booklet.
The sale booklet allows us to follow the books into the next stage of
their life cycles, but we do not know what happened to the books after they
reached the homes of the new owners. Did the new owners bequeath their
collection to a family member, did they endow some or all of the books into
an organisation of learning (such as a madrasa), did they sell them before
72
Books 226–8.
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Map 5.1 Trajectories of Burhān al-Dīn’s books after the auction (solid arrows/circles: libraries
of identifiable new owners, dotted arrows/circles: libraries of unidentified new owners);
based on Burgoyne, Mamluk Jerusalem, 34 (Fig. 1, © Kenyon Institute [British School of
Archaeology in Jerusalem])
they died, or were the books again auctioned to settle their estates? Wherever
they went, many of them should have been mentioned in the paper trail that
the respective transaction triggered, but we have not found documents that
would help us understand the further trajectories of these books. Almost all
of these books have thus vanished from sight, and there are very few exceptions where we are able to see some of them at a further stage of their life cycle,
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such as the previously discussed document #652. Here books are named that
a certain Burhān al-Dīn al-Qalqashandī had to pledge as security for a loan.
Al-Qalqashandī had attended the sale of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate library as
Buyer 8 and it is very likely that Burhān al-Dīn’s books were also pledged to
secure the loans. Their stay in the new library of al-Qalqashandī was thus a
very short one and beyond this short episode they are also no longer traceable.
In the case of Ibn al-Muhandis (Buyer 11) we have seen that his library was
also dispersed after a short period.
The impression that we get from the snapshot provided by our sale booklet and other Ḥaram al-sharīf documents is thus one of a town where numerous books rapidly moved across the urban trajectory at dizzying speed. This
mobility of books is certainly in no way unique to Jerusalem, and research on
trajectories of books in other medieval collections has shown rapid changes of
ownership often occurring every few years.73 In our case the households were
spread across the urban topography of Jerusalem and spread across the town’s
social groups. In the previous chapters we have argued that the large number
of documents that were produced for the most mundane transactions indicates a high rate of pragmatic literacy in Jerusalem. The high number of books
circulating in Jerusalem at high speed also supports this argument and suggests
that considerable rates of literacy must have existed that allowed numerous
individuals to engage with books and documents.
Apart from the wide distribution of literacy, the spread of books across
Jerusalem’s urban topography indicates that the map of its learned places, its
lieux de savoir, goes well beyond the learned organisations and households
of the scholarly elites. Rather, the network of book culture had many more
nodes where books were stored and read. The problem is that these nodes
were so fleeting and left so few traces in the sources. What is missing so far for
Jerusalem is one of those pre-Ottoman Arabic Muslim book collections that
has survived to some degree as one corpus, that is, a collection that has had
a reasonably stable trajectory over the past centuries – or that can at least be
reconstituted. There are some rare cases where we are able to do this, and one
of them is the personal library of Ibrāhīm ibn Jamāʿa (d. 790/1388) mentioned
73
Hirschler, Monument, 101/2.
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above. Ibrāhīm died just a year after Burhān al-Dīn and he was also closely
connected to Jerusalem. After his death Ibrāhīm ibn Jamāʿa’s massive book
collection ended up (via his son Muḥibb al-Dīn) in the ownership of Jamāl
al-Dīn Maḥmūd, who, as we have seen, was one of the most prominent officers
of his time and an accomplice of Sharaf al-Dīn in misappropriating estates in
Jerusalem. Jamāl al-Dīn Maḥmūd endowed his books to the Cairene madrasa
that he had set up, and these books moved in the following centuries again to
numerous libraries. Kyle Wynter-Stoner identified the extant books that once
were in the library of Jamāl al-Dīn Maḥmūd and thus also those that once were
in the library of Ibrāhīm ibn Jamāʿa. Another example of a personal library
with a reasonably stable trajectory is that of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, of which many
books are still in Damascus today.74 In both cases it is evident that these collections went through an endowment and that this moment was crucial for their
preservation until now. The case of Burhān al-Dīn is so special because it was
not linked to a moment of endowment, so that we have here a rare snapshot of
a very fleeting personal library and its afterlife.
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The discussion of Burhān al-Dīn’s library has shown the crucial role of personal
libraries in the mobilisation and distribution of books in urban topographies.
To have a document on an estate auction is particularly important as personal
ownership could be so short-lived and libraries such short stages in the life
cycles of books. To endow books certainly did not mean to immobilise them
(that only remained theory), but it certainly gave book collections a higher
chance of a more stable trajectory. The thousands and thousands of cases
where books were mobilised in the pre-Ottoman period via estate auctions,
by contrast, are effectively impossible to reconstruct on the basis of the available sources. The sale booklet of Burhān al-Dīn (and the documents linked to
the auction) has given a unique glimpse into a moment when the book became
an object on the move, and thus a rare insight into the period’s book culture.
The documents produced at such moments give us a snapshot of the rapid
movements of books across the urban topography of a town such as Jerusalem.
74
Hirschler, Monument.
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The rapidity of these movements is particularly clear in the case of Burhān
al-Dīn, who only owned these books for a short period of time. They quickly
moved with their new owners into new homes, new streets, new quarters and,
in some cases, new towns and cities.
The moment when these books show up in Burhān al-Dīn’s home is a
particularly fleeting moment of no more than ten years in many cases. His
increasing success as a reciter in Jerusalem and his ability to identify new
patrons allowed him to build up an impressive prestige library with outstandingly expensive books in a short period of time. There is no information on
where he purchased his books, but it is highly likely that previous sales of
estate libraries were occasions when his buyers met Burhān al-Dīn in the
last decade of his life. Over these years he built up a prestige library commensurate with his new social and cultural status that contained what must
have been gems of Arabic book culture, such as the copy of al-Rawḍa by
al-Nawawī and several other multi-volume works. There is no doubt that
this library, with its focus on mīʿād-related topics, reflected Burhān al-Dīn’s
professional profile, but to label it a scholarly library would be too broad and
too narrow at the same time. It would be too broad because Burhān al-Dīn
did not use this library in the context of teaching, participating in scholarly
circles or authoring books. He did not perform such activities, and his book
collection certainly served purposes other than the libraries of the scholars
who taught in madrasas, held judgeships or authored books. At the same
time the label would be too narrow as it does not catch the library’s prestige
function, a function that has hitherto been mainly associated with court
libraries.
After moving into new homes, these books may have started to serve different functions. In the home of Ibn al-Muhandis they came into a scholarly
library whose bibliophile owner was a scholar of considerable standing. In
other homes they certainly retained their primary status as objects of prestige.
Each of the new sixty-seven book collections into which Burhān al-Dīn’s went
had its own story and would deserve its own analysis if we had the required
sources. We have hardly any information on what happened to these books in
the next decades or centuries and what different book collections they joined
in the course of their life cycles. What we can see via the sale booklet is the
astonishingly wide distribution of book ownership in Jerusalem during this
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period. If we add to this what we saw in Chapter 3, the wide distribution
of substantial documentary collection right across the urban topography of
Jerusalem, there is little doubt that many members of its society were intimately connected with the written word – whether in the shape of documents
or the form of books.
6
Book Prices
n the preceding chapters we have seen to what extent pragmatic and bookish
literacy permeated the topography of a town such as Jerusalem. This diffusion of the written word in the shape of ever-present documents and a large
number of personal libraries outside endowed organisations and elite households was neatly exemplified by Burhān al-Dīn’s estate archive, his prestige
library and the subsequent trajectories of his books. His library not only contained many books, as we have seen, but was also a very valuable collection in
monetary terms. In this chapter we turn to the book prices, the final aspect that
makes the sale booklet such a fascinating source. These prices are of outstanding importance because previously we had only very patchy evidence of book
prices for the pre-Ottoman period. The auction of Burhān al-Dīn’s books, by
contrast, provides prices for 274 books for one single town within two days –
quantitative book data that is uniquely concentrated.1
To continue our literacy argument from the previous chapters, we will
take this data to analyse the social accessibility of books and 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. Thus far we have approached this
question with a focus on book owners with a relatively modest social position.
This approach was, on the one hand, via the professional biography of Burhān
al-Dīn as a multiple part-time reciter, and on the other, via the subsequent
trajectory of his books. Here we saw that his books went into numerous households across the urban topography of Jerusalem and that individuals from
different social groups were among the buyers. In this chapter we move away
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I
1
On another case of well-documented book prices see Déroche, de Castilla and Tahali, Les livres du
sultan, I, 95–109.
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from the social profiles of book owners and will, rather, zoom in on the actual
book prices. We will thus ask to what extent the information on these prices
provides a more systematic insight into what social groups were actually able
to own books in late eighth/fourteenth-century Jerusalem. In the end, this
discussion comes down to the (seemingly simple) question of how expensive
books were in late medieval Jerusalem.
This discussion is not just a simple matter of analysing unproblematic
quantitative data. Precisely because previous discussions of pre-Ottoman book
prices have not been fully satisfactory, this chapter will also deal with two
major methodological issues, which might be labelled ‘meaning’ and ‘reading’.
‘Meaning’ refers to the question of how to interpret quantitative data on book
prices and whether broader conclusions can be drawn from different sets of
data. ‘Reading’, in turn, refers to a question that might seem at first glance
rather pedestrian, namely how to read the numerals that we find in late medieval documentary sources. As will become evident, this is far from a banal
question, as we find in the sale document – and in many other documents
and texts produced by notary witnesses – an intricate notation system that
has hitherto not even been given a satisfactory name. In contrast to previous
scholarship, which has labelled this notation system ‘siyāqa’ script, we suggest
that we are here dealing with ‘Arabic documentary numerals’.
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Really an Auction? And Where?
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The economy of the book in the medieval period has not yet been at the centre
of scholarship on the Arabic lands, though many studies have touched upon it
in passing. Doris Behrens-Abouseif has been important in trying to push the
field in this direction and Maya Shatzmiller has attempted to trace the development of book prices – an issue to which we return below.2 In consequence,
the question of where exactly books were traded within the urban topography (as well as outside towns and cities) remains rather poorly explored. The
economy of the book certainly rested to a large extent on the actual book
market, about which we have a decent amount of knowledge for cities such as
2
Behrens-Abouseif, Book in Mamluk Egypt and Syria; Shatzmiller, Adoption of Paper.
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Cairo and Damascus.3 Here, the warrāq (stationers) and the kutubīyūn (book
dealers) not only traded books, but also produced them. No book market has
yet been identified for Jerusalem during the medieval period and even for the
Ottoman period our knowledge is very limited.4 Our main narrative source
for pre-Ottoman Jerusalem, al-ʿUlaymī’s al-Uns al-jalīl, shows the author’s
great interest in documents and archival collections, but little to no interest
in the book trade or book ownership. In the same vein, we have not found a
single reference to a book market in the entire corpus of the Ḥaram al-sharīf
documents. The absence of a market in the currently available sources certainly
does not mean that there was no specialised book market in the town – there is
a very fair chance that future scholarship will identify one.
At any rate, what we want to suggest here is that the field might have been
fixated on the market as the physical space where books were traded during
the pre-Ottoman period. As an alternative it might be more useful to look at
other mechanisms that show how quickly books changed hands, as we saw
in the case of Burhān al-Dīn, and how book collections were thus regularly
reconfigured. One of these mechanisms, and arguably a very important one,
was the sale (generally by auction) of estate libraries in physical spaces beyond
markets, which is how Burhān al-Dīn’s books were sold. For the Ottoman
period it has been argued that in seventeenth-century Aleppo, for instance,
buying at auctions of estates was the principal way of buying books.5 The auction as a crucial site of bookish transactions has, however, been slow to come
into the focus of scholarship, which has repeatedly questioned to what extent
we can read estate documents as referring to effective sales. There is caution as
to whether the ‘prices’ in many estate registers might not actually be sums paid
after an auction, but rather a judge’s estimates in order to divide the objects of
the estate according to the heirs’ relative entitlements.6 The documents produced for the sale of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate, however, leave no doubt that we
are looking at an actual auction and at actual prices, not at a judge’s estimate.
The sale booklet is organised by buyers and the accounts produced in the days
3
4
5
6
Behrens-Abouseif, Book in Mamluk Egypt and Syria, 71–102; Quickel, Making Tools; Pomerantz,
Maqāmah on the Book Market; Aljoumani, Warāqa; Hirschler, Monument, 70–2.
Barakat, Tārīkh al-maktabāt al-ʿarabīya, 29/30.
Mills, Commerce of Knowledge, 73/4.
Liebrenz, Der Wert von Büchern, 659; Quinn, Books and Their Readers, 27/8.
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following the auction clearly show that al-Adhraʿī and his men chased these
buyers to obtain the cash they owed.
For the pre-Ottoman periods, references to such ‘auctions’ often provide
little insight into how such estate sales actually worked. 7 Most evidence is very
brief and open to interpretation, such as a newly discovered type of manuscript
note, the ‘vendor’s note’,8 which might be read as suggesting that auctions were
common in the eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries. In addition,
we have the standard problem that trade-related sources for this period tend to
focus on long-distance trade, evidence of which is found in letters, for example. Local trading, by contrast, is in many ways much less visible and its written
manifestation less prone to survival – the papers of the trader al-Ḥamawī are
a rare example.9 Against this background, Burhān al-Dīn’s paperwork in his
estate archive is relevant because it is to date the first documentary window
onto the sale of books from an estate in the pre-Ottoman period.
The sale of assets to settle a deceased’s estate (whether in form of an
auction or not) could take place in different locations. The jurist al-Asyūṭī
described the process in the ninth/fifteenth century as a process of sales made
in market-places in his discussion of the issue in his seminal notary handbook
Jawāhir al-ʿuqūd. According to him, moveable assets were grouped and then
taken to the appropriate market – small items to the trinket market, books to
the book market and so on – where they were sold in the presence of notary
witnesses.10 Such market sales for estates are described not only in this normative source, but also in narrative sources for Cairo and Damascus.11
The documentary record of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate shows that such
market sales were not the only option. His legacy was definitely not sold in
market-places, but most likely in his house and, more importantly, in the
form of one public auction of the entire estate. If his books, his furniture, his
clothing and his household objects (including cushions, combs, razors and
scutchers) had been brought to the respective markets this would certainly
7
8
9
10
11
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 429–34.
Liebrenz, Vendor’s Note.
Obviously the Geniza documents have provided the basis for the most spectacular books on longdistance trade, such as Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage and Goldberg, Trade and Institutions.
Al-Asyūṭī, Jawāhir al-ʿuqūd, 369/70.
Behrens-Abouseif, Book in Mamluk Egypt and Syria, 74/5 for Cairo and Liebrenz, Rifāʿīya aus
Damaskus, 266 for Damascus (Ibn Ṭawq).
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have left some trace in the estate’s documentary record. For instance, not only
the name of the buyer, but also the name of the witness vouching for the
respective transaction on the market would have been registered somewhere.
Furthermore, the sale booklet clearly shows that many buyers bought a wide
variety of objects. For instance, Ghars al-Dīn Khalīl b. Makkī (Buyer 13) went
home with twenty-two books as well as an Anatolian carpet, several fans, an
ottoman, a pair of wooden clogs and an oven. It is highly unlikely that these
transactions took place on different markets and were then simply recorded
in one entry in our sale booklet. There is no space to discuss this in detail, but
the second cluster of documents in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus on the sale of
an estate (that of the trader al-Ḥamawī) gives the same impression of a sale that
was not dispersed across various markets.
That the sale of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate took place at a one-off house auction is also evident from the ‘auxiliary’ expenses of running the sale. Such
expenses were repeatedly recorded in other Ḥaram al-sharīf documents for
the sale of estates, and typically included costs for paper (because so much
paperwork was produced), for porters (because goods needed to be moved),
for money-changers (because different monetary systems were used) and for
witnesses (because legal certainty was needed).12 In the case of Burhān al-Dīn’s
estate the expenses were recorded in the two accounts #793 and #800 of the
sale (see Chapter 8). Here, we find one intriguing item, namely a payment for
‘arranging the books’ (tartīb al-kutub).13 Burhān al-Dīn’s books must thus
have been displayed to the potential buyers in a single place when they were
offered for sale. This did not happen in the market, where the professional
book traders would certainly not have taken a special fee for arranging books –
this was part and parcel of their job and included in their fee.
That an in-house auction is the most likely possibility for the sale of
Burhān al-Dīn’s estate is supported by another item listed as an expense, the
fees for the porters. In the accounts for settling his estate there is a special fee
for those ‘carrying the books’ (ḥaml kutub, #800), who are called in another
list ‘porters of chest’ (#793) as the books must have been carried around in
one of Burhān al-Dīn’s chests. These porters only received half a dirham for
12
13
For instance #591, ed. Little, Documents Related to the Estates of a Merchant, 111–26.
#800b, left, l. 4.
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their services, while those arranging the books, for instance, received fifteen
and a half dirhams. This paltry sum suggests that the porters did not carry all
these books through the streets of Jerusalem to the market, but that they only
moved them within the house of Burhān al-Dīn. That an in-house auction is
the most likely option for the sale of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate is finally supported
by the fee paid to the professional broker (dalāla). The accounts mention one
single fee of forty dirhams, not various fees due to brokers working at different
markets.14
We are thus definitely looking at an auction and not at a judge’s estimate
or a sale dispersed across markets. From Burhān al-Dīn’s documents we get a
good impression of how such an auction must have played out. A crowd of
roughly a hundred persons must have jostled in his house and courtyard for
the two days of the sale. It was October, but the auction continued after the
sun set and as darkness began to fall, shortly after six o’clock, as we have seen
from the expenses for candles.15 Near-contemporary descriptions of auctions
of estate libraries in narrative sources give us an insight into how the many
moments of nerve-wrecking bidding must have felt for the members of this
auction community. For instance, one scholar at an estate sale had his eye on
an autograph of the dictionary Lisān al-ʿarab. When ‘he sought to buy it … he
started to bid and others started to increase their bids … The price rose higher
and higher … he was afraid of increasing his bid any further’ and had to give
up on any hope of buying this book.16 During the two auction days, when the
large crowd of people was bustling around Burhān al-Dīn’s house there must
have been many such moments when people tried to get hold of the books and
other objects they had set their hopes on, sometimes in vain.
The Meaning of Prices
If we are looking here at one single auction, this also means that the sale booklet offers a uniquely compact set of data points for pre-Ottoman book prices.17
In order to understand the quality of this data it is necessary to reflect on the
14
15
16
17
#800b, left, ll. 2–6.
See above for our estimate that his death occurred in late Ramaḍān (9th month), which was in the
year 789 in mid-October.
Sakhāwī, Ḍawʾ, V, 162 (ʿAlī b. Aḥmad al-Qalqashandī).
We thank Georg Christ for feedback on this section on book prices.
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meaning of book prices, and for this we can briefly turn to previous scholarship. Maya Shatzmiller has made the most significant foray into this question
and has put forward, for instance, a graph illustrating the long-term development of book prices in Egypt between the third/ninth and the seventh/
thirteenth centuries.18 Here she makes the very interesting argument that we
observe a fall in book prices on account of the fall in the price of paper. Her
limited data set of only 171 book prices means that the statement that ‘[the
results] show that the average price of a book volume in Egypt went from
4.2105 dinars in the 9th century to 0.5153 dinars in the 13th century’ has to be
taken with a degree of caution. Most problematically, the ‘average’ book prices
for the third/ninth century and for the fourth/tenth century are based on one
single data point respectively.19
A second layer of complication is added by the fact that such research only
refers to ‘books’, as if there were a clear and consistent terminology in medieval
texts when speaking about a written artefact. As we have seen above, when
talking about books we need to be precise as to whether the ‘book’ referred to is
a part, a volume, a multi-volume text, a multiple-text book, and so on, to avoid
ending up in a terminological quagmire. Comparing a small number of data
points without factoring in the object’s materiality makes broad assertions on
the development of book prices a rather risky affair. As we have seen, even the
prices within Burhān al-Dīn’s auction for ‘the Koran’ varied greatly, ranging
between two (book 126) and seventy-two dirhams (book 108). These different
prices were exclusively tied to the materiality of the objects. If we had taken the
prices from different documents the terminology would not necessarily have
indicated these very different materialities. Looking at a small number of data
points, one might thus have been tempted to observe a massive fall (or rise) in
prices and to link this phenomenon with broader economic developments or
fluctuating paper prices.
Apart from the size of the data set and the materiality, a third layer that
needs to be factored in, especially when comparing prices across far-flung
regions and across centuries, is cultural factors. The very same text in the very
18
19
Shatzmiller, Early Knowledge Economy.
Shatzmiller, Early Knowledge Economy, 7/8. The subsequent Shatzmiller, Adoption of Paper, uses
the same data, though the number of data points is no longer given.
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same materiality could obviously fetch very different prices depending on the
popularity of the text itself, the popularity of the book’s scribe in a specific
region or period, the popularity of a specific scholar who left notes in the
book, and so on. The cultural values attached to a specific work are obviously
hardly ever explicated when it is sold, but it is clear that being an autograph,
being in the hand of a known student of the author, its transmission by scholars important in a specific region, former ownership by prestigious scholars
and being the only copy in that region were among the factors that bestowed
cultural prestige and monetary value on a book. There are at least some occasional insights that we get from book lists that help us to understand how
these factors played out. For instance, in his endowment list from the ninth/
fifteenth-century, Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī noted next to one book that he paid a high
price for it as it carried the marginalia of a well-known scholar.20
We can stay with this endowment list so as to further explicate the issue
of cultural factors. The numerous small ḥadīth booklets that Ibn ʿAbd
al-Hādī owned had probably been items of considerable value in the seventh/
thirteenth century. Two hundred years later this genre had largely fallen out of
fashion and prices had fallen considerably – he bought some of these booklets
even on the trinket market.21 The very same Damascene booklets would also have
fetched a significantly lower price in Cairo in the seventh/thirteenth century,
as this peculiar form of ḥadīth transmission and the Damascene protagonists
inscribed in the manuscript notes were much less valued in a Cairene context.
The changes in these prices again have nothing to do with broader economic
developments or paper prices, but are as important as materiality when thinking about book prices over long periods and across regions.
The fourth and final issue that affects the meaning of quantitative data on
book prices in addition to the size of data sets, materiality and cultural factors is
linked to the sources for this data. The prices that we get for the pre-Ottoman
period are often mediated via narrative sources, especially chronicles and biographical compendia, and these texts tend to focus on the outstanding cases.
As Doris Behrens-Abouseif cautions, the authors were mostly interested in
prices for particularly valuable copies and luxurious books, while the standard
20
21
Hirschler, Monument, no. 498.
Hirschler, Monument, 70–2.
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run-of-the-mill book rarely caught their attention. Typical examples of this
tendency to focus on the pricey items are the libraries that went into Sultanic
endowments in Cairo in the late eighth/fourteenth and early ninth/fifteenth
centuries.22 That the average price of the book in these endowments was at
least one gold dinar certainly does not give us an impression of book prices in
Egypt at that point, only an idea of a very narrow segment at the top end of the
market. The more we move back in time, the fewer sources we have and the
greater the focus on the exceptionally luxurious and grandiose. For the third/
ninth century, the figures given for the sale of book collections clearly only
reflect the plush and luxurious end of book culture.23
In short, the data sets which we have on pre-Ottoman book ownership
are still far too small and far too inconsistent for us to start drawing graphs or
advancing arguments with any claim of statistical authority. Even the statistical analyses for the numerous estate records in the Ottoman court registers,
which are much more comprehensive and have far more consistent data sets,
are far from straightforward. Christoph Neumann has warned against rushing
into quantitative exercises on the basis of this seemingly neat data and rightly
insists that the registers’ documentary and social logic ought to be considered.24
In order to understand book prices, we thus need to do more than quarry
quantitative information from narrative and documentary texts. If we stay
with scholarship on the Ottoman period and its attempts to trace the development of book prices, the long road ahead of pre-Ottoman scholarship becomes
clearer still. For the Ottoman period we do have much larger sets of data and
the prices can be derived from a much broader set of sources (especially court
registers, manuscript notes and narrative texts) and are thus of much better
quality. Yet we still have a far from clear picture of the development of book
prices, even within one single city such as Damascus.25 The most convincing
data so far was derived from fairly consistent sources for short periods of time,
as discussed in the important article by Establet and Pascual.26 Here they ana-
22
23
24
25
26
Behrens-Abouseif, Book in Mamluk Egypt and Syria, 83.
See for instance the examples given in Gruendler, Rise of the Arabic Book, 141–2 and Touati,
L’Armoire à sagesse.
Neumann, Arm und Reich in Qaraferye.
Liebrenz, Der Wert von Büchern.
Establet and Pascual, Les livres des gens.
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lyse hundreds of estate inventories in Damascene court registers for a period
of some thirty years around the year 1100/1700, but even so they hesitate to
make a clear argument on the relative value of book prices and their diachronic
development.
What do these methodological reflections on the size of data sets, materiality, cultural factors and the sources for this data mean for the quantitative
data derivable from Burhān al-Dīn’s books? To what extent do these factors
limit the usefulness of this data? The main limitation that we have to acknowledge is the issue of materiality. As we have not been able to track down any
actual books it is impossible to get an idea of factors such as paper quality,
the presence of decorative elements, bindings, the quality of the script and
the lavishness of the page layout. The impact of materiality on the prices in
the sale booklet is only known for a few outliers at the very end of their life
cycle. Nineteen books are described as incomplete or damaged (kharm), yet
here we are not told these books’ titles.27 In other cases, we get at least some
explanation behind the varying prices via the information on the completeness
of the work in question. For instance, the ḥadīth compendium of Muslim sold
once for 110 dirhams (most likely a complete copy) and once for twenty-two
and a half dirhams. In the latter case the writer of the booklet mentions that
these were only parts of (ajzāʾ min) the work.28 Just how problematic the
absence of materiality is in most other cases is neatly illustrated by the varying
prices for copies of the Koran, which cannot be meaningfully analysed from
the booklet itself. The same goes for examples such as copies of the ḥadīth
compendium Tajrīd al-ṣiḥāḥ. Seemingly, both were complete, but one sold
for seventy-two and a half dirhams (book 50) and the other for thirteen and a
half dirhams (book 122b). The booklet provides no information as to why the
prices were so different.
On the positive side, the data in Burhān al-Dīn’s case is less problematic
with regard to cultural factors because the prices derived from the sale booklet
were all paid in one consistent setting (same days, same city, same group of
buyers). Within the framework of this single auction the cases of very similar
27
28
Book 95 (9 books), book 147 (1 book), book 164 (2 books), book 165 (3 books), book 218
(9 books).
Books 151 and 235.
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prices for the same book suggest that copies of comparable materiality fetched
similar prices. Examples include: the two copies of the above-mentioned ṣūfī
handbook ʿAwārif al-maʿārif, which sold for exactly the same price, seventy
dirhams each;29 the two copies of the sermons by Ibn al-Jawzī that sold for
almost the same price, twelve dirhams and eleven and a half dirhams;30 and
the three copies of the Maqāmāt that were sold at prices within a very narrow
range of fifteen to eighteen dirhams.31
In the same vein, the data from the booklet is also less problematic with
regard to the two other issues laid out above, size of the data set and mediation
via narrative sources. From the booklet we get the prices for 274 books, which
is a fairly large number compared with what we have for other pre-Ottoman
settings. More importantly perhaps, the numbers are derived from a documentary source that does not have the same selection bias towards the pricy and the
luxurious as narrative texts. Without doubt, the data is far from perfect. We
will never know, for instance, what these nineteen incomplete and damaged
books were. Yet we do gain an insight into the value of a personally owned
book collection that we would never have been able to derive from chronicles
or biographical compendia.
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So, having established that we are looking at prices paid at an actual auction
and having assessed the quality of this data, we can turn to the core question
of this chapter: what do these 274 book prices actually tell us about the social
accessibility of the written word in late eighth/fourteenth-century Jerusalem?
The central and most important point that comes out of the following analysis
is that there was a considerable range of book prices that catered for different
social groups. Some books at the bottom end of this range were definitely
within reach of a large section of the population of Jerusalem, such as the
aforementioned copy of the Koran for two dirhams and the Shāṭibīya ode on
Koran recitation for four dirhams.32 At the top end, by contrast, we see books
that were clearly only affordable for a select group of the town’s population,
29
30
31
32
Books 104 and 106.
Books 120 and 220.
Books 26, 194 and 267.
Books 126 and 29.
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Table 6.1 Distribution of book prices (in dirhams) in the sale booklet of
Burhān al-Dīn’s estate by decile
Decile 0–10 10–20 20–30 30–40 40–50 50–60 60–70 70–80 80–90 90–100
Price >2
>9
>11.25 >13.5 >16
>18
>21.75 >26
>32.5 >52
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such as the previously mentioned multi-volume works Rawḍat al-ṭālibīn for
305 dirhams and al-Bukhārī’s al-Ṣaḥīḥ for 260 dirhams.33
That the prices at the auction of Burhān al-Dīn’s many books differed
by a factor of over 150 means that a book was available for individuals with
a range of incomes.34 The significance of this argument only comes out if we
look at the distribution of book prices, rather than the average price. The
average price of a book from Burhān al-Dīn’s estate was twenty-seven dirhams, but on account of eight expensive outliers above 100 dirhams this value
is of limited usefulness. More meaningful is that the median was eighteen
dirhams,35 that is to say that half of the books sold for eighteen dirhams or
fewer. As we will see in more detail below, eighteen dirhams was roughly
equal to eighteen days of bread consumption by an average household at that
time. The distribution by decile shows clearly how many books were at the
lower end of the price range, and that a fifth of the books sold for fewer than
nine dirhams (roughly equal to nine days of bread consumption by an average
household).
Before we move on with the argument that Burhān al-Dīn’s books show
how modest households were able to purchase books, we have to turn once
again to the question of the extent to which this sale booklet is actually representative. It could very well have been the case that the prices paid at the
auction of his estate were for some reason outstandingly low (or high). We do
have some evidence from other auctions in Jerusalem, and it indicates that the
prices for Burhān al-Dīn’s books were in line with those paid elsewhere. If we
return to the above-mentioned account of the sale of Muḥyī al-Dīn’s estate,36
we see that five titles overlap with those in Burhān al-Dīn’s auction. At Muḥyī
33
34
35
36
Books 43 and 1.
See Quinn, Books and Their Readers, 41–7 for price ranges in seventeenth-century Istanbul.
The median was more precisely 18.125 dirhams.
#768 (793/1391).
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al-Dīn’s auction the Risāla by al-Qushayrī, for instance, sold for eighteen dirhams; the same book fetched only a slightly higher price, twenty-two dirhams,
at Burhān al-Dīn’s auction.
The book prices paid at Burhān al-Dīn’s auction thus seem to be representative, and this is probably also true for the other objects sold. If we turn to
objects other than books, we also see a broad range of prices with numerous
cheap items, so that participants were able to buy very differently priced pieces
of furniture and clothing. The prices for such objects show a similar distribution as the prices of books. Among the fifteen most expensive items sold at the
auction we certainly find ten books, but we also find two overgarments (for 100
and 133 dirhams), a pair of chests for 160 dirhams, a sword for eighty dirhams
and a carpet for seventy-five dirhams. The average price of twenty-three dirhams
for non-book objects was only slightly lower than that for the books (twentyseven dirhams) and the median of twelve dirhams for non-book objects is not
that far from the median for books (eighteen dirhams). Book prices were thus
not on a level entirely separate from the prices for other household objects, so
we can think of books as being in the same material world as cushions, vessels,
jars, fans, combs and knives. This is a world where most households certainly
owned a jar, but where such jars could obviously range from modest pottery to
luxurious metal ware. Similarly, books could be owned by many households,
but these books greatly varied in material terms.
That differently priced books catered for socially different groups of
buyers is evident from an examination of the nexus between social status and
the prices paid for books. Those buying the books in the top decile of the price
range clearly belonged to the social elite of Jerusalem, with almost all buyers
spending considerable sums above 100 dirhams.37 Here, we find also those
top spenders who spent at least 300 dirhams at this auction, including Buyer
11 with 1,295 dirhams and Buyer 10 with 566 dirhams.38 Among the buyers
of books in the top decile we find prominent officers (Buyers 2, 3 and 41), the
ḥanafī judge (Buyer 5), the shāfiʿī deputy judge of Jerusalem (Buyer 4) and
other prominent scholars (Buyers 11, 12, 57, 59).
37
38
The exceptions are Buyer 6 (65.75 dirhams), Buyer 76 (85 dirhams), Buyer 5 (87 dirhams) and
Buyer 53 (92.5 dirhams).
The other buyers in this group are Buyer 13 (510.5 dirhams), Buyer 2 (466 dirhams), Buyer 1 (361
dirhams), Buyer 54 (355.75 dirhams) and Buyer 3 (346 dirhams).
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If we turn to the lowest decile of the price range, we see a very different
group of buyers who in general belonged to the above-defined ‘small-scale’
buyers who spent fewer than sixty-five dirhams. The buyers in this decile tend
to be those individuals who are not identifiable, and here we have, for instance:
Buyer 30, who acquires nothing but an incomplete or damaged (kharm) book
for three and a half dirhams; a notary witness (Buyer 65), who went home with
a book for nine and a half dirhams; a certain Muḥammad b. Yūnus (Buyer 87)
and his purchase of a complete copy of the Koran for twelve and a half dirhams;
a certain ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. al-Zayn (Buyer 22), who bought an incomplete
copy of the biography of the Prophet for fourteen and a half dirhams; and the
glazier ʿUmar (Buyer 17) and the book he bought for fifteen dirhams. In other
words, the books in the lower deciles circulated in a social world that was at
some distance from that of the town’s judges and officers.
Up until now, the argument that prices for some books were so low that
individuals across a broad range of social backgrounds could buy them has been
based on comparing book prices within the sale booklet, matching them with
book prices from other estates, and the social background of buyers. A very
important dimension for understanding the meaning of book prices has been
missing so far: comparing them with the prices for other goods in Jerusalem
during this period. Frustratingly, the enormous set of Ḥaram al-sharīf documents proves to be of limited usefulness for calculating living expenses as they
provide very little information on prices of staple goods. Most monetary data
points are, rather, for financial transactions (debts and repayments of debts)
and salaries (almost exclusively linked to Burhān al-Dīn), as well as sale prices
and rent for houses (although apart from Burhān al-Dīn’s house, we do not
know what these houses looked like). What is entirely missing from these
documents is information about the price of living, for example how much
individuals spent each day on bread.39 That said, there are at least some prices
of staple goods, even if they refer to transactions between wholesale merchants.
39
Such prices include the one we find in accounts #803 of Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ḥamawī. Here he mentions that he bought from his uncle 500 raṭl (925 kg) of pistachios for 725 dirhams, that is, one
dirham buys 1.28 kilogram. However, this price is difficult to use for calculating the value of books,
for several reasons: the transaction took place twenty years prior to Burhān al-Dīn’s death (year
769); we do not know in which season this price was paid; pistachios were not a staple food; and it
is a transaction between wholesale merchants, which does not reflect the retail price on the market
(we thank Michail Hradek/Munich for this reference).
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We are lucky enough to have a price from the year 788/1386–7, that is one year
before the death of Burhān al-Dīn, for one of the most important food commodities in Palestine, olive oil. Here we see that one dirham bought roughly
half a litre of olive oil.40
As the documents from Jerusalem are not of great help regarding other
retail prices, we can turn to the narrative sources for bread prices. There are
no reports on Jerusalem, but we have information on Damascus. As Jerusalem
belonged to the same zone of coinage circulation as Damascus41 and was also
under its political influence we can assume that prices in Jerusalem broadly
mirrored those in Damascus. For 789, the year Burhān al-Dīn died, we read
of a rise in prices and a dirham only bought 1.85 kilograms of bread.42 The
challenge here is that – just like books – the texts tend to only mention prices
that were extraordinary, for example after a significant rise. However, we know
at least that this rise was much less dramatic than during the food crisis in
northern Syria twenty years earlier. At that point, one dirham only bought 0.3
kilograms of bread and chroniclers reported that corpses, cats and dogs were
eaten.43
In order to contextualise the rise of prices in Damascus in the year 789
we can take an event from the following year: the population was again riled
on account of rising bread prices, so the governor ordered that bread be sold
at a price that would calm the population. This new price meant that one
dirham bought 3.7 kilograms of bread.44 This price must have been identical
(or close) to the standard price in southern Bilād al-Shām in that period to
have had the intended political effect. Adam Sabra has suggested that average
bread consumption for an adult urban dweller (in his case in Cairo) was one
40
41
42
43
44
In #809 (we thank Michail Hradek/Munich for this reference) we find the price of 290 dirhams
for 100 raṭl of oil, that is 185 kilograms of oil. The density of oil is around 90 per cent that of
water, so one kilogram of oil roughly equals 1.1 litre of oil, so 185 kilograms is equal to around
203.5 litres. One raṭl of oil costs 2.9 dirhams (equal to one kg of oil for 1.57 dirhams) so one litre of
oil cost 1.43 dirhams. If, therefore, one dirham was paid for 0.7 of a litre of oil between wholesale
merchants, we can estimate that one dirham would buy half a litre of oil on the market. For the raṭl
see Hinz, Maße und Gewichte, 30–1.
Jerusalem documents regularly state prices in ‘the dirhams currently used in Damascus’; see for
instance #039 and #622.
Al-Maqrīzī, Sulūk, V, 198 (one raṭl of bread for one dirham).
Al-Maqrīzī, Sulūk, IV, 391 (one raṭl of bread for six dirhams).
Ibn Qāḍī Shuhba, Tārīkh, III, 241/2 (two raṭls of bread for one dirham).
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kilogram of bread per day,45 and one can surmise that children consumed
on average a third of that amount. In consequence, a household with three
adults and four children would require roughly four kilograms of bread per
day, which would have cost slightly more than one dirham.46 Burhān al-Dīn
certainly had three adults in his household at any given point considering his
multiple wives, the presence of a slave (though Shīrīn might have paid for her
food) and possibly also those of his children who had grown up, and so on.
He thus required thirty dirhams per month to pay for bread, not to mention
the cost of other food items, drinking water, rent, clothing and heating in the
winter months.
On the basis of this bread price (one dirham for 3.7 kilograms) and the
olive oil price (one dirham for 0.5 litres), it is clear that the books in the top
deciles of the price range carried too hefty a price tag for the average household. The Rawḍat al-ṭālibīn, at 305 dirhams, was equivalent to over 1,100
kilograms of bread (the equivalent of 275 days of bread for an average household) or over 150 litres of olive oil. Al-Bukhārī’s al-Ṣaḥīḥ at 260 dirhams was
equivalent to over 950 kilograms of bread (the equivalent of almost 240 days
of bread for an average household) or 120 litres of olive oil. Such prices were
also out of reach if we recall the fact that Burhān al-Dīn bought his house for
825 dirhams. Yet, if we consider that half of the books of Burhān al-Dīn sold
for eighteen dirhams or fewer, the costs of book ownership look much more
moderate. Those buying the books in the lowest deciles, at nine dirhams or
fewer, did not need a high income to become a book owner. The cheapest
book, at two dirhams, was equivalent to just under seven and a half kilograms
of bread (the cost for two days of bread for an average household) or one litre
of olive oil. The Shāṭibīya, at four dirhams, in turn had a worth comparable
to fifteen kilograms of bread (the equivalent of between three and four days of
bread for an average household) or two litres of olive oil.
This brings us to the last take on how to understand the meaning of the
book prices in Burhān al-Dīn’s estate: salaries. The library that Burhān al-Dīn
45
46
Sabra, Poverty and Charity, 120. He translates raṭl as ‘pound’. The Egyptian raṭl in this period,
according to Hinz, Maße und Gewichte, was equivalent to c. 500 grams.
The document on his position in the Manṣūrī Ribāṭ shows that in Jerusalem a raṭl was equivalent
to four loaves of bread (#013, 1.2.770/1368).
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had in his house was, at a total sale price of roughly 7,400 dirhams, a major investment. This sum is the equivalent of five years of bread for an average household
or 3,700 litres of olive oil, and it certainly expressed an income well beyond
that of most households in Jerusalem. Considering Burhān al-Dīn’s monthly
income of at least 160 dirhams for the last decade of his life, the acquisition of
such a library seems realistic: if he bought all of his books for roughly the same
value as they sold, this would mean that he spent some sixty dirhams per month
on books. So, for somebody like him who was able to successfully navigate the
market for minor part-time positions in the scholarly world, acquiring such a
large number of books was clearly a possibility. That his books subsequently
went into sixty-seven new households, among which we find quite modest
ones, shows that cases such as his were not unique in this period.
Those books in Burhān al-Dīn’s library that are of relevance for our argument here are thus the cheap books. Similar books, or rather booklets, certainly
made up a considerable portion of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s library – though we do
not have book prices in his case. A better-documented case of cheap books
comes from the Geniza in Cairo, where Judith Olszowy-Schlanger has identified books in rotuli format as the equivalent of modern ‘pocket editions’. She
argues that these popular books were accessible to a much wider section of
the population while the more expensive books (there is a similar range as in
Burhān al-Dīn’s library) clearly catered for a different readership. In the case of
the Geniza the analysis is based on extant copies – exactly the kind of information we are missing for Burhān al-Dīn’s books. It is thus possible to show that
such books were made of cheap writing material (such as reject parchment or
reused paper/parchment), that they often had no rulings and that they were
written at great speed.47 While the Geniza offers the actual material artefacts,
the estate of Burhān al-Dīn and its subsequent diffusion offers one social context in which such cheap books arguably circulated.
Pinning down the social contexts of non-elite owners of books in the
Geniza material is difficult, and the most recent overview article on books
and libraries in the Geniza by Miriam Frenkel remains very cautious in this
regard.48 For Egypt or Bilād al-Shām we only have the case of Burhān al-Dīn
47
48
Olszowy, Cheap Books.
Frenkel, Book Lists from the Cairo Genizah.
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for a personal documented book collection with prices, so we have to look
further to obtain further context concerning the circulation of cheap books.
Here, we can consider Jewish book owners and their libraries on the Iberian
Peninsula during the eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries, as
discussed by Joseph Hacker.49 Their wills, inventory lists and notarised lists
come of course from a very different historical context and a radically different documentary context. For instance, Christian scribes were often not terribly interested in recording Hebrew-script books or were simply not able to
do so. Yet the available documentation of over a hundred lists with over 3,000
books shows how widespread book ownership was, even though there were
many reasons why books were excluded from documents. With an average of
twenty-eight books per owner we see a range from small-scale owners with
one or two books to individuals with well over a hundred books. Overall, it is
evident that book ownership reached well beyond elite households and into
the social contexts of ‘laborers, craftsmen, merchants, financial agents and
money lenders’.50
To return to Jerusalem, the estate inventories in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus
are rather silent on books, as has been mentioned above, but this might be a
function of the nature of the documents rather than proof of the absence of
books. One striking element that merits further investigation is that we seem
to have a socially biased selection of estate inventories in the Ḥaram al-sharīf
corpus, with a strong focus on non-elite individuals. This might at least explain
why book ownership in elite households is not visible from this corpus. Yet
we now know that books were also present in many non-elite households and
that the books of Burhān al-Dīn went into sixty-seven households. This wide
diffusion of his books relative to the near-silence of estate inventories indicates
either that for some reason a large proportion of inventories registering books
have not made their way into the corpus or that books were not systematically
recorded. Yet we have seen that there are a dozen documents that give some
insight into individuals’ Arabic libraries in Jerusalem, including the library of
Muḥyī al-Dīn. These were generally collections with under twenty items, and
49
50
Hacker, Jewish Book Owners and Their Libraries.
Hacker, Jewish Book Owners and Their Libraries, 95.
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Table 6.2 Books in Ḥaram al-sharīf documents
No.
Doc. no.
Name of owner
Date
No. of titles
Other details
1
#939
no date
11
2
#595
781/1379
2
3
4
5
#178
#768
#652
793/1391
793/1391
793/1391
16
16
+ 1 majmūʿ +
2 Korans
in 9 volumes +
2 Korans
34 volumes + quires
+ incomplete volumes
+ 2 volumes
6
#776
794/1392
4
7
#087
8
#146
9
#494
10
#570
11
12
#227
#284
Muḥammad
al-Raṭūnī
al-Shaykh ʿAbd
al-Wāḥid
Muḥyī al-Dīn Yaḥyā
Muḥyī al-Dīn Yaḥyā
Burhān al-Dīn
al-Qalqashandī
al-Shaykh Muḥammad
al-Saʿdī
Nāṣir al-Dīn b. ʿAbd
Allāh al-Ghazzī
Muḥammad b. Ḥusayn
b. ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq
Muḥammad b.
Muḥammad al-Nassāj
Yūsuf b. Sufyān b.
Baykāl al-Rūmī
Amal Ilmish al-Turkīya
Yalbughā b. ʿAbd Allāh
13
#448
14
#772-1
4
ve
rs
795/1393
ity
795/1393
ni
796/1394
796/1394
7
+ 1 book as security
one complete Koran
+ 8 books + 2 Korans
+ 1 majmūʿ
old, small and
incomplete Koran
2 Korans
nb
u
796/1394
1 bound book +
books + quires
15 volumes
Pr
795/1393
U
h
es
s
795/1393
796/1394
rg
al-Shaykh ʿUmar
al-Sharafī
Mīrān al-ʿAjamī
+ numerous quires +
2 Korans
half a Koran
Ed
i
Note: The numbers are approximate as the scribes had very different ways of noting sheets, quires,
volumes, titles and books.
their owners (including one woman called Amal)51 left rather modest estates.
The numbers in Table 6.2 represent the number of books found in these
houses, and these are a low estimate as not all books were registered.52
What we see here are thus modest personal collections that sometimes
contain no more than half a Koran, but where we also see households with
double-digit numbers of volumes or titles. All the owners of these books are
individuals who are not identifiable in narrative texts and the way they are
named in the documents also does not imply elite status. The impression
51
52
#227 (796/1393).
#570, l. 6 states, for instance, ‘and books, among them [4 books are listed]’.
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that we are dealing here with rather modest households is corroborated by
the other few belongings listed in the documents. The owner of the books in
document #146 (our number 8), for instance, is introduced as ‘a sickly man,
called Muḥammad b. Ḥusayn b. ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, known as the reciter in the
Ibn al-Nafīs Zāwiya’. It seems that this Muḥammad never received an honorific title (laqab) and was renowned for reciting in a rather minor zāwiya.
This social selection bias is for our purposes not a major methodological
impediment as our interest lies in such examples of small-scale book owners.
If Muḥammad’s only job was indeed reciter in the Ibn al-Nafīs Zāwiya, he was
a part-time reciter, but not one with multiple positions. In this case it is quite
remarkable that he owned one bound book, several (seemingly unbound)
books and further quires.
In the same vein, another book owner, Yalbughā b. ʿAbd Allāh, is also
identified without honorific or title. The names indicate a slave background,
but we find in his house a book collection of nine titles and eight further books.
Among these modest book owners were also craftsmen and traders. The estate
inventory of Muḥammad b. Muḥammad al-Nassāj, who might have been a
weaver by profession, shows that he owned fifteen volumes. These examples
thus provide cases of book ownership in Jerusalem that reached well beyond
elite households. That they are only the tip of the iceberg is evident when
we return to al-Qalqashandī and Muḥammad b. Muḥammad. The document
that we have was meant to carefully differentiate between the property of
Muḥammad and that of his deceased grandfather. The fact that Muḥammad’s
books were described in such loving detail implies that his grandfather probably owned books too – otherwise the scribe could have simply written ‘the
books’ and the issue would have been settled. Unfortunately, the estate inventory of the grandfather has been lost and thus his book collection vanished
without leaving a trace in the written record.
Regrettable too is that the vast majority of documents do not provide any
prices for the objects they list. In the case of Muḥyī al-Dīn we thankfully also
have an account of the sale of this estate and hence book prices.53
53
#768 (793/1391).
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Table 6.3 Books sold from the estate of Muḥyī al-Dīn Yaḥyā b. Ḥusayn
al-Turkī, according to the makhzūma #768 (793/1391) in order of prices paid
Price (dirhams)
Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn
muṣḥaf sharīf (Koran)
al-Jamʿ bayna al-saḥīḥayn54
al-Ishrāq55
al-Niḥal wa-al-milal56
Risālat al-Qushayrī57
Sirāj al-mulūk58
Taʿbīr al-ruʾyā ‘and more still’59
Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (two volumes)
Minhāj al-bayān ‘and more still’60
al-Jawāhir ‘and more still’61
al-Mughnī fī al-ṭibb62
al-Burda ‘and more still’63
Nihāyat al-iqdām64
[parts] of al-Mudhish65
Ṭarīqat al-khilāf66
73
67
30
22
20
18
15
14
13.5
13
13
12
6
5.5
4.5
2
U
ni
ve
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Pr
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Title
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
rg
h
Numerous works with this title exist.
Not identified; the Ḥikmat al-ishrāq by Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 587/1191) is rather
unlikely.
Numerous works with this title exist.
Authored by ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072; cf. book 195 in Burhān al-Dīn’s list).
Authored by Muḥammad b. al-Walīd al-Ṭurṭūshī (d. 520/1126?; cf. book 119 in Burhān al-Dīn’s
list).
Numerous works with this title exist; cf. (e.g.) Hirschler, Ashrafīya Library Catalogue, nos 260
and 261. ‘And more still’ is the literal translation of ‘wa-ghayruhu’; by it, the writer of the list meant
that the manuscript (or the lot) contained additional titles, and not just the one that he cites.
Arguably the pharmacological work The Method of Demonstrating by Yaḥyā b. ʿĪsā Ibn Jazla
(d. 493/1100), of which we also find eight copies in the Ashrafīya Library (Hirschler, Ashrafīya
Library Catalogue, nos 1030 and 1480).
Numerous works with this title exist.
Possibly the medical work The Sufficient Book Concerning the Treatment of Illnesses and the
Knowledge of Afflictions and Affections by Saʿīd b. Hibat Allāh b. al-Ḥusayn (d. 495/1101; cf.
Hirschler, Ashrafīya Library Catalogue, no 1037).
The famous ode in praise of the Prophet Muḥammad by Muḥammad b. Saʿīd al-Būṣīrī
(d. c. 694/1294; cf. Hirschler, Monument, nos 227m and 572n).
Possibly the theological work Kitāb Nihāyat al-iqdām fī ʿilm al-kalām by Muḥammad b. ʿAbd
al-Karīm al-Shahrastānī (d. 548/1153; ed. and tr. Alfred Guillaume, London 1934).
Authored by Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200; cf. book 212 in Burhān al-Dīn’s list).
Several works with this title exist.
nb
u
55
Ed
i
54
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Among the sixteen titles in Muḥyī al-Dīn’s small library we have two items,
a Koran codex for sixty-seven dirhams and al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ ulūm al-dīn for
seventy-three dirhams, that fall at the higher end of book prices. In the case of
Muḥyī al-Dīn we have, exceptionally, two different documents mentioning
his books, and these were written by two different scribes.67 As always, these
scribes had different methods of registering books, but in this case this is to our
advantage as we have the number of titles in one list and the number of physical
volumes in the other. We thus know that the sixteen titles came in thirty-four
volumes and the hefty prices for the most expensive books in Muḥyī al-Dīn’s
estate certainly reflect the fact that they were multi-volume works.
Apart from these top two books, the prices for Muḥyī al-Dīn’s books
are significantly lower. The third book, entitled al-Jamʿ bayna al-saḥīḥayn,
fetched thirty dirhams and the next two books already sold for twenty-two and
twenty dirhams respectively. The remaining eleven books were cheap books
costing fewer than twenty dirhams and buyers were able to get hold of books
valued as low as two and a half dirhams, four and a half dirhams, five and a half
dirhams and six dirhams. It is in this book collection by Muḥyī al-Dīn, and
those of the other small-scale book owners of late eighth/fourteenth-century
Jerusalem, that we see traces of how peripheral households participated in the
world of book ownership – households similar to those where Burhān al-Dīn
bought cheap books to stock his library and households similar to those into
which his cheap books went after the sale of his estate.
The sale booklet of Burhān al-Dīn and the wider Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus
thus show that book ownership was widely spread across society. To what
extent this was also the case in Syria, Egypt or even more widely throughout
North Africa and West Asia – and for what periods of time – remains to be
seen. There is no a priori reason to assume that Jerusalem would have had
a different social topography for books from that of Hama, Hims, Aleppo,
Damascus or Cairo. However, in terms of period we might have to factor in
the Black Death, which first struck the region in 748/1347 and recurred in
the following decades. The subsequent demographic decline meant that the
salaries of those who survived went up. At the same time, the supply of books
must have been high after each wave as auctions of personal libraries went
67
#178 (793/1391) and #768 (793/1391).
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also up.68 Thus, at least in the immediate aftermath of the first major wave the
prices for books – together with those for other non-essential products – went
down. Burhān al-Dīn died fifty years after the first wave and it is not certain to
what extent subsequent waves entailed further steep demographic decline. In
consequence, the wide spread of books across society might have been facilitated by the Black Death and falling prices, but on account of the distance in
time we are hesitant to simply reduce the phenomenon to this factor alone.
Reading Book Prices (and Other Numerals)
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So far, we have problematised the meaning of the quantitative information
derived from the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents and used it to build our argument
on the financial affordability of the book in late eighth/fourteenth-century
Jerusalem. In this discussion the ‘raw’ data itself, the numbers, has appeared as
straightforward and rock-solid material. Yet any reader who has worked with
the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents (or any other medieval documents with numbers) knows that this raw data is far from straightforward and rock-solid – and
this brings us to the problem of reading numerals. The crux of the problem
is that most quantitative data in these documents is provided in an intricate
system of numerals that Donald Little described as ‘siyāqa’ script. They are
highly condensed ligatures of the Arabic numbers written out and thus very
distinct from the standard digits as we know them today – Table 6.4 provides
an overview of the shape of these ligatures. In order to tackle the problem
of reading these numerals, the following discussion has two aims. Firstly, it
suggests that the term ‘siyāqa’ is inadequate and should be replaced with the
term ‘Arabic documentary numerals’.69 Secondly, and more importantly, it
proposes an overview of how to read these numerals.70
The ligatures that we call numerals here have nothing to with Arabic
alphanumerical notation systems. These abjad or abjadīya systems assign
each of the twenty-eight consonants of the Arabic alphabet a numerical
68
69
70
On the demographic and economic consequences of the Black Death see Dols, Black Death,
Pamuk and Shatzmiller, Plagues, Wages, and Economic Change, and Borsch and Sabraa, Plague
Mortality.
Rustow, Lost Archive refers to such signs rather as ‘cipher’, and this is indeed in many ways a better
term than ‘numeral’. However, we opted not to use it, as cipher carries the connotation of a secret
sign, which we wanted to avoid at all costs.
We thank Marina Rustow (Princeton) for her feedback on this section.
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value (alif equals one, bāʾ equals two, tāʾ equals 400 and so on) and were,
for instance, often used in chronograms. The ligatures discussed here,
by contrast, are abbreviations of the written versions of the numbers, but
have become so different from the underlying word that they can justifiably
be called ‘numerals’. In the ‘foundation’ document of the field of Ḥaram
al-sharīf documents, Donald Little’s Catalogue, the author is very open about
his reading of ‘siyāqa’ numerals in many cases being highly tentative. In subsequent articles, he repeatedly returned to the challenge of these numerals
that he ‘gradually learned to read after much trial and, alas, continuing error’.71
As this issue was laid open right from the inception of the field, acknowledging that these numerals are a major problem is part and parcel of any serious
study of these documents. Huda Lutfi, for instance, was very cautious, saying
that ‘[t]he sum … is written in Siyakah script; my deciphering of the script
may be liable to error’.72 Donald Richards quite frankly stated in one of his
editions that ‘[a]ll the figures must remain doubtful’.73 In his study of Burhān
al-Dīn’s library, Ulrich Haarmann entirely stayed away from the numbers
and concluded his brief discussion with the warning that a ‘full appreciation,
however, of these figures, which … will first have to be deciphered from their
siyāq “camouflage”, will require careful study of comparable texts both in and
beyond the Ḥaram collection’.74
As a consequence of this uneasiness about the reading of numerals, correcting previous readings – or at least challenging them – is standard practice
when working with these documents.75 In a lengthy article, Werner Diem challenged many previous readings, especially of numerals, and Christian Müller
does so in the course of his book.76 As is evident from our own Appendix 1 we
have also departed from several previous readings of dates. While the reading
of dates is often a highly complex exercise, this is even more the case for less
predictable numbers on quantities of goods and prices – the reason Ulrich
71
72
73
74
75
76
Little, Documents Related to the Estates of a Merchant, 94.
Lutfi, Documentary Source, 225.
Richards, Primary Education, 227.
Haarmann, Library, 333.
Lutfi, Six Fourteenth Century Iqrārs, 258–62 dated #289 to the year 702 and she corrected this
subsequently to the correct year 782 in Lutfi and Little, ‘Iqrārs from Al-Quds’: Emendations.
Diem, Philologisches and Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen.
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Haarmann did not try at all to provide any reading of the hundreds of numerals in the sale booklet of Burhān al-Dīn’s library.77
That Donald Little put the problem of reading the numerals right at the
centre of the field from the moment of its inception has been a major blessing.
This is particularly evident if we look at other examples. For instance, the journal of the Damascene notary witness Ibn Ṭawq has had – quite rightly – an
important impact in our field, and we have briefly mentioned him and his
work before.78 His journal is so important that a recent book-length study of
Damascus is entirely based on it, especially on its quantitative information
(in particular prices).79 Yet, how the numerals, the raw data, are written and
how they are read is not problematised in this study at all. The author entirely
relied on the modern standard numerals as given in the edition, but one simple
check of a digital facsimile of the unique manuscript would have shown that
these numerals are highly problematic.80 This is the case because in his edition the editor ‘translated’ the very difficult Arabic documentary numerals
of Ibn Ṭawq into modern standard print numerals. Yet the editor does not
problematise anywhere the fact that we are facing here a fiendishly difficult
practice of writing numerals. His readings of the numerals are in fact much
less straightforward and rock-solid, as the edition implies – they are the result
of complex and debatable interpretative processes. In consequence, if one
does not consult the manuscript one moves within the illusory comfort of a
pleasantly smooth modern edition with straightforward quantitative information. However, these seemingly smooth numerals are for the most part highly
disputable and often plainly wrong.81 As a result, all the ‘rich data’ derived
from this journal and the vast majority of arguments based on it are – to put
77
78
79
80
81
Difficulties in reading numbers probably also explain some articles’ practice of relying entirely on
the rather arbitrary corpus of documents published so far, such as Maḥmūd, Wathāʾiq al-Ḥaram
al-sharīf.
Ibn Ṭawq, al-Taʿlīq.
Shoshan, Damascus Life, 17 and Appendix.
Ibn Ṭawq, no title, Damascus, National al-Asad Library (formerly Ẓāhirīya) 4533.
To take just one sample page from the edition, vol. I, p. 220 (fol. 40b in the manuscript), the following numbers at least have to be corrected: l. 6: 1,000 (not 2,000), 2,065 (not 3,065); l. 8: 1,000
(not 2,000); l. 14: 12,800 (not 12,080); l. 17: 300 (not 200). Systematic errors include the misreading of ‘¼’ as ‘2’ (for instance, edition vol. I, p. 26 (fol. 1b, line 6 in the manuscript)) or the fraction
¾ being overlooked (for instance, edition vol. I, p. 206 (fol. 34a, line 10 in the manuscript)).
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it mildly – on shaky ground. Building such arguments in fact requires the republication of the entire edition of the journal with major revisions.
Even though the problematic nature of the numerals has been openly
discussed in studies of the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents, this discussion was
often relegated to the footnotes. Donald Little was fully aware of the need for
a ‘fuller study’ on this issue that sadly never materialised,82 and there is thus an
urgent need to push the discussion ahead. For a start, one very obvious aspect
that requires fuller discussion is that of terminology. Donald Little proposed
the term siyāqa, but – as so often in his oeuvre – he never explained that choice.
On account of his strong influence this term has remained the standard way
of referring to these numerals in the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents until the present day and has also made its way into Arabic-language scholarship.83 Donald
Little of course adopted this term from Ottoman Studies, where broadly
comparable ligatures were widespread and have been well-studied.84 In this
context they were called siyāqa numerals because they were used alongside the
siyāqa script.85 While the Ottoman history of these numerals has been fairly
well-studied, this is not the case for its previous historical development. In consequence, scholarship has developed highly divergent narratives – often with
nationalistic undertones – that have not been put into communication. An
often-found argument is that these numerals first appeared under the Saljuks
and this is sometimes taken further to construct a specific Turkic genealogy for
them.86 Another author could easily claim that we have here a system invented
in Yemen in the seventh/thirteenth century.87
82
83
84
85
86
87
Little, Documents Related to the Estates of a Merchant, 94.
Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 44; Muḥammad, Qāʾimat hadāyā; Muḥammad, Ijrāʾāt jard
al-mawārīth al-ḥashrīya.
For an overview see C. J. Heywood, Siyāḳat, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn, ed. P. Bearman,
T. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/
1573-3912_islam_SIM_7080 (last accessed 31 March 2021).
The classic work on this issue is Fekete, Siyaqat-Schrift. More recent scholarship includes Otar,
Muhasebede Siyakat Rakamları and Öztürk, Osmanlı arşiv belgelerinde siyakat.
Even Kawatoko, On the Use of Coptic Numerals, speaks of ‘the Siyaqat letters of Turkey’ (60).
This narrative has also been widely adopted in Arabic-language scholarship: Ḥanash, al-Madrasa
al-ʿuthmānīya, 232; Ḥanash, al-Wathāʾiq al-ʿuthmānīya, 85-6 and 191-92; Ḥasanayn, Fann
al-khaṭṭ al-ʿarabī, 63; Ṣābān, al-Muʿjam al-mawsūʿī, 137; al-Bahnasī, Muʿjam, 75; Zayn al-Dīn,
Muṣawwar, 383; Barakāt, al-Khaṭṭ al-ʿarabī, 33; al-ʿAzzāwī, al-Khaṭṭ, 415–6.
Nūr al-maʿārif fī nuẓum wa-qawānīn, II, 59–63.
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In fact, what we have here is a widespread practice of writing numerals
that continued to evolve over the centuries and arguably took one specific
form of evolution in the context of Ottoman siyāqa script. Once the nexus
with the siyāqa script was consolidated it became perfectly reasonable to designate these numerals with the same term. Yet, there is no reason to project
this development back onto the rich diversity of Arabic documentary numerals and to reduce this rich tradition to nothing but a precursor to its later
Ottoman branch. These numerals have a long pre-Ottoman pedigree and this
pedigree has no nexus whatsoever with the siyāqa script. Arabic documentary numerals were rather used in combination with naskhī script, such as in
our Ḥaram al-sharīf documents, and in combination with kūfī script, such
as on Saljuk coins.88 A term such as ‘Mamluk siyāqa’89 is thus misleading as it
implies a linear historical continuity that did not exist. It is also misleading as
it anachronistically uses a term that the modern reader might believe to be an
expression current in the period of the Cairo Sultanate.90 However, the term
siyāqa in connection with numerals was entirely foreign to texts on administrative and documentary affairs in the eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth
centuries such as al-Nuwayrī’s Nihāyat al-arab, al-Asyūṭī’s Jawāhir al-ʿuqūd
and al-Qalqashandī’s Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā.91
Apart from the term siyāqa, we also find the term ‘dīwānī numerals’
in scholarship, with reference to the term for administrative department
(dīwān).92 Most likely, the usage of these numerals in the Ottoman administration inspired this terminology and those pre-Ottoman examples where
we indeed see a link to political authority further encouraged scholarship to
keep using this term. Such earlier examples include the secretary Hilāl al-Ṣābiʾ
(d. 448/1056), who refers to Arabic documentary numerals in his book on
88
89
90
91
92
Al-Ḥusaynī, al-Nuqūd al-islāmīya fī al-ʿahd al-saljūkī, 101.
Little, Documents Related to the Estates of a Merchant, 94.
The term ‘ʿilm al-siyāqa’ did exist in the pre-Ottoman period; see C. J. Heywood, Siyāḳat, in
Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn, ed. P. Bearman, T. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel
and W. P. Heinrichs, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_7080 (last accessed
31 March 2021). However, it referred to book-keeping, not the documentary numerals.
We find the term in al-Nuwayrī, Nihāyat al-arab, VIII, 213, 214, 283 and 284 in the meaning of
‘column’.
Al-Ḥusaynī, al-Nuqūd al-islāmīya fī al-ʿahd al-saljūkī, 110; Broome, Coinage of the Seljuqs of
Rum, 27; Muḥammad, Qāʾimat hadāyā; Khan, Legal and Administrative Documents, 507.
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94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
Hilāl al-Ṣābiʾ, Rusūm dār al-khilāfa, 43.
This link was particularly emphasised by Hinz, Rechnungswesen orientalischer Reichsfinanzämter.
Shaykholhokamaei and Soleymani, Sākhtār-shināsī-yi panj waraq-i ḥisāb (we thank Zahir Bhallo
for drawing our attention to this article).
Mostafa, Madrasa, Ḫānqāh und Mausoleum des Barqūq.
See for instance the endowment note by Muḥammad b. Qawām al-Dīn al-Ḥanafī in Damascus,
year 826, in the manuscript Damascus, Majmaʿ al-lugha al-ʿarabīya 21, fol. 1a (numeral ‘6’).
See for instance the samāʿ notes written in Alexandria in the years 729 and 731 in the manuscript
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Ms. Or. Oct 3810, fols 1a, 7a–7b (numeral ‘7’).
See for instance the two taqrīẓ notes dated to the year 826 in the manuscript Staatsbibliothek zu
Berlin, Wetzstein II 164, fols 159b and 163a (numeral ‘6’).
See for instance the reading note dated to the year 744 in the manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque
Nationale de France Arabe 724, fol. 272b (all numerals) and the reading note dated to the year 859
in the manuscript Gotha, Forschungsbibliothek Gotha orient. A 1658, fol. 101a (all numerals).
See for instance the note on the number of ḥadīths in one of the recensions of al-Bukhārī’s compendium in the manuscript Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Wetzstein II 1333, fol. 197r.
Our thanks to Boris Liebrenz (Leipzig) for sharing his ongoing work on manuscript notes, especially those in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, with us.
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official correspondence written in fifth/eleventh-century Baghdad,93 Saljuk
coins where we repeatedly find the same numerals,94 and examples from the
Cairo administration around the year 700/1300, to which we will return later.
If we take a broader look, no exclusive link between these numerals and
official administration exists. Rather, we see them in a wide variety of different documentary contexts. These include: Abū Isḥāq, a trader in modern-day
Afghanistan who operated independently of any particular official administration and used these numerals in his accounting book; administrative
documents from the sixth/twelfth century preserved at the Mashhad shrine;95
endowment deeds written in Cairo during the lifetime of Burhān al-Dīn;96 the
Ḥaram al-sharīf documents as the largest corpus known so far; and the journal
of Ibn Ṭawq from Damascus from just before the Ottoman period. We also
find these numbers in documentary manuscript notes such as endowment
notes,97 transmission notes,98 laudatory notes (taqrīẓ),99 reading notes100 and
summary notes.101 This use of Arabic documentary numerals has not yet been
systematically recorded, but Boris Liebrenz has started to gather numerous
occurrences.102
Once we free Arabic documentary numerals from the conceptual siyāqa
and dīwānī restraints, we can start to look at their pre-Ottoman pedigree in
more detail. This takes us well beyond any Turkic or Yemenite genealogies and
into widely different geographical areas. One of the earlier examples of the use
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of these numerals is found in documents from a region far from Jerusalem,
modern-day Afghanistan, from the early fifth/eleventh century. The accounts
book of a certain Abū Isḥāq on textiles dealing from the year 411/1021–2 uses
such documentary numerals exclusively.103 The numerals used are absolutely
identical with those that we find in the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents even
though they were separated by almost 400 years and thousands of miles. In
the same vein, the numerals on Saljuk coinage are, except from the numbers
for ‘one’ and ‘three’, identical with those in the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents.104
Our numerals also appear in Cairo in a stand-alone (Fatimid?) list that Tamer
El-Leithy discovered among the Geniza papers in which a scribe practised
writing numerals.105 The numerals in this list are exactly the same as those
used in the documents produced in late eighth/fourteenth-century Jerusalem.
Staying in Cairo, the numerals appear in trans-Mediterranean lists of gifts
sent around the year 700/1300 by the Cairo Sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b.
Qalāwūn to the Aragonese king James I (r. 1285–1327).106 During the same
period, these numerals were also employed for administrative purposes in
Yemen.107 Below, we will see that some differences can be observed between
regions and periods, but these are so few that it is possible to subsume these
numerical writing systems – for the time being – under one single category of
‘Arabic documentary numerals’.108
We are far from really understanding this practice in any detail, and our
aim here is to connect some dots and to put the problem on the agenda of
scholarship. The situation is similar with regard to the second main numerical
writing system in pre-Ottoman documents and literary texts produced in West
Asia and North Africa, namely the so-called Coptic numerals. These were also
103
104
105
106
107
108
The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Ms.Heb.8333.23.
Al-Ḥusaynī, al-Nuqūd al-islāmīya fī al-ʿahd al-saljūkī; Broome, Coinage of the Seljuqs of Rum.
Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York ENA 3936.7 (we thank Tamer El-Leithy for
drawing our attention to this document and sharing it with us).
These lists are discussed by Bauden, Lists of Gifts, and we use the illustrations in this article for
our present discussion. The lists in question are Barcelona, Archivo de la Corona de Aragón,
Real Cancilleriá, Cartas árabes, no. 146 (dated 699/1300) and Barcelona, Archivo de la Corona
de Aragón, Real Cancilleriá, Cartas árabes, no. 149 (714/1315).
Nūr al-maʿārif fī nuẓum wa-qawānīn, II, 59–63.
It remains to be seen whether there is a distinct Persianate tradition. At the very least the fractions
as listed by Hinz, Rechnungswesen orientalischer Reichsfinanzämter, are very foreign when compared with those used in the late medieval documents.
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numerals derived from an alphabetical system, in this case Greek.109 Yet, the
terminology for these numerals is – as much as is the case with our ‘siyāqa’ –
far from straightforward and scholarship often also refers to them as Greek
numerals or Rūmī numerals.110 The Genizah Research Unit (Cambridge)111
and the Princeton Geniza Project, in turn, have started to use the term ḥurūf
al-zimām.112 This Greek/Coptic/Rūmī/ḥurūf al-zimām system has a history
that is probably even richer than siyāqa, and it is most likely that we will end
up with a more granular terminology which better reflects divergent practices
in different regions and different periods. The Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus will be
part of this discussion as we find in many of its documents Arabic documentary numerals (such as those by Burhān al-Dīn), but also other documents that
intensively use the Greek/Coptic/Rūmī/ḥurūf al-zimām system (such as the
accounts by the trader Nāṣir al-Dīn113).
One topic in this discussion will be whether the Arabic documentary
numerals can even be called an entirely distinct ‘system’. As they are highly condensed ligatures of the Arabic numbers written out they are often positioned on
a continuum, with the standard way to write out Arabic numerals at the other
end. Thus, to say whether a ligature is an Arabic documentary numeral or just
a hastily written numeral is in many cases not straightforward. This is evidently
different for the Greek/Coptic/Rūmī/ḥurūf al-zimām numerals that do not
look like anything Arabic at all. Whether the term ‘Arabic documentary numerals’ is the most fortunate remains to be seen, but it is useful to differentiate these
numerals from the Greek/Coptic/Rūmī/ḥurūf al-zimām system based on the
Greek alphabet.
Who opted at what points for either of the two systems (respectively, for
one of the branches that we will have to define) is evidently still entirely unclear.
However, for the late medieval setting of the present book, there seems to
be one very distinct link that might allow us to narrow down one context
in which Arabic documentary numerals were intensively used – documents
linked to notary witnesses. The Ḥaram al-sharīf documents come from this
109
110
111
112
113
On these numerals see Kawatoko, On the Use of Coptic Numerals.
Déroche, Islamic Codicology, 97.
Connolly, ‘Coptic’ Numerals and Genizah Studies (accessed 31 October 2021).
Elbaum and Rustow, Basic Guide (accessed 2 January 2022).
See for instance account #583 (we thank Michail Hradek/Munich for this reference).
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milieu to a large extent, and this link might also explain why Ibn Ṭawq used
Arabic documentary numerals in his narrative text. Ibn Ṭawq was himself a
notary witness and his journal includes such a large number of documents
that it has been described as ‘a detailed log of a notary’s professional calendar’.114
The Arabic documentary numerals appear in this log exactly in those places
where he reproduces the contents of yet another document, and it is clear
that in many cases he had these documents in front of him when reproducing
them in his narrative text. If there is something like a specific system of Arabic
documentary numerals during the period of the Cairo Sultanate, this salient
role of notary witnesses seems to be the most promising point to pursue.
That Arabic documentary numerals were so widespread allows us to do
away with scholarly myths that have started to surround the ‘siyāqa’ numbers
other than the nationalistic undertones. Scholarship has repeatedly suggested
that these numerals might have functioned as a secretive code, describing them
as ‘obscure’ numerals in need of ‘deciphering’115 or as needing ‘to be deciphered
from their siyāq “camouflage”’.116 There is no question that these numerals are
very difficult to read for us and present a major obstacle when approaching
such documents. Yet the fact that these numerals remained unchanged over
long periods and across far-flung regions indicates that they were not exactly a
highly secretive code. They appeared on texts as public as coins and manuscript
notes, they were understood by a group as large as the notary witnesses, and
they could be used in documents sent across the Mediterranean to the court of
Aragon. Arabic documentary numerals are simply difficult for us to read, but
they were not secretive and such tropes of secrecy are centred on the researchers’ own experiences of incomprehension. Comparable tropes are known from
other fields such as linguistics, where the languages spoken by itinerant groups
with non-conforming grammars ‘are frequently described by scholarly and lay
observers as “secret languages”’.117 It is also important to underline that Arabic
documentary numerals are in no way more forgery-proof than the standard
numerals. For instance, it requires minimal intervention and skill to change ‘4’
to ‘9’, ‘40’ to ‘90’, ‘400’ to ‘900’ and so on.
114
115
116
117
El-Leithy, Living Documents, Dying Archives, 412.
Lutfi, Al-Quds al-Mamlûkiyya, 86 and 322.
Haarmann, Library, 333.
Richardson, Invisible Strangers, 197.
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From the above, it is evident that the history of numerical systems employed
in Arabic-script documents and codices remains to be written. Our field has
only started to scratch the surface of different systems, of their diachronic
development, of their interconnections and of their social contexts. To write
this history we first need to do the groundwork, and this includes providing
research tools with which to facilitate the future use of documents containing
such numerals. The following list is meant as a contribution in this direction.
It is an expanded list of Arabic documentary numerals that is based on the
work done by Donald Little, especially the list he suggested after almost two
decades of working with the documents.119 In order to give an idea of the
variations of Arabic documentary numerals, we have opted to move beyond
the corpus of the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents and we juxtapose numerals
from three contexts: Abū Isḥāq’s account book (early fifth/eleventh century;
modern-day Afghanistan), documents on Burhān al-Dīn from the Ḥaram
al-sharīf corpus (late eighth/fourteenth century; Jerusalem) and Ibn Ṭawq’s
journal (early tenth/sixteenth century; Damascus).
Ed
i
‘and’ ()و
Abū Isḥāq
⅛
Burhān al-Dīn Ibn Ṭawq
nb
u
Value
rg
h
U
ni
Table 6.4 Comparison between Arabic documentary numerals in Abū Isḥāq’s
account book (411/1021–2), documents on Burhān al-Dīn (780s/1380s) and
Ibn Ṭawq’s journal (late ninth/fifteenth century)
Remarks
IṬ uses this mark in conjunction
with numbers higher than 11,
while for BD the equivalent
figure is 21; in BD the stroke can
be horizontal or slanted.
¹⁄₆
119
Little, Documents Related to the Estates of a Merchant. Apart from its comparative nature, our
list reflects the progress that has been made in the meantime (for instance the numeral for ‘33’ in
his list is really the numeral for ‘303’) and to fill voids (e.g. there are no fractions). The Table in
Mostafa, Madrasa, Ḫānqāh und Mausoleum des Barqūq, 168/9 has very few examples and is of
limited benefit as it uses print numerals.
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Table 6.4 (continued)
Value
Abū Isḥāq
Burhān al-Dīn Ibn Ṭawq
Remarks
¼
⅓
½
additional understroke in BD
¾
es
s
1
Pr
2
rs
ity
2 (in 12-92)
ni
ve
3
U
3 (in 13-93)
rg
nb
u
BD has two ligatures that differ
at the end
Ed
i
4 (in 14-94)
h
4
5
BD has two ligatures that differ
at the end
5 (in 15-95)
the ligatures can be closed or
open in all cases
6
6 (in 16-96)
7
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Table 6.4 (continued)
Abū Isḥāq
Value
Burhān al-Dīn Ibn Ṭawq
Remarks
7 (in 17-97)
8
8 (in 18-98)
9
es
s
9 (in 19-99)
BD has two ligatures that differ
at the end
Pr
10
rs
ity
10 (in 11-19)
ni
ve
11.5
rg
h
U
12
15.75
16
18.25
19
20
Ed
i
15
nb
u
13
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Table 6.4 (continued)
Value
Abū Isḥāq
Burhān al-Dīn Ibn Ṭawq
Remarks
25
26
30
35
es
s
38
ity
Pr
40
rs
50
ni
ve
60
U
70
100
150
188
194
200
Ed
i
90
nb
u
rg
h
80
IṬ writes the final yāʾ of مايةin
100 and 300-900 as a second
stroke if no other numeral
follows
AI always writes the final yāʾ
of مايةin 100 and 300-900 as a
second stroke
IṬ omits the second stroke
when a numeral follows
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Table 6.4 (continued)
Value
Abū Isḥāq
Burhān al-Dīn Ibn Ṭawq
Remarks
242
252
IṬ writes the final yāʾ as a
second stroke as no other
numeral follows
300
es
s
305
Pr
350
rs
ity
400
ni
ve
466
U
468
523
600
606
700
733
Ed
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510.5
nb
u
rg
h
500
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Table 6.4 (continued)
Value
Abū Isḥāq
Burhān al-Dīn Ibn Ṭawq
Remarks
783
‘80’ is written here as a simple
stroke very similar to ‘and’. The
reading of ‘783’ – in contrast to
‘703’ – is only secure because we
know when BD lived.
here a different shape is used for
‘700’118
784
800
AI retains the final yāʾ even
though another numeral follows
Pr
es
s
891
rs
ity
900
ni
ve
950
rg
h
U
1,000
2,000
2,100
2,533
118
#005.
Ed
i
1,962
nb
u
1,365
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Table 6.4 (continued)
Value
Abū Isḥāq
Burhān al-Dīn Ibn Ṭawq
Remarks
2,496
3,000
3,300
es
s
4,000
ity
Pr
6,660
ve
rs
7,592
U
ni
12,800
17,500
19,421
Ed
i
16,300
nb
u
rg
h
15,000
Looking Beyond Jerusalem: The Dynamics
of the Written Word and its Materiality
his book had as its starting point a micro-history, the story of a reciter
owning books and preserving documents in medieval Jerusalem. While
reconstructing and writing this story we have focused on Burhān al-Dīn’s
social position and his cultural practices, but we hope that we have also succeeded in bringing to life the day-to-day travails of such an individual. There
is no doubt that in more able hands his story could serve as inspiration for the
Palestinian equivalent to Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land. What we want
to do in this conclusion is more mundane, namely to reflect on how this microhistory contributes to wider discussions and wider developments in studying
the medieval history of West Asia and North Africa. This reflection will be
focused on those three areas where we think that this book has something to
say that might resonate beyond the small worlds of hardcore bibliophiles and
document scholars: firstly, by offering a broader historical argument on literacy, secondly by engaging with the methodological turn towards materiality,
and thirdly by placing a conceptual emphasis on processes.
As for the historical argument, this study of Burhān al-Dīn’s books
completes a trilogy of analyses of documented book collections in medieval
Bilād al-Shām that are known to date. It thus functions as a capstone for an
(admittedly modest) arch encompassing the Ashrafīya library of seventh/
thirteenth-century Damascus and the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī library of ninth/
fifteenth-century Damascus. The conclusion of this trilogy is a good point at
which to step back and reflect on the bigger picture. The first point coming
out of these studies is how unhelpful categories such as ‘Islamic library’ are.
More fitting is a heuristic typology of libraries, namely the endowed library
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(Ashrafīya), the author library (Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī) and the prestige library
(Burhān al-Dīn). These different types reflect the very different profiles of the
books on their shelves and their meanings for their owners and users. The
endowed library clearly catered for broader reading interests and larger reading
audiences and was thus characterised by a wide range of diverse works. The
author library, in turn, catered for the scholarly interests of its owner, who
routinely employed these books in the process of producing new texts – in the
case of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī a particular focus was ḥadīth. The prestige library
reflected the wider cultural world in which its owner acted, but had neither
the breadth of the endowed library nor the clear thematic profile of the author
library.
The main argument emanating from the present study and the trilogy as
a whole, however, is that the written word played an increasingly central role
in the socio-cultural practices of these societies. The massive growth of local
endowed libraries across urban topographies, especially from the seventh/
thirteenth century onwards, meant that the book was more and more tightly
woven into the fabric of society. The Burhān al-Dīn library was arguably the
result of the diffusion of the written word into ever-wider sections of society.
After the spread of the endowment libraries we see here a further step, where
considerable book collections started to be found well beyond the endowment, the court and the elite scholar’s household. The history of literacy, book
ownership and authorship in Arabic-speaking societies has by now its fair
share of revolutions and turning points and we do not want to add yet another
one. We argue, however, that over the course of the eighth/fourteenth century
we see a further rise in the number of people who actively engaged with the
written word. True, the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus is a rare snapshot and there is
always the danger of advancing over-consistent arguments on the basis of very
inconsistent source corpora. However, having studied various manifestations
of the written word in medieval Bilād al-Shām (libraries such as the Ashrafīya
and the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī collections as well as documentary corpora such
as the Ḥaram al-sharīf and the Qubbat al-khazna corpora), we are in a position to at least suggest that in this period more and more people started to
own books and to engage with documents. This was not a torrent of literacy
flooding society, but a multifaceted and complicated development. The case
of post-canonical ḥadīth booklets, which went into decline precisely in the
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eighth/fourteenth century with fewer and fewer of them produced, is a case
in point. Yet, overall there is ample evidence for the hypothesis that there were
significantly more individuals in Bilād al-Shām who routinely dealt with books
and documents in the year 800/1397 than there were in the year 700/1300.
This hypothesis and the trilogy underlying it were based on very specific
case studies, and with each case the lingering doubt remains as to whether it is
just an exception, nothing but an odd one out. Looking at them in combination and considering those features they share and do not share has made what
is actually unique and what is, rather, a broader trend more evident. In consequence, when an earlier book argued that ‘it seems likely that at least for Syrian
and Egyptian cities the proportion of those able to read simple texts was rather
a two-digit than a one-digit number’,1 we can now make such statements with
much more confidence. One aspect that has remained completely beyond the
scope of our studies is the rural areas, for which documentary corpora and
evidence of book ownership are much sparser. In addition, the world of books
(less so that of documents) as we represent it is still an overwhelmingly male
history.
Our work has also shown that a simplistic dichotomy between literate
and illiterate would not serve the field. Rather, it is evident that, as has been
argued for medieval Europe, a ‘plurality of written cultures coexisted’2 where
individuals had the ability to engage with the written word to very varying
degrees. The example of Burhān al-Dīn shows the staggering number of
books that could be found in the house of an individual who – had his estate
archive not survived – would have vanished from the historical record without
a trace. How often Burhān al-Dīn read his books, whether he even read all
of them, what he made of them and other similar questions have to remain
unanswered. It is clear, however, that the written word in the form of the book
was part and parcel of the world of this rather average individual in eighth/
fourteenth-century Jerusalem. This spread of literacy is not the outcome of
a technological revolution, and paper had been around for centuries in West
Asia and North Africa. Rather, we see here a typical example showing that
1
2
Hirschler, Written Word, 29.
Bertrand, Documenting the Everyday, 7.
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technological change does not automatically lead to far-reaching changes, but
that its impact depends on individuals and societies adopting this change.
This book has extended the argument of its two predecessors in that it
dealt with the question of how the written word was woven into the socialcultural fabric by looking not just at books, but also at pragmatic literacy. This
world of documents was invisible in the case of the Ashrafīya Library, as neither its endowment deed nor a single sheet of its day-to-day paperwork (such
as accounting books, payment slips and petitions) has survived (or rather, has
been identified thus far). There were some glimpses of the documentary world
in the case of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, who bound several of his documents into the
intricate books that he produced. The nature of the Ḥaram al-sharīf source
corpus means that the intimate link between the world of books and the world
of documents is only fully visible in the case of Burhān al-Dīn. His case clearly
shows to what extent the large number of books he owned went hand in hand
with the large number of documents that he preserved at home. Not only
were there many documents, they also came in wildly different shapes and
forms. This wide range in the documents’ materiality shows how many actors
were involved in producing such paperwork – individuals who clearly had
very different ideas of what a document was meant to look like. In the course
of the eighth/fourteenth century, it thus seems that an increasing number of
ordinary men and ordinary women produced documents in their day-to-day
activities without having recourse to professional scribes who would have
imposed a larger degree of uniformity.
The number of documents linked to Burhān al-Dīn and their material
variety thus indicate, as do the size of book collections, the extent to which
the written word had penetrated day-to-day activities in the late eighth/
fourteenth century beyond the madrasa, beyond the court, beyond the world
of legal administration and beyond the households of the political elite. This
was a world in which lay people could use documents with utmost efficiency
for the most banal transactions, such as concise receipts for rent payments for
modest houses. It is also clear that medieval people were keen conservers of
their documents, that they carefully safeguarded the documents they received
and that those dealing with their estates skilfully reconfigured these personal
collections into the new archival configurations they needed: estate archives.
Individuals were thus not just using more documents: they also considered
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them to be of increasing importance and relevance, and thus made them
retrievable in various ways.
This increasing role of the written word in wider sections of the population was arguably part of a wider transformation of society and economy.
Georg Christ has proposed that external shocks such as climate change and,
especially, the Black Death in the eighth/fourteenth century with the subsequent series of epidemics triggered a shift towards what he characterises as a
‘fully mature knowledge economy’. This meant that the role of the agricultural and manufacturing sectors diminished during the period of the Cairo
Sultanate while the tertiary sector (long-distance trade and higher education)
thrived.3 In combination with the continuing spread of endowments and processes of bureaucratisation, the amount of paperwork that circulated within
society and the numbers of those who handled it certainly increased. Our
observation that wider sections of society had increased rates of pragmatic
literacy and also bookish literacy in the eighth/fourteenth century was thus
arguably linked to a profound transformation of social structures and thus also
of cultural practices.
Whereas this literacy argument addresses a historical phenomenon, we
see our book’s second contribution as being to the wider field of the methodology of how we study the past, specifically the topic of materiality. The
study of the medieval history of West Asia and North Africa emerged within
a strongly text-centred philological tradition, and the later emergence of the
field of Mamluk Studies took place with this same approach to the past. The
focus was on publishing an ‘authoritative’ and unified version of a given text
at the expense of the multiple traditions that fed into the handwritten versions
that went before it. In the process, the material texture vanished from sight.
Issues such as the differing layouts of the same text, the bindings of the codices,
the papers on which the text was written, the usage traces on the books, the
composite manuscripts into which they might have been bound, and other
features were more often than not invisible when accessing the printed edition.
Today we often worry about how the ubiquity of the digital facsimile might
undermine an appreciation of the material artefact. Whatever the negative
impact of the digital might be, it will always have a far less disastrous impact
3
Christ, Economic Decline.
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than print editions have had on our understanding of handwritten writerly
culture.
Our field has come a long way since its text-centred beginnings, and the
material turn in wider history has changed scholarly approaches in many
ways. Scholarship on book studies has been particularly prone to integrating
the material turn, and this methodological development might radiate to the
wider field of studying the medieval history of West Asia and North Africa.
For instance, analysing the library of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī without paying heed to
his binding strategies, without ‘reading’ his composite manuscripts as intricate
material constructions, would have meant missing out on essential elements of
this splendid monument to medieval Syrian book culture. As regards Burhān
al-Dīn’s library, consideration of its material objects made its main contribution in terms of enabling us to understand the documentary corpus. The nesting of the booklet’s sheets and the folding of the documents, the layout of the
page and the format of the sheet, archival holes and archival strings have all
been central elements for building up this book’s arguments. The material plurality of documents, for instance, is so important for literacy because it shows
that people from very different walks of life claimed the right to produce documents and did not hesitate to do so in very idiosyncratic (or ‘unprofessional’)
ways. This wild world of documentary formats can hardly be described with
the functional categories that we as modern historians might try to create.
Paying attention to these ever-new material forms of documents is crucial for
understanding the increasingly writerly world in which these individuals lived.
Apart from the historical and the methodological, this book’s third contribution lies in the conceptual, namely in its emphasis on processes and actors,
rather than structure. The book has thus not been on a quest to find the
archive, but has been interested in archival practices sustained by various social
actors; it has not been on a quest to identify the state, but was interested in
socio-cultural practices driven by households within the military and political elite; and it has not primarily been on a quest to find stable libraries, but
rather to discover the processes of how and by whom libraries were made and
unmade. As we have seen, especially, in Chapter 3, the first and the second
element, ‘archive’ and ‘state’, are closely interconnected: most document preservation in the political elite was carried out in a polycentric network of households and far from any ‘state’ archive. In the civilian elite we observe a similar
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complex network of processes. Even if papers were legally relevant, such as in
the case of estate archives, the archival actor in Jerusalem was not the judge or
an organisation called ‘court’, but a rather obscure trustee – an ‘official’ whom
we only know from the paperwork that he himself left behind. It will thus be
our task to retrace the faint traces of such elusive archival practices on those
documents that have reached us, rather than trying to slot them into visions of
state structures. In this book we suggested, for instance, that the ‘estate archive’
is an important stage in the trajectories of many papers. Listening to the archival stories of documents will certainly bring up many other social sites where
documents were (even if only for short periods) brought together, preserved
and reconfigured. There is, however, little doubt that in late medieval society
home is the prime site where practices of document preservation should be
looked for – the homes of judges and notary witnesses, of administrators and
officers, and of traders and reciters.
Distributed document preservation, especially in homes, is particularly
crucial for furthering our understanding of social processes. It brings into
focus a growing number of actors who confidently claimed a considerable
role within society via asserting the right to keep (and to discard) documents.
The agency of these individuals has often been overlooked in scholarship that
has privileged ‘Mamluk’ state structures and endowed organisations in understanding how society functioned or failed to function. The social strategy of
Burhān al-Dīn has only become evident as a result of a detailed study of how
declarations of intent (not ‘decrees’ or ‘diplomas’) were produced, used and
preserved. His socio-cultural practice of acquiring personal stipends from
low-ranking officers is exactly one point where we see the agency of otherwise
invisible individuals – individuals whose social position cannot be grasped
with the catch-all term ‘scholar’. The specific case detected here, patronage
between peripheral scholars and low-ranking officers, is in this particular shape
probably a development specific to the late Qalāwūnid and early Barqūqid
periods in the late eighth/fourteenth century. There is no doubt that a further
interest in social and cultural practices will bring out other manifestations of
such practices and will allow us to get a better understanding of their historical
dynamics.
The conceptual emphasis on processes has, finally, been crucial for
the way we approach libraries. Before serious library history emerged as a
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sub-field, the discipline of studying medieval West Asia and North Africa
was dominated by its fixation on the ‘holy trinity’ of the grand royal libraries
of ʿAbbasid Baghdad, Fatimid Cairo and Umayyad Cordoba. It was arguably the typical lure of the stable organisation that contributed to a focus on
these libraries, even though the extant documentation for them is – to put
it mildly – not overwhelming. At the same time, the massive evidence that
we have for ephemeral book collections was simply sidelined. The history of
libraries cannot be written with any precision if the focus is on neat, longlasting and easily definable organisations – the search for ‘the’ library will end
in an impasse just as much as will the search for ‘the’ archive. The demise of
the grand royal libraries of ʿAbbasid Baghdad, Fatimid Cairo and Umayyad
Cordoba (however ‘grand’ they really were) was not a sign of decline or
decay. Rather, their end was part of the long-term process of books being
reconfigured in new collections. In the same vein, endowed libraries in the
period of the Cairo Sultanate had rather short life cycles. This was not because
endowment administrators or the political elite were inherently corrupt, but
because libraries have to be, in most cases, thought of as processes, not as
stable entities. To write such a processual history of libraries and book collections dispenses with the need to engage in hackneyed debates on decline,
corruption, malpractices, plunder and theft. Rather, it enables us to see how
specific individuals and specific organisations acquired, materially changed
and divested books. The history of libraries is thus one of constant reconfiguration, of books that rapidly move and on collections that disappear as quickly
as they come into being. The analytically richest moments in the history of a
library are generally not when it was extant, but are to be found in the process
of its books coming together and in the process of its books parting company
while moving on to their next life stage.
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PART II
THE DOCUMENTS
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7
Analysis and Edition of the Sale Booklet
fter the narrative Part I, this Part presents the core documents from
Burhān al-Dīn’s estate archive. In this chapter we start with the contents
of this book’s central objects, the three-sheet document that we call a ‘sale
booklet’. We settled on the term after initially referring to it as an ‘auction
list’. However, once we had identified the documentary network to which this
booklet belonged (for this see Chapter 8) it became clear that this document
was not so much a reflection of the actual proceedings of the auction – this
must have been done in another ‘ghost’ document that is lost. The booklet,
rather, aimed at reworking the details of the auction to group together what
was sold to each buyer and what each buyer had to pay. This booklet was written by the otherwise unknown scribe Muḥammad (Ibn) ʿAshā, who was in
the service of the judge’s trustee, al-Adhraʿī. Apart from writing this booklet,
this scribe also appears as one of the buyers in this auction (Buyer 70). In the
booklet we find the names of the eighty-seven buyers who participated in the
auction, the books and other objects they bought, the price for each item and
the total sum owed by each buyer. (For the methodology we used to identify
the buyers, see Chapter 8.)
This booklet subsequently remained in use and served as a point of reference when al-Adhraʿī and his men registered payments. That they kept returning to this booklet is evident from the strokes as well as the terms ‘qubiḍa’ and
‘wuzina’, all added in subsequent days (see Chapter 4). In addition, they had
this booklet in front of them when they were writing document #968 and the
debtor list in document #793. The booklet is undated, but, like document
#812, it was clearly written at an early point in the process of settling Burhān
al-Dīn’s estate (see Chapter 8 for the timeline). This is evident from its role
as a point of reference for other documents and also from a heading, which
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is quite detailed when compared with later documents: ‘Itemised list of the
names [of the objects] sold from the estate of the late Burhān al-Dīn al-Nāṣirī,
who passed into the mercy of God the Almighty before the date [of this list’s
writing]; [organised] according to those [buyers] mentioned therein’.
The (Vanished) Books of Burhān al-Dīn’s Library
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As repeatedly mentioned, this study (and thus also this chapter) is missing
one crucial component, namely the actual books that once were in Burhān
al-Dīn’s home. The identification of the written artefacts would have added a
crucial material dimension to our overall discussion of Burhān al-Dīn’s books.
It would have been particularly helpful for writing the present chapter in order
to identify book titles. In the absence of the actual codices, we have had to rely
exclusively on the rather concise and often entirely elusive short titles given
in the sale booklet. Comparing our data with extant books would have been
hugely useful in helping us decrypt the scribe’s practice of ‘translating’ the long
titles on the actual codex into the short entries that we find in the sale booklet.
Identifying books is a crucial step in any historical work on a vanished
library, and more and more work is being conducted in this regard.1 As part of
our contribution, we want to briefly lay out our approach when conducting
this, ultimately unsuccessful, search. The field is still far from having easily
accessible and reliable data from many libraries holding Arabic codices, and
under these circumstances no project can claim to have conducted a comprehensive search. Rather, one has to opt for those modern collections that seem
to be the most promising repositories for identifying the books in question.
We focused our search on collections that are today in Jerusalem, as there
is some probability that at least a few of Burhān al-Dīn’s books stayed in
the town. In these collections, we identified all the codices that carry title
components matching those in the sale booklet and that were written before
the year of Burhān al-Dīn’s death (789 hijrī). On each of these codices we
looked for evidence (ownership statements, reading notes, endowment notes
1
The most pertinent recent examples are Necipoğlu, Kafadar and Fleischer, Treasures of Knowledge;
D’hulster, Browsing through the Sultan’s Bookshelves and Kyle Wynter-Stoner’s Ph.D. project
(University of Chicago).
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and so on) that might have linked it to Burhān al-Dīn or to the buyer of the
respective book.
Within Jerusalem, we conducted our search in the four main manuscript
collections, the Aqṣā Mosque, the Khālidīya, the Budayrīya and the National
Library of Israel, in addition to smaller collections that hold very few early
codices, such as the Isʿāf al-Nashāshībī Library (with eight codices before the
year 789) and the Uzbakīya Library (with one codex before the year 789). In
the National Library of Israel, currently the largest library with Arabic codices
in the city, considerable segments of the collections are not directly relevant as
they have no specific historical link to Palestine. This is especially true for the
Yahuda collection, which was acquired in cities all over the Middle East.2 In
this sense, the probability of finding a Burhān al-Dīn book in this collection
is as high (or low) as in other collections such as Princeton University Library
or the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. The National Library also holds the
collection of approximately six hundred codices labelled ‘AP’ that form part
of a larger collection of what is euphemistically called ‘Abandoned Property’.
These codices reflect an important part of the pre-1948 manuscript topography of Palestine and can be considered as local as their peers in the Aqṣā
Mosque, the Khālidīya or the Budayrīya libraries.3
The first step (matching title and period on the basis of catalogues4) led
to numerous candidates across the libraries. In the Aqṣā Mosque library, for
instance, the search led to thirty codices that had a relevant title element and
were written before the year 789. However, following the second step (checking the manuscript notes) none of these codices could be securely ascribed to
the library of Burhān al-Dīn. There were near-misses, such as a copy of Riyāḍ
al-ṣāliḥīn by al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277) of which we find a copy in the sale
booklet (book 7).5 The Aqṣā manuscript does indeed carry an ownership note
of one of the buyers from the auction of Burhān al-Dīn’s books, namely Ibn
2
3
4
5
Ukeles, Abraham Shalom Yahuda.
On the printed AP items in the NLI see Amit, Salvage or Plunder and Derri, Construction of
‘Native’ Jews, 15–19.
Salameh, Fihris makhṭuṭāt Maktabat al-Masjid al-Aqṣā; Ju’beh and Salameh, Fihris makhṭūṭāt
al-Maktaba al-Khālidīya; Salameh, Fihris makhṭūṭāt al-Maktaba al-Budayrīya; Barakat, Fihris
makhṭūṭāt Maktabat Dār Isʿāf al-Nashāshībī; Barakat, Catalogue of Manuscripts of the Uzbek
Zawiya (we thank Samel Thope, National Library of Israel, for sharing a list of the AP codices).
Salameh, Fihris makhṭuṭāt Maktabat al-Masjid al-Aqṣā, I, 85 (no. 76).
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6
7
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al-Muhandis (Buyer 11), who bought dozens of books in the auction.6 This
note is undated, but the codex also contains a note of transmission for this
same scholar referring to a reading session in Damascus just a year after Burhān
al-Dīn’s death.7 One could easily see that Ibn al-Muhandis bought the book
and then travelled to Damascus to acquire an ijāza, licensing him to transmit
the work.
Regrettably, it was not Ibn al-Muhandis who bought Burhān al-Dīn’s
Riyāḍ al-ṣāliḥīn in the auction, but rather the prominent officer and viceregent Nāṣir al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Bahādar (Buyer 2). One could assume that
Nāṣir al-Dīn bought the book and sold it shortly after to Ibn al-Muhandis,
but the problem is that there is no positive evidence for such an assumption in
terms of manuscript notes. In addition, this would make the story even more
complicated because the ownership note explicitly states that Ibn al-Muhandis
bought the codex from the heirs of somebody called Badr al-Dīn. Thus, the
book would have had to have passed from Burhān al-Dīn to Nāṣir al-Dīn,
subsequently to this Badr al-Dīn and finally to Ibn al-Muhandis, who took it
to Damascus, in less than a year. While this is not impossible, Riyāḍ al-ṣāliḥīn
was a highly popular title so there is too high a chance that Ibn al-Muhandis’s
book that we find in the Aqṣā Mosque Library today is a codex that had nothing to do with that of Burhān al-Dīn.
Another group of strong contenders were those titles for which only
few codices exist. For instance, the Aqṣā Mosque Library holds a copy
of Ibn Shaddād’s biography of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, al-Nawādir al-sulṭānīya.8
Fol. 175a:
بدر/]... المسلمين أبي العباس أحمد أعزه اللـ[ـه تعالى/]... اشترى سيدنا العبد الفقير إلـ[ـى هللا تعالى/الحمد هلل وحده
مطالبة] وال شيء...[ بتمامه وكماله ولم يتأخر له من/]؟... [من ثمن الدين من ثمن/]... الدين تغمده هللا تعالى بر[حمته
. محمد بن محمود الحنفي الثقفي/ أشهد عليهما بذلك/]...[
Fol. 175b:
[الحمد هلل وحده وصلى هللا على سيدنا] محمد وآله وصحبه وسلم تسلي ًما كثيرًا إلى يوم الدين حسبنا هللا ونعم الوكيل أما
بعد فقد سمع جميع كتاب الرياض للشيخ اإلمام العالم الرباني محي الدين أبي زكريا يحيى النووي قدس هللا روحه ونور
ضريحه على الشيخ اإلمام المسند المعمر برهان الدين إبراهيم بن الشيخ ضياء الدين أحمد بن الشيخ برهان الدين إبراهيم
بن فالح اإلسكندري أبقاه هللا تعالى بسماعه له عل الشيخ اإلمام العالم العامل عالء الدين أبي الحسن علي بن الشيخ األجل
موفق الدين إبراهيم بن داود ابن العطار الشافعي رحمه هللا وهو معارض بأصله سنة ثالث عشرة وسبعماية بدار الحديث
النورية بدمشق المحروسة بسماعه له من المصنف رحمة هللا تعالى عليه فسمعه الجماعة بقراءة الشيخ اإلمام العالم شهاب
وصح ذلك... الدين أبو العباس أحمد بن شمس الدين محمد بن أحمد بن محمد الحسني الحنبلي الشهير بابن المهندس
صحيح ذلك وكتب... وثبت في مجالس آخرها ثامن عشر شوال سنة تسعين سبعماية بالجامع األموي بدمشق المحروسة
.[إبراهيم] بن إبراهيم بن فالح اإلسكندري الشافعي عفا هللا عنه
Salameh, Fihris makhṭuṭāt Maktabat al-Masjid al-Aqṣā, I, 189 (no. 203).
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In the sale booklet we find that this title (book 49) was bought by Ibn alMuhandis. However, there is no positive evidence on the Aqṣā codex in terms
of relevant manuscript notes. In addition, it was not possible to identify clusters of such contenders via other provenance criteria, such as a shared later
owner/library or nearby classmarks in the Aqṣā Mosque.9 In consequence,
it was impossible to move this book or any of its peers from the group of
contenders to the group of possible matches.
In total we identified more than a hundred codices in the libraries of
Jerusalem (forty-three in the Budayrīya, thirty in the Aqṣā Mosque, twentyfive in the Khālidīya, three in the ‘AP’ section of the National Library of Israel
and two in the Dār Isʿāf al-Nashāshībī) that matched in terms of title and
period. That we were not able to link any of them to the library of Burhān
al-Dīn might be of interest to further provenance research. This might mean
that Burhān al-Dīn and the other buyers never, or rarely, wrote ownership
notes on their books and that these books were subsequently so often reconfigured in new collections that there are no other provenance criteria in terms
of shared trajectories. That book owners rarely wrote their names on the books
they owned is very likely, as the number of ownership notes on these manuscripts is often quite low. For instance, the copy of al-Nawādir al-sulṭānīya
in the Aqṣā Mosque Library carries notes relevant for its readership, but none
for its ownership even though it is by now almost 800 years old.10 That the
owners did not write their names into the books they owned might be due to
the fact that books were highly mobile objects that moved so rapidly between a
high number of households that owners did not individually mark them. The
absence of ownership notes is a fascinating phenomenon that brings up the
much wider question of who put ‘when?’, ‘for what reasons?’ notes on manuscripts. The cultural logic of when manuscript users noted their engagements
on the object was evidently deeply inscribed in power structures, with female
users, for instance, or users from non-elite backgrounds, probably less likely to
9
10
On using such provenance criteria in the identification of codices see Hirschler, Ashrafīya Library
Catalogue and Hirschler, Monument.
The codex (Maktabat al-Masjid al-Aqṣā 203) has four reading notes and one further note that
has been partly scratched off so that it is impossible to know what kind of relationship (reading/
lending/owning/endowing) it referred to.
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leave their name on the manuscripts. This topic will certainly be a vivid field of
research in years to come.11
In addition to searching the main Jerusalem collections with a Palestinian
heritage, we also followed up references to Jerusalem codices in other libraries.
By necessity, this was not done systematically, but was based on identifying
books concerned with the Palestinian written tradition. To these belong, for
instance, Bashir Barakat’s Tārīkh al-maktabāt al-ʿarabīya, which has a chapter
dedicated to ‘the Jerusalem manuscripts removed from Palestine’ and Yusuf
al-Uzbaki’s Tārīkh maʿālim al-masjid al-Aqṣā, where we checked more than
100 titles of codices that were produced or circulated in Jerusalem.12 Apart
from searching Jerusalem collections and checking Jerusalem codices around
the world, a final approach was to follow up on prominent book owners who
acted in in proximity to Burhān al-Dīn’s auction. To these belong the majordomo of the Sultan in Cairo, Jamāl al-Dīn Maḥmūd, who was implicated in
the misdeeds of the judge Sharaf al-Dīn in Jerusalem and whose officer, al-Sayfī
Bulūṭ, was at the auction (Buyer 3). As mentioned above, Maḥmūd built up
a massive library which he endowed in Cairo, and which he sourced to a large
extent in Bilād al-Shām, in particular from a member of the Jamāʿa family,
Ibrāhīm ibn Jamāʿa (790/1388).13 Frustratingly, checking books that had once
belonged to Maḥmūd again did not bring up any convincing trace of a codex
that had once belonged to Burhān al-Dīn.
Identification of Buyers, Books and Other Objects
Ed
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We turn now to an annotated version of the sale booklet. In the following list,
those parts of the personal name (including titles and invocations) mentioned
in the sale booklet are underlined. For instance, Buyer 1 appears in the sale booklet as ‘al-Shaykh al-Najmī aʿāda Allāh barakatahu wa-raḥima salafahu al-karīm’
and he is in the following list as ‘al-Shaykh al-Khaṭīb Muḥammad b. ʿAbd
al-Raḥmān al-Najmī, aʿāda Allāh barakatahu wa-raḥima salafahu al-karīm’
11
12
13
Matthew Keegan discusses the issue with regard to audition certificates in the framework of
his ongoing book project, Before World Literature: al-Ḥarīrī’s Impostures in an Islamic Age of
Commentary.
Eight titles showed a potential overlap with a title in Burhān al-Dīn’s sale booklet. We then checked
the respective codex, but none of them contained compelling evidence that it was indeed in the
library of Burhān al-Dīn.
This library is the subject of the Ph.D. thesis by Kyle Wynter-Stoner (University of Chicago).
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to differentiate between information taken from the booklet and what we
added from other sources (‘al-Khaṭīb Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān’). In
those cases where the buyer’s name appears in one of the other documents in
the estate-related documentary network (see Chapter 8), the respective debtor
or payor number, as well as the name used in that document, if different, are
provided. Also underlined in the following list are those parts of the book title
and the author’s name mentioned in the sale booklet. This includes frequently
occurring terms referring to the materiality of the codex such as ‘parts of ’
(ajzāʾ min) and ‘complete’ (kāmil) as well as the term ‘wa-ghayruhu’ (‘and
more still’) that the scribe used to indicate further titles. For example, the sale
booklet provides for book 82 the following information: ‘Fuṣūl Ibn Muʿṭī
wa-ghayruhu’. In our list this title appears as ‘Kitāb al-Fuṣūl; A: Yaḥyā b. ʿAbd
al-Nūr Ibn Muʿṭī al-Zawāwī (d. 628/1231); ed. M al-Ṭanāḥī, Cairo: ʿIsā al-Bābī
al-Ḥalabī 1977; FI: wa-ghayruhu’. Bibliographical references are omitted for
well-known works. ‘Ashrafīya’ refers to the respective entry in the Ashrafīya
catalogue from the late seventh/thirteenth century (cf. Hirschler, Ashrafīya
Library Catalogue) and ‘Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī; Fihrist’ refers to the endowment
list from the late ninth/fifteenth century (cf. Hirschler, Monument). For those
lots with two books (identified as ‘a’ and ‘b’), the price is given under book ‘b’.
On the challenge of ascribing thematic categories, see Chapter 5. Objects other
than books are referred to as ‘obj’; the only document listed in the inventory is
numbered as ‘docum 1’.
Ed
i
Abbreviations: ‘A’ = author; ‘FI’ = further information; ‘C’ = thematic category; ‘sum total’: sum total owed by buyer
#061a right = page 1 (Plate I.1)
BUYER 1 al-Shaykh al-Khaṭīb Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Najmī,
aʿāda Allāh barakatahu wa-raḥima salafahu al-karīm [ll. 4–6], sum total:
361 dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 1, al-Shaykh Najm al-Dīn) and #968
(Debtor 1, al-Khaṭīb).
The elaborate invocation after the name of this scholar (‘shaykh’) indicates
that he and his family members were prominent individuals. The very
concise form of his name given here suggests, furthermore, that he was
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well-known to those drafting the sale booklet. The most likely candidate
is the Jerusalemite shāfiʿī scholar Muḥammad Najm al-Dīn (d. 795/1393),
who belonged to the Banū Jamāʿa dynasty, which held office across Egypt
and Bilād al-Shām (al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, II, 108). Najm al-Dīn was
khaṭīb in the Ṣalāḥīya Madrasa. He was well-known to the judge’s trustee,
al-Adhraʿī, who was responsible for running this auction. The close connection between the two is evident from document #717, in which Najm
al-Dīn gave al-Adhraʿī the authority to oversee the settling of the estate of
the trader al-Ḥamawī (Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 187).
es
s
(book 1) Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī; A: Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870);
Price: 260; C: ḥadīth. (cf. book 46, 47, 78)
Pr
(book 2) Asās al-balāgha; A: Maḥmūd b. ʿUmar al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144);
Price: 74; C: rhetoric.
h
U
ni
ve
rs
ity
(book 3) Sharḥ Mukhtaṣar al-Iṣfahānī; This is most likely an unidentifiable
commentary on one of the many abridgements of the Kitāb al-aghānī by Abū
al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī (d. 356/967), such as the Mukhtaṣar al-aghānī by Ibn ʿAbd
al-Munʿim (d. 604/1207, cf. Sawa, Music Performance Practice, 32). Price: 27;
C: poetry/adab. (cf. book 30b)
Ed
i
nb
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BUYER 2 al-Maqarr Muḥammad al-Nāṣirī al-Karakī [ll. 7–13], sum total: 466
dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 2 & Payor 48), #812 (Payor 20, Ibn Shihāb)
and #968 (Debtor 2, al-nāʾib).
As other documents (such as #968) refer to the same individual as ‘nāʾib’
(vice-regent), this is most likely the prominent officer and vice-regent
(nāʾib al-salṭana) Nāṣir al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Bahādar. He also acted
as supervisor of the endowments in the Ḥijāz and invested in the pious
topography of Jerusalem (al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, II, 273).
(book 4) al-Shifāʾ bi-taʿrīf ḥuqūq al-Muṣṭafā; A: al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ b. Mūsā
al-Yaḥṣubī (d. 544/1149); Ashrafīya, no. 577; Price: 171; C: Prophet
Muḥammad – devotional. (cf. book 169, 230)
(book 5) al-Raqāʾiq; Most likely a book on asceticism and piety as authors
used the terms zuhd and raqāʾiq interchangeably (Kashf al-ẓunūn, II, 1422).
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This could be the work by ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ishbīlī Ibn
al-Kharrāṭ (d. 582/1186; Kashf al-ẓunūn, I, 911 and al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh
al-islām, 581–90, p. 112). Price: 22; C: asceticism. (cf. book 116)
(book 6) Dīwān al-khuṭab; tentative reading; One might think of the work
of Ibn Nubāta (fl. 4th/10th c.), but we find that work with a different title
below (cf. book 28). This is thus more likely the collection of sermons by A:
Muḥammad b. Abī al-Qāsim Fakhr al-Dīn (d. 622/1225); (al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh
al-islām, 621–30, p. 133–5); Price: 27; C: sermons/paraenesis.
(book 7) Riyāḍ al-ṣāliḥīn; A: Yaḥyā b. Sharaf al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277); Price:
50; C: ethics.
ve
rs
ity
Pr
es
s
(book 8) Laṭāʾif al-ishārāt; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn, II, 1551),
but the suggestion of Haarmann, Library, 332 is possible: A: ʿAbd al-Karīm
al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072). This author’s Koran commentary fits Burhān
al-Dīn’s intellectual world and contemporary authors referred to the work
with this title (al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh al-islām, 461–70, p. 172). Price: 32; C:
Koran – study of.
rg
h
U
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(book 9a) al-Jihād; The keywords of 9a and 9b most likely refer to two distinct
titles. There are numerous possibilities for titles containing the term ‘jihād’
and this entry is thus not identifiable.
nb
u
(book 9b) al-Irshād; There are numerous possibilities for titles containing the
term ‘irshād’ and this entry is thus not identifiable. Price: 20. (cf. book 254)
Ed
i
(book 10) al-Ṣarṣarī; This entry merely mentions the author’s name. There
are two main possible identities for this author: the ḥanbalī scholar Sulaymān
b. ʿAbd al-Qawī al-Ṣarṣarī (d. 716/1316) and the author of devotional ṣūfī
poetry, especially in praise of the Prophet Muḥammad, A: Yaḥyā b. Yūsuf
al-Ṣarṣarī (d. 656/1258). The latter was better known in Bilād al-Shām (for one
example cf. Guo, Mamluk Syrian Historiography, I, 68) and is also suggested
by Haarmann, Library, 331. Price: 33; C: Prophet Muḥammad – devotional.
(book 11) al-Adhkār; There are numerous possibilities for works with the term
‘adhkār’ (invocation and recollection of God), but in the context of Jerusalem
in this period the work by A: Yaḥyā b. Sharaf al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277), an
author who has at least one work in this list (book 7, in addition to the other
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owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
likely entries book 43, 142a, 197 and 231), is very likely. Price: 37; C: sufism.
(cf. book 231)
(book 12) Faḍāʾil al-aʾimma; The Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī fihrist has titles
such as Faḍl al-aʾimma al-arbaʿa (cf. Hirschler, Monument, no. 143f)
and Manāqib al-aʾimma al-arbaʿa (cf. Hirschler, Monument, no. 397b)
referring to the founders of the four main Sunni madhhabs. Price: 17;
C: history – merits – individuals.
(book 13) Faḍāʾil al-Quds; popular title with numerous possibilities (cf. ʿAsalī,
Makhṭūṭāt faḍāʾil Bayt al-Maqdis); Price: 32; C: history – merits – places.
es
s
(obj1) ikhwān: table (Biberstein-Kazimirski, Dictionnaire, I, 651), Price:
4.25.
ity
Pr
BUYER 3 al-Maqarr al-Sayfī Bulūṭ [ll. 14–20], sum total: 346 dirhams. Listed
in #793 (Debtor 3 & Payor 49), #812 (Payor 18) and #968 (Debtor 3).
Ed
i
nb
u
rg
h
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ve
rs
This could be the amīr Sayf al-Dīn Bulāṭ, who belonged to the household
of Jamāl al-Dīn Maḥmūd, the major-domo of the Sultan from 792/1390
to 798/1395. He was one of those accused of malpractices in the investigation (Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 515–18) that led to the formation
of the investigation archive, which forms the largest sub-corpus in the
Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus as we know it today (see Chapter 3). Sayf al-Dīn
appears also in another estate record from the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus (e.g.
#768a [Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 451]) and one of his mamlūks
appears further down (Buyer 73).
(book 14) Rabʿa sharīfa; A (incomplete?) copy of the Koran (Dozy,
Supplément, I, 503). Price: 8; C: Koran – text.
(book 15) al-Muntaqā; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn, II, 1851/2)
and thus not identifiable; Price: 21.
(book 16) Mukhtaṣar al-Qudūrī; A: Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Qudūrī
(d. 428/1037); ed. ʿA. al-Azharī, Cairo: Dār al-Iḥsān 2017; Price: 14.25;
C: fiqh – ḥanafī.
(book 17) Dīwān shiʿr; not identifiable; Price: 20; C: poetry.
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(book 18) Muṣḥaf sharīf; a complete copy of the Koran; Price: 70;
C: Koran – text.
(book 19) Muṣḥaf; We take the term rubʿ to refer to one quarter of the full
text. Rubʿ can also refer to one quarter of a juzʾ, a thirtieth part of the full text.
However, this would mean that here a quarter of a thirtieth, that is a hundred
and twentieth, is sold for 18 dirhams. This would give a potential, and highly
unlikely, price of 2,160 dirhams if the copy had been complete. Price: 18;
C: Koran – text. (cf. book 35, 126, 130, 190)
(book 20) al-Qurʾān; parts of (ajzāʾ min) the Koran; Price: 7; C: Koran – text.
rs
ity
Pr
es
s
(book 21) Muṣḥaf; We take the term (thumn) to refer to one eighth of the full
text. Thumn can also refer to one eighth of a juzʾ, a thirtieth part of the full
text. However, this would mean that here an eighth of a thirtieth, that is a two
hundred and fortieth, was sold for 6.25 dirhams. This would give a potential,
and highly unlikely, price of 1,500 dirhams if the copy had been complete.
Price: 6.25; C: Koran – text.
ve
(book 22a) Duʿāʾ; C: prayer book.
h
U
ni
(book 22b) Majmūʿ; not identifiable multiple-text (or composite) manuscript; Price: 12.
nb
u
rg
(obj2) sībā: tripod (Haarmann, Library, 330; cf. Dozy, Supplément, I, 710/1
for sība), Price: 5.25.
Ed
i
(obj3) zawj ṣanādīq: pair of chests, Price: 160.
(obj4) ṣandūq khashab: wooden chest, Price: 4.25.
BUYER 4 Sayyidunā al-Ḥākim al-Shāfiʿī, asbagha Allāh ẓillahu [ll. 21–5],
sum total: 194 dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 4) and #968 (Debtor 4,
al-Shāfiʿī).
This is most likely Abū Bakr b. Ibrāhīm al-Ṣarfanī, who was the shāfiʿī
deputy judge of Jerusalem from the beginning of 789/1387 to mid790/1388,14 that is, the period when this sale booklet was written. The
title ‘ḥākim’ refers to the judge himself rather than his deputy, but we see
14
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 263/4: ‘Abū Bakr lbrāhīm al-Ṣarwī (?) {P 116}’.
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owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
in #052/1 and #111/1 (see Appendix 2) that the professional witnesses
also refer to al-Ṣarfanī as ‘sayyidunā al-ḥākim’. The identification of this
buyer as al-Ṣarfanī is more likely still because he was closely involved in
settling Burhān al-Dīn’s estate: he decided the amount of the maintenance
payments for Burhān al-Dīn’s children (#052 and #111) and he also
endorsed individual payments (#108 and #118). He is not Shams al-Dīn
Muḥammad al-Ṣayrafī, who assisted al-Adhraʿī in settling Burhān al-Dīn’s
estate (#793, #800 and #812).
Pr
es
s
(book 23) al-Durra al-farīda; A: Ḥusayn b. Abī al-ʿIzz al-Hamadānī
(d. 643/1245), who was one of the leading scholars of Koran recitation in Bilād
al-Shām (al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh al-islām, 641–50, pp. 224–6) and authored a
commentary on the Shāṭibīya (cf. books 29 and 67) with the title al-Durra
al-farīda (Kashf al-ẓunūn, I, 646). Price: 27.5; C: Koran – recitation.
rg
h
U
ni
ve
rs
ity
(book 24) al-Jamʿ bayna al-ṣaḥīḥayn; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn,
I, 599); Haarmann, Library, 330–1 suggested authorship of Ibn al-Kharrāṭ
(cf. book 5); however, considering other documented book collections
(Ashrafīya, no. 1438; Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, Fihrist, no. 439l) and contemporary
sources (al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh al-islām, 631–40, p. 361; al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh
al-islām, 651–60, p. 358), the most likely author is A: Muḥammad b. Futūḥ
al-Ḥumaydī (d. 488/1095); Price: 52; C: ḥadīth. (cf. book 236)
Ed
i
nb
u
(book 25) Adab al-dunyā wa-al-dīn; A: al-Māwardī (d. 450/1058); Ashrafīya,
no. 9; Price: 13; C: political thought. (cf. book 41)
(book 26) al-Maqāmāt; A: al-Qāsim b. ʿAlī al-Ḥarīrī (d. 516/1122); Ashrafīya,
no. 1095; Price: 16.5; C: adab. (cf. book 194, 267)
(book 27) al-Īḍāḥ; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn, I, 209–10);
Haarmann, Library, 330 suggested the work by A: al-Ḥasan al-Fārisī Abū ʿAlī
(d. 377/987); considering that the Ashrafīya book list (nos 30a, 952, 1415)
and contemporary sources (e.g. al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh al-islām, 681–90, p. 51
and al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh al-islām, 691–700, p. 52) used the keyword ‘al-Īḍāḥ’
for this work, this is indeed highly likely. FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 15.75;
C: grammar.
(book 28) al-Khuṭab; A: ʿAbd al-Raḥīm b. Muḥammad Ibn Nubāta
(fl. 4th/10th c.); Price: 17.25; C: sermons/paraenesis.
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(book 29) al-Shāṭibīya; A: Abū al-Qāsim b. Firruh al-Shāṭibī (d. 590/1194);
Price: 4; C: Koran – recitation. (cf. book 67)
(book 30a) al-Ifṣāḥ; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn, I, 81) and thus
not identifiable. (cf. book 86)
(book 30b) Sharḥ al-Iṣfahānī; This is most likely an unidentifiable commentary on the Kitāb al-aghānī by Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī (d. 356/967). Price: 48;
C: poetry/adab. (cf. book 3)
BUYER 5 al-Ḥākim al-Ḥanafī [ll. 26–8], sum total: 87 dirhams. Listed in
#793 (Debtor 5) and #968 (Debtor 5, al-Ḥanafī).
rs
ity
Pr
es
s
Khalīl b. ʿĪsā al-ʿAjamī al-Bāyartī (?) (d. 801/1398) was appointed as (first)
ḥanafī judge in Jerusalem in 784/1382. Other documents from the Ḥaram
al-sharīf corpus show that he held this position for well over a decade, at
least until 796/1393 (Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 233–5). He was in
all likelihood in this post when Burhān al-Dīn died in 789/1387.
nb
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rg
h
U
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(book 31) Sharḥ al-Āthār; This is most likely a commentary on the
Kitāb al-Āthār by Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānī (d. c. 187/803)
(ed. al-Afghānī, Beirut 1993). Kashf al-ẓunūn, I, 211 mentions a commentary
(sharḥ) by Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Ṭaḥāwī (d. 321/933), arguably the Sharḥ
maʿānī al-Āthār. Price: 61; C: fiqh – ḥanafī/ḥadīth.
Ed
i
The following entry for ajzāʾ min Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim was transferred (‘nuqila’)
to book 235.
(obj5) ṣuḥūn qashānī: china plates, Price: 9.
(obj6) ṣandūq khashab: wooden chest, Price: 17.
#061a left = page 2 (Plate I.1)
BUYER 6 al-Shaykh ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn ʿAlī Ibn al-Naqīb al-Ḥanafī [ll. 1–2],
sum total: 65.75 dirhams. Listed in #793 (Payor 14), #800 (Payor 9), #812
(Payor 36) and #968 (Debtor 6).
Jerusalemite scholar, fl. 797/1395 (al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, II, 220/1);
named together with Buyer 9, Shams al-Dīn, in al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl,
II, 221.
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owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
(book 32) al-Tadhkira; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn, I, 391–3)
and thus not identifiable. Price: 65.75. (cf. book 135)
BUYER 7 al-Shaykh Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl al-Qalqashandī
[ll. 3–7], sum total: 55.25 dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 6 & Payor 40),
#812 (Payor 10) and #968 (Debtor 7).
d. 809/1406, settled in Jerusalem to become one of its leading scholars in
the field of shāfiʿī law (al-Sakhāwī, Ḍawʾ, VII, 137), brother of Buyer 8.
es
s
(book 33) Tanbīh; As this term is not determined, this is most likely not a
keyword drawn from a title but a generic description of a text of admonition.
Price: 25; C: sermons/paraenesis. (cf. book 170)
ity
Pr
(book 34) al-Akhbār fī fawāʾid al-akhyār; A: Muḥammad b. Isḥāq
al-Kalābādhī (d. 380/990 or 384/994); for instance, MS Bibliothèque nationale
de France, Arabe 5855 (no evident link to Burhān al-Dīn); Price: 12; C: sufism.
ve
rs
(obj7) ʿukkāz ḥadīd: iron crutch, Price: 5.25.
ni
(obj8) rakwa: copper pot, Price: 4.5.
rg
h
U
(book 35) Maṣāḥif sharīfa; two quarters (rubʿayn) of the full text (cf. book
19, 126, 130, 190). Price: 8.5; C: Koran – text.
Ed
i
nb
u
BUYER 8 al-Shaykh Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm b. Ismāʿīl al-Qalqashandī, his
brother [ll. 8–11], sum total: 52 dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 7 & Payor 47),
#812 (Payor 16) and #968 (Debtor 8).
d. 790/1388–9; al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, II, 161/2; al-Sakhāwī, Ḍawʾ,
VII, 137; brother of Buyer 7; In a codex today held in Damascus we see
him attending, together with his brother, the scholarly reading of a ḥadīth
collection in the Aqṣā Mosque in 772/1370.15 The scribe of the sale booklet notes that four dirhams of the sum total were paid by ‘Maqarr Sayfī
Bulūṭ’ (Buyer 3). Al-Qalqashandī subsequently ran into financial troubles
(according to document #652) and had to pledge several of his books as
security for a loan (discussed in Chapter 4).
15
Damascus, National al-Asad Library (formerly Ẓāhirīya), MS 3787/3, fol. 35b.
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(book 36) al-Nāsikh wa-al-mansūkh; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn,
II, 1920) and thus not identifiable; Price: 18.5; C: Koran – study of.
(book 37) Istidʿāʾ; The Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī fihrist uses the same term ‘Istidʿāʾ’,
also undetermined, for a request for an ijāza (cf. Hirschler, Monument,
no. 521c); FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 5; C: ijāza.
(book 38) Mushkil al-ṣaḥīḥayn; the Jerusalemite scholar A: Khalīl b. Kaykaldī
(d. 761/1359); Sezgin, GAS, I, 132, 142; Price: 7.5; C: ḥadīth.
(obj9) kāmilīya bayḍāʾ: white robe of honour (al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl,
II, 317), Price: 21.
ity
Pr
es
s
BUYER 9 Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Dayrī [ll. 12–14], sum
total: 94.75 dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 8), #800 (Payor 39) and #968
(Debtor 9).
U
ni
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rs
Jerusalemite ḥanafī scholar (d. 827/1424), who is constantly referred to as
‘Shams al-Dīn al-Dayrī’ in al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl. He later took up the
ḥanafī judgeship in Cairo (al-Sakhāwī, Ḍawʾ, VIII, 88/9). He is named
together with Buyer 6, ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn, in al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, II, 221.
nb
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h
(book 39) Mukhtaṣar; A: ʿUthmān b. ʿUmar al-Mālikī Ibn al-Ḥājib
(d. 646/1249); Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, Fihrist, no. 571; Price: 11.5; C: fiqh –
mālikī.
Ed
i
(book 40) al-Riʿāya li-ḥuqūq Allāh; A: Ḥārith b. Asad al-Muḥāsibī
(d. 243/857); ed. ʿA. Maḥmūd/ʿA. ʿAṭāʾ, Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Ḥadītha
1970; Price: 27; C: sufism.
(book 41) Adab al-dunyā; possibly A: al-Māwardī (d. 450/1058); FI: waghayruhu; Ashrafīya, no. 9; Price: 41; C: political thought. (cf. book 25)
(book 42) al-Ihtimām; This is most likely al-Ihtimām bi-talkhīṣ kitāb
al-ilmām by A: ʿAbd al-Karīm b. ʿAbd al-Nūr al-Ḥalabī (d. 735/1334)
(ed. Ḥ. Riyāḍ, Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Kutub al-Thaqāfīya 1990), a commentary on Ibn Daqīq al-ʿĪd’s (702/1302) al-Ilmām bi-aḥādīth al-aḥkām. Price:
15.25; C: ḥadīth/ fiqh – shāfiʿī.
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owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
BUYER 10 Burhān al-Dīn b. Qāsim [ll. 15–19], sum total: 566 dirhams.
Listed in #793 (Debtor 9 & Payor 52, Burhān al-Dīn Qāsim), #812 (Payor 22)
and #968 (Debtor 10).
Pr
es
s
Not identified; we find the interlinear accounting note ‘qubiḍa 265 baqiya
291’ (‘265 [dirhams] received, 291 [dirhams] outstanding’) next to this
buyer’s sum total, which matches the amount recorded in accounts #793
and #812. However, the sum total he owed is unstable: the sale booklet
initially recorded 556 dirhams (faint traces of the ‘fifty’ are visible) and
this matches the sum of the individual prices he had to pay as well as the
interlinear note (265+291 = 556). This sum total was subsequently altered
to ‘566’ without any of the individual prices being altered. In #793 and
#968 we find, furthermore, a sum total of 576 dirhams and there is no
explanation for these different sums.
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(book 43) al-Rawḍa; There are numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn,
I, 924–33), but the high price indicates a large and popular work. This makes
the shāfiʿī fiqh work Rawḍat al-ṭālibīn wa-ʿumdat al-muftīn by A: Yaḥyā b.
Sharaf al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277), an author who has at least one work in this list
(book 7, in addition to the other likely entries book 11, 142a, 197 and 231), very
likely. Numerous authors wrote a commentary on this work in the subsequent
centuries. The Rawḍa is a summary of the legal commentary by al-Rāfiʿī, the
author of the book in the subsequent lot. Price: 305. C: fiqh – shāfiʿī.
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(book 44) al-Muḥarrar; A: ʿAbd al-Karīm b. Muḥammad al-Rāfiʿī
(d. 623/1226); ed. M. Ismāʿīl, Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmīya 2005; Price: 28;
C: fiqh – shāfiʿī. (cf. book 122a)
(book 45) Mirʾāt al-zamān fī tārīkh al-aʿyān; A: Sibṭ Ibn al-Jawzī
(d. 654/1256); Price: 11; C: history.
(book 46) Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī; A: Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870);
Price: 172; C: ḥadīth. (cf. book 1, 47, 78)
(book 47) Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī; quires of (karārīs min); A: Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl
al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870); Price: 40; C: ḥadīth. (cf. book 1, 46, 78)
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BUYER 11 Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Muḥammad Ibn al-Muhandis [61a,
ll. 20–33–61b. ll. 1–13], sum total: 1295 dirhams.16 Listed in #793 (Payor 1),
#800 (Payor 5), #812 (Payor 24) and #968 (Debtor 11).
Jerusalemite ḥanbalī scholar (d. 803/4–1401/2), al-Sakhāwī, Ḍawʾ, II, 86.
The scribe of the sale booklet notes two monetary transactions for this
buyer (see book 101 below).
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(book 48) Dalāʾil al-aḥkām; There are several possibilities for this title, but
on account of the regional context and the following title, the most likely is
A: Bahāʾ al-Dīn Yūsuf b. Rāfiʿ Ibn Shaddād (d. 632/1235); Dalāʾil al-aḥkām
min aḥādīth al-rasūl, ed. M. Shaykhānī/Z. al-Ayyūbī, Damascus: Dār
Qutayba 1992; Price: 30.5; C: ḥadīth.
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(book 49) al-Nawādir al-sulṭānīya; There are again numerous possibilities,
but on account of the previous title and the strong Jerusalem link, the most
likely is A: Bahāʾ al-Dīn Yūsuf b. Rāfiʿ Ibn Shaddād (d. 632/1235); Price: 18;
C: history – biography – Ayyūbid.
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(book 50) Tajrīd al-ṣiḥāḥ; A: Razīn b. Muʿāwiya al-ʿAbdarī (d. 524/1129
or 535/1140); mentioned in Kashf al-ẓunūn, I, 345 and all references in
al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh al-islām with this title refer to this book; Price: 72.5;
C: ḥadīth. (cf. book 121, 122b)
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(book 51) Zahr al-ādāb; A: Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī al-Ḥuṣrī al-Qayrawānī
(d. 413/1022); Ashrafīya, no. 541; Price: 38; C: adab – anthology.
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(book 52) Sharḥ al-Ishārāt; Most likely a commentary on the Ishārāt by Ibn
Sīnā (d. 428/1037). Following the suggestion by Haarmann, Library, this
is arguably the work by A: Muḥammad b. ʿUmar Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī Ibn
al-Khaṭīb (d. 606/1210). This author is likely as we have books by him elsewhere in this sale booklet (cf. book 53, 115, 246) and as al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh
al-islām explicitly refers to this exact title (al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh al-islām,
601–10, p. 214). Price: 11; C: philosophy.
(book 53) Mulakhkhaṣ al-Rāzī; A: Muḥammad b. ʿUmar Fakhr al-Dīn
al-Rāzī Ibn al-Khaṭīb (d. 606/1210); This compendium on philosophy and
16
Adding the individual prices suggests the sum total should be 1,297.75, but he indeed only paid
1,295 dirhams, as is evident from accounts sheet #812.
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logic is admittedly a rather surprising book for this collection, but the reading
is reasonably clear and we find the same author elsewhere (cf. book 52, 115).
Price: 11.25; C: logic.
(book 54) al-Miftāḥ li-ahl al-Dīn wa-al-ṣalāh; There are numerous titles
with the keyword ‘miftāḥ’ (Kashf al-ẓunūn, II, 1,769–72), but none with the
exact wording found here. Price: 7.5.
(book 55) Mushkil al-ḥadīth; two main possibilities: ʿAbd Allāh b. Muslim
al-Dīnawarī Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/889; mentioned al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh
al-islām, 271–80, p. 382) or Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan Ibn Fūrak (d. 406/1015;
ed. D. Gimaret, Damascus 2003); Price: 18.75; C: ḥadīth.
ity
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(book 56) Jawāmiʿ al-fiqar wa-lawāmiʿ al-fikar; commentary on the chronicle
by Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-ʿUtbī (d. 427/1036 or 431/1040); A: Faḍl
Allāh b. ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Kirmānī (d. c. 620/1223); Kaḥḥāla, Muʿjam,
II, 626; Price: 46; C: history.
Ed
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(book 57) Manāqib ʿUmar; Contemporary sources are aware of two
authors of such a title: (1) ʿAbd al-Ghanī b. ʿAbd al-Wāḥid al-Maqdisī
(d. 600/1203; al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh al-islām, 591–600, p. 446) and (2) Ibn
al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200; al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh al-islām, 591–600, p. 290). As we
have no other book by ʿAbd al-Ghanī in this sale booklet (and hardly any
by another author from the Damascene ḥanbalī Maqdisī environment), Ibn
al-Jawzī, who has numerous titles in this inventory (cf. book 72, 120, 134, 216,
220 and possibly 75, 208, 212), is more likely. He has two titles starting with
‘Manāqib ʿUmar’, one referring to ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz and one to ʿUmar
b. al-Khaṭṭāb. The latter was more popular (we find it, for instance, in Ibn
ʿAbd al-Hādī, Fihrist, no. 22) and thus is the most likely version here. Price: 42;
C: history – merits – individuals.
(book 58) Dīwān Ibn Nubāta; A: ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. ʿUmar Ibn Nubāta
(d. 405/1015); Ashrafīya, no. 420; or A: Muḥammad b. Muḥammad Ibn
Nubāta al-Miṣrī (d. 768/1366; cf. Bauer, Ibn Nubātah al-Miṣrī). We find the
same title further down (cf. book 97). As it is unlikely that a book collection
with a rather weak profile in poetry contained two copies of the same dīwān,
the most likely option is that the dīwāns of both Ibn Nubātas were held. Price:
14; C: poetry.
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(book 59) Mawālid; The term ‘mawālid’ (sg. mawlid) is here most likely used
in the sense of panegyric poems in honour of the Prophet. FI: wa-ghayruhu;
Price: 20.25; C: Prophet Muḥammad – devotional. (cf. book 61, 243)
(book 60) Shams al-maṭālib; unidentified; Price: 13.25.
(book 61) Mawālid; FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 28.75; C: Prophet Muḥammad –
devotional. (cf. book 59, 243)
(book 62) Sharḥ al-ḥurūf al-jāmiʿ bayna al-ʿārif wa-al-maʿrūf; following Haarmann, Library, 331 arguably A: Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad al-Ṭāʾūsī
al-Qazwīnī (fl. 658/1260); Browne/Nicholson, Descriptive Catalogue, 289.
Price: 18.25; C: lettrism.
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(book 63) al-Muhadhdhab; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn,
II, 1912–14) and thus not identifiable. On account of the prominence of
shāfiʿī works in this library a cautious case can be made for al-Muhadhdhab
by Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī al-Shīrāzī (d. 476/1083) (cf. book 172, 265a). Price: 30.25;
C: fiqh – shāfiʿī.
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(book 64) Mashāriq al-anwār; Contemporary sources are aware of two
authors of such a title: (1) al-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad al-Ṣaghānī (d. 650/1252;
al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh al-islām, 641–50, p. 445); (2) ʿIyāḍ b. Mūsā al-Yaḥṣubī
(d. 544/1149; al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh al-islām, 541–50, p. 200). Both titles are
linked to ḥadīth. Haarmann, Library, 331 suggested al-Yaḥṣubī, who is indeed
slightly more likely as he has another title in this sale booklet (cf. book 4). Price:
10; C: ḥadīth.
(book 65) Gharīb al-Qurʾān; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn,
II, 1,207) and thus the author is not identifiable; Price: 19.5; C: Koran/
lexicography.
(book 66) Shiʿār al-dīn; the lost work by A: Ḥamd b. Muḥammad Ibn
al-Khaṭṭāb (d. 388/998); Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ, Ṭabaqāt, I, 469 is one of the few biographies that mention it and Ibn Taymīya, Minhāj, V, 63 one of the few works
that cites it. Price: 30; C: theology (uṣūl al-dīn).
(book 67) al-Shāṭibīya; A: Abū al-Qāsim b. Firruh al-Shāṭibī (d. 590/1194);
FI: wa-ghayruhā; Price: 18.25; C: Koran – recitation. (cf. book 29)
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(book 68) al-Faṣīḥ; A: Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā Thaʿlab (d. 291/904); Ashrafīya,
no. 1302a; Price: 17.75; C: lexicography. (cf. book 89, 98b)
(book 69) al-Madkhal; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn, II, 1941–3)
and thus not identifiable. Price: 60.
(book 70) Kanz al-abrār; A: Muḥammad b. ʿAlī Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240);
Baghdādī, Hadīyat al-ʿārifīn, II, 120; Price: 35; C: ḥadīth.
(book 71) Dīwān al-Wardī; most likely A: ʿUmar b. Muẓaffar Ibn al-Wardī
(d. 749/1349); ed. ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Hindāwī, Cairo: Dār al-Āfāq al-ʿArabīya;
Price: 20; C: poetry.
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(book 72) Uns al-nufūs; most likely A: Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200);
Brockelmann, Geschichte, S, I, p. 505; Price: 21.75.
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ity
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(book 73) al-Ṭabaqāt; Extracts from/parts of (min) a (biographical?) work,
but there are numerous possibilities and it is thus not identifiable. Price: 35.25;
C: history – biographies.
ve
(book 74) Tārīkh; A part of (juzʾ min) a chronicle. Price: 38; C: history.
Ed
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(book 75) al-Tabṣira; There are numerous possibilities for this keyword
(Kashf al-ẓunūn, I, 338–9). However, in light of several preaching-related
books in Burhān al-Dīn’s collection (cf. books 6 and 28), one of them
by Ibn al-Jawzī (cf. book 120), this is most likely the Tabṣira by A: Ibn
al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200; al-Tabṣira, Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmīya 1986).
We find a second copy further down. Price: 6.75; C: sermons/paraenesis.
(cf. book 134)
(book 76) al-Aḥkām; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn, I, 19–22) and
thus not identifiable; FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 34.25.
(book 77) al-Dalāʾil; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn, I, 760) and
thus not identifiable. The vast majority of titles with this keyword are on the
signs of prophethood and this is also reflected in a list such as Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī,
Fihrist (nos 265, 503f and 533f). Price: 27.25; C: prophethood.
(book 78) Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī; Extracts from/parts of (min) this work.
A: Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870); Price: 32; C: ḥadīth. (cf.
book 1, 46, 47)
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(book 79) Majmūʿ lugha; No title contained in this multiple-text (or composite) manuscript is given. ‘Lugha’ refers most likely to C: lexicography;
Price: 18.
(book 80) al-Sīra; This is most likely a part of (juzʾ min) a biography of
the Prophet. There are several possibilities, but considering what books the
Ashrafīya cataloguer entered as ‘sīra’, the most likely authors are: (1) Ibn
Isḥāq (d. 150/767)/Ibn Hishām (d. 218/833 or 213/828) (Ashrafīya, no. 547)
and (2) Aḥmad Ibn Fāris (d. 395/1004) (Ashrafīya, no. 1222c); Price: 23;
C: history – biography of the Prophet. (cf. book 141, 211, 240a)
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#061b right = page 3 (Plate I.2)
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(book 81) Ṣifat al-janna wa-al-nār; Haarmann, Library, proposes the work
by Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wāḥid al-Maqdisī (d. 643/1245) that
we find in Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, Fihrist, no. 543e and is mentioned in Kashf
al-ẓunūn, II, 2013. However, titles by authors from the Damascene ḥanbalī
Maqdisī environment are rare in this sale booklet and this is thus more likely
the work by A: Aḥmad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Iṣfahānī Abū Nuʿaym (d. 430/1038)
whose work is also in Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, Fihrist, no. 531k and is mentioned in
contemporary sources (al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh al-islām, 421–40, p. 276). Price:
25.875; C: theology.
Ed
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(book 82) Kitāb al-Fuṣūl; A: Yaḥyā b. ʿAbd al-Nūr Ibn Muʿṭī al-Zawāwī
(d. 628/1231); ed. M al-Ṭanāḥī, Cairo: ʿIsā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī 1977; FI: waghayruhu; Price: 32; C: grammar.
(book 83) Majmūʿ; not identifiable multiple-text (or composite) manuscript;
FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 14.5.
(book 84) Athar al-safar; very tentative reading and thus not identifiable;
FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 24.
(book 85) Rāḥat al-qulūb; The spelling of the title suggests a Persian-language
work. This is possibly a ṣūfī work such as the Rāḥat al-qulūb ascribed to Sharaf
al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā Manīrī/Manērī (d.782/1381; Agra Maṭbaʿ Mufid-i
ʿām 1321[1903]). Price: 17.375; C: sufism.
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(book 86) al-Ifṣāḥ; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn, I, 81) and thus
not identifiable; FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 27. (Cf. book 30.)
(book 87) al-Masāʾil al-maknūna; A: al-Ḥakīm Muḥammad b. ʿAlī
al-Tirmidhī (d. c. 318/936); ed. M. I. al-Juyūshī, Cairo: Dār al-Turāth al-ʿArabī
1980; FI: wa-ghayruhu. Price: 25; C: sufism.
(book 88) al-Taʿlīq; a part (juzʾ) of an unidentified work by A: Muḥammad
b. Yaḥyā whose identity is unclear. FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 19.
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(book 89) Akhbār Faṣīḥ al-kalām; No such title is identifiable, but this is
clearly one of the works referring to Faṣīḥ al-kalām by Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā
Thaʿlab (d. 291/904). On similar works cf. Ashrafīya, nos 966 and 1328b;
Price: 17.25; C: lexicography. (cf. book 68, 98b)
Pr
(book 90) Kitāb ṭibb; not identifiable; FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 22; C: medicine.
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(book 91) Mawāʿiẓ; not identifiable; FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 21; C: sermons/
paraenesis.
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(book 92) Risālat al-Fayyūmīya; FI: wa-ghayruhu; The missing article in
‘risāla’ is probably a slip of the pen and the correct title is more likely al-Risāla
al-Fayyūmīya. Haarmann, Library, 332 suggests that these are the glosses of
A: Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Fayyūmī (d. after 770/1368) on al-Rāfiʿī’s commentary on al-Wajīz by al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111; cf. book 192); Price: 14.5;
C: fiqh – shāfiʿī.
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(book 93) al-Muwaṭṭaʾ; A part of (juzʾ min) the ḥadīth collection by A: Mālik
b. Anas (d. 179/796); Price: 12; C: ḥadīth.
(book 94) Dīwān; not identifiable; FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 11.5; C: poetry.
The next entry juzʾayn min al-Qurʾān (two parts of the Koran) does not
carry a price and is crossed out. This is most likely the item that we find
below (cf. book 123).
(book 95) Tisʿat kutub; Here nine incomplete books (kharm) are sold as one
lot and the sale booklet gives no indication as to their authors, titles or content.
The standard term for incomplete books is makhrūm (pl. makhārīm), as, for
instance, used in Ashrafīya, no. 339. The form used here is also attested in
book 148, 212, 213, 266. Price: 19.
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(book 96) Thalāthat kutub; As in the previous entry, several (most likely
incomplete) books are sold in bulk. The term ‘thamāniya’ (eight) is crossed
out, because the writer first wrote out the price in full and then remembered
that he was using Arabic documentary numerals. He thus crossed out the term
and duly added the number in its correct form below. Price: 8.
(obj10) qushsha: small pieces of furniture (al-Zabīdī, Tāj al-ʿarūs, XVII, 333),
Price: 23.25.
(book 97) Dīwān Ibn Nubāta; Price: 10; C: poetry. (cf. book 58)
(book 98a) Majmūʿ; not identifiable multiple-text (or composite) manuscript.
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(book 98b) Faṣīḥ; A: Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā Thaʿlab (d. 291/904); Ashrafīya,
no. 1302a; FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 10.5; C: lexicography. (cf. book 68, 89)
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(book 99a) Kitāb al-taʿabbud; The only known book with this title is the one
by Isḥāq b. Ibrāhīm Ibn Wahb (fl. 4th/10th century). This work has been lost
and is only known from a reference to it in his al-Burhān fī wujūh al-bayān.
The likelihood that such an obscure book was the one sitting on the shelves of
Burhān al-Dīn is minimal.
U
(book 99b) al-Adab; not identifiable; FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 11.5.
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(book 100) al-Badr al-munīr fī al-taʿbīr; A: Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān
al-Maqdisī (d. 697/1298); al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh al-islām, 691–700, p. 317;
FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 11; C: oneiromancy.
Ed
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(book 101) al-Ḥadīth; The term (ajzāʾ min) most likely does not refer to
‘parts of ’ one specific ḥadīth collection such as that by al-Bukhārī, as the
name would have been specified (as we see in book 1, 32, 47, 79, 94). More
likely, we are dealing here with brief post-canonical ḥadīth collections that
often carry the ‘title’ ‘juzʾ ’, of which there are many in the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī
collection (Hirschler, Monument). This entry is followed by the phrase ‘min
yadd Junayd’ (‘from the hand of Junayd’). Haarmann, Library, 331 assumes
that this refers to an autograph, but this would have certainly been described
with the phrase ‘bi-yadd’ or ‘bi-khaṭṭ’. The following ‘entry’ in this line ‘min
jihat al-Shaykh ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Ibn al-Naqīb 20’ (our Buyer 6) refers to a monetary transaction (Ibn al-Naqīb paid 20 dirhams of this buyer’s sum total)
and it is most likely that the phrase ‘min yadd Junayd’ refers to a monetary
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transaction as well. Another reason why it is unlikely that this phrase is part of
the proper entry is the way the writer positioned the price: in general, prices
are put beneath the middle of the title, slightly to the right. Here, however, if
we take the phrase ‘min yadd Junayd’ to be part of the title as well the price is
positioned unusually far to the right. Price: 33.5; C: ḥadīth.
BUYER 12 Shams al-Dīn al-Khalīlī [ll. 14–18], sum total: 252 dirhams. Listed
in #793 (Payor 35), #812 (Payor 5) and #968 (Debtor 12).
U
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This is the Jerusalemite scholar Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. ʿUthmān
(d. 805/1402) (al-Sakhāwī, Ḍawʾ, II, 140 (‘known as Ibn Uthmān
al-Khalīlī’); al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, II, 164; misread in Haarmann,
Library, 329 as ‘Shams al-Dīn al-Ḥalabī’ as in the black and white reproductions Haarmann used, the second yāʾ is not visible; #793 has him as
‘Ibn al-Khalīlī’; #812 has him as ‘Shams al-Dīn Ibn al-Khalīlī’). The addition ‘wa-al-Ustadār’ (‘and the major-domo’) is entirely unclear to us. It
is unlikely that this is a second buyer of the same lot, especially as no
major-domos appear in any of the other accounts and lists linked to the
sale of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate.
Ed
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(book 102) al-Wasīṭ; There are numerous ‘intermediate’ books. Considering
the usage in contemporary sources and the holdings of the Ashrafīya Library
(Ashrafīya, nos 1373, 1376, 1397), the two most evident candidates are the
works by: (1) al-Ghazālī (al-Wasīṭ fī al-madhhab, ed. A. Ibrāhīm, Cairo:
Dār al-Salām 1997) and (2) al-Wāḥidī (al-Wasīṭ fī tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-majīd,
ed. ʿĀ ʿAbd al-Mawjūd, Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmīya 1994). Price: 26.25.
(Cf. book 127, 142b, 265b.)
(obj11) farjīya bayḍāʾ: white overgarment (Dozy, Dictionnaire détaillé,
327–34), Price: 30.5.
(obj12) jubba bayḍāʾ: white long robe, Price: 26.75.
(book 103) Sīrat al-Iskandarī; The phrasing of the title makes it unlikely that
this is a version of the Sīrat al-Iskandar on Alexander the Great. It is impossible to identify who ‘al-Iskandarī’ is. Price: 32.5.
(book 104) ʿAwārif al-maʿārif; A: Shihāb al-Dīn ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī
(d. 632/1234); Ashrafīya, no. 723; Price: 70; C: sufism. (Cf. book 106.)
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(book 105) al-Maṣābīḥ; most likely A: al-Ḥusayn b. Masʿūd (Ibn) al-Farrāʾ
al-Baghawī (d. c. 516/1122); Ashrafīya, no. 917; Price: 66; C: ḥadīth.
BUYER 13 Ghars al-Dīn Khalīl b. Makkī [ll. 19-31], sum total: 510.5
dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 10 & Payor 32), #812 (Payor 2) and #968
(Debtor 13).
es
s
This is most likely Ghars al-Dīn Khalīl Ibn ʿAskar, who plays a prominent
role in the Ḥaram al-sharīf documents between the years 790/1388 and
796/1393 as representative of the bayt al-māl in settling estates (Müller,
Kadi und seine Zeugen, 557). ‘Ibn ʿAskar’ is clearly evident in account
sheet #812.
Pr
(book 106) ʿAwārif al-maʿārif; A: Shihāb al-Dīn ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī
(d. 632/1234); Ashrafīya, no. 723; Price: 70; C: sufism. (Cf. book 104.)
ve
rs
ity
(book 107) al-Sharīshī; Haarmann, Library, 333 identifies this as the
commentary of Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Muʾmin al-Sharīshī (d. 619/1222) on the
Maqāmāt, but the basis for this identification is entirely unclear. Price: 50.
h
U
ni
(book 108) Muṣḥaf sharīf; a complete copy of the Koran; Price: 72;
C: Koran – text.
nb
u
rg
(book 109) Jawāhir al-Qurʾān; A: al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111); Ashrafīya,
no. 290; Price: 18.25; C: Koran – study of.
Ed
i
(book 110) al-Musalsalāt; numerous possibilities and thus not identifiable;
Price: 12; C: ḥadīth.
(book 111) Siyar al-salaf; A: Ismāʿīl b. Muḥammad al-Iṣfahānī (d. 535/
1140–1); Ashrafīya, no. 548; Price: 20; C: history – biography/ḥadīth.
(book 112) al-Mujālasāt; Haarmann, Library, 330 ascribes this title to
Thaʿlab (d. 291/904), which is, however, only one of several possibilities.
Price: 16.
(book 113) Sharḥ al-Alfīya; The main work could be the Alfīya by Yaḥyā
b. ʿAbd al-Nūr Ibn Muʿṭī (d. 628/1231; Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, Fihrist, no. 492),
but judging from its popularity in the Damascene Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī endowment one hundred years later this is more likely the work by Muḥammad
b. ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Mālik (d. 672/1274) (Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, Fihrist, nos 18, 149,
238
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owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
255, 386). If that is the case this could be the commentary by the Jerusalemite
scholar Aḥmad b. Ḥasan Ibn al-Raṣṣāṣ (d. 790/1388; al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns
al-jalīl, II, 218). Price: 17.5; C: grammar.
(book 114) Sharḥayn li-l-Ḥājibīya; two unidentifiable commentaries; The
main work is arguably the Kāfiya by ʿUthmān b. ʿUmar al-Mālikī Ibn al-Ḥājib
(d. 646/1249; cf. book 39). Price: 24; C: grammar.
es
s
(book 115a) al-Muntakhab; 115a and 115b are most likely separate titles as a
combination of these two keywords is highly unlikely. We have both titles as
separate works by one author, namely A: Muḥammad b. ʿUmar Fakhr al-Dīn
al-Rāzī Ibn al-Khaṭīb (d. 606/1210), who is also suggested by Haarmann,
Library, 331. On the Muntakhab see Sarrio Cucarella, Muslim-Christian
Polemics, 2015, 274. C: uṣūl al-fiqh.
ity
Pr
(book 115b) wa-al-Maḥṣūl; A: Muḥammad b. ʿUmar Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī Ibn
al-Khaṭīb (d. 606/1210); Ashrafīya, no. 937; Price: 12; C: uṣūl al-fiqh.
U
ni
ve
rs
(book 116) al-Zuhd wa-al-raqāʾiq; One of the books on asceticism and piety
with this title, such as Kitāb al-zuhd wa-al-raqāʾiq, arguably by A: Abd Allāh
b. al-Mubārak (d. 181/797, ed. Ḥ. al-Aʿẓamī, Beirut 1966), who is suggested by
Haarmann, Library, 332. Price: 16; C: asceticism. (Cf. book 5.)
Ed
i
nb
u
rg
h
(book 117) Tanbīh al-ghāfilīn; There are several possibilities. Haarmann,
Library, 332 proposed A: Abū al-Layth Naṣr b. Muḥammad al-Samarqandī
(d. between 373/983–4 and 393/1002–3) and his identification is indeed
highly likely as contemporary sources (al-Dhahabī, Tārīkh al-islām) always
mean this work when they use the title ‘Tanbīh al-ghāfilīn’. Price: 18.25;
C: sermons/paraenesis.
(book 118) al-Ulūf wa-al-arwāḥ; very tentative reading and thus not identifiable; Price: 16.25.
(book 119) Sirāj al-mulūk; A: Muḥammad b. al-Walīd al-Ṭurṭūshī
(d. 520/1126?); Ashrafīya, no. 559; Price: 26; C: political thought – mirror for
princes. (cf. book 153)
(book 120) Khuṭab; A: Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200); most likely his al-Laʾālī
fī khuṭab al-mawāʿiẓ (Kashf al-ẓunūn, II, 1534); Price: 12.5; C: sermons/
paraenesis.
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239
(book 121) Tajrīd al-ṣiḥāḥ; A: Razīn b. Muʿāwiya al-ʿAbdarī (d. 524/1129 or
535/1140); Price: 15.5; C: ḥadīth. (cf. book 50, 122b)
(book 122a) al-Muḥarrar; The keywords ‘muḥarrar’ and ‘tajrīd’ certainly
refer to two different titles, here by A: ʿAbd al-Karīm b. Muḥammad al-Rāfiʿī
(d. 623/1226); C: fiqh – shāfiʿī. (cf. book 44)
(book 122b) al-Tajrīd; most likely A: Razīn b. Muʿāwiya al-ʿAbdarī
(d. 524/1129 or 535/1140); Price: 13.5; C: ḥadīth. (cf. book 50, 121, 258a)
(book 123) al-Qurʾān; two parts of (juzʾayn min) the Koran; Price: 7.5;
C: Koran – text.
es
s
(book 124) al-Qurʾān; two halves of (niṣfayn min) the complete text (cf. book
139); Price: 10; C: Koran – text.
ity
Pr
(book 125) Muṣḥaf; complete (kāmil) Koran divided into quarters (arbāʿ);
Price: 8.25; C: Koran – text.
ve
rs
(book 126) al-Qurʾān; two quarters (rubʿayn) of the full text (cf. book 19, 35,
130, 190); Price: 2; C: Koran – text.
ni
(obj13) bisāṭ rūmī: Anatolian carpet, Price: 36.5.
U
(obj14) ṭarrāḥa: Ottoman (al-Bustānī, Muḥīṭ, 547), Price: 9.5.
rg
h
(obj15) marāwiḥ: fans, Price: 0.5.
nb
u
(obj16) qabqāb: wooden clogs (Dozy, Dictionnaire détaillé, 347–9), Price:
3.75.
Ed
i
(obj17) tannūr hayākil: oven (Haarmann, Library, 330: consisting of different parts) (cf. obj30), Price: 2.75.
BUYER 14 his maternal uncle Badr al-Dīn Ḥasan b. Mūsā Ibn Makkī
[ll. 32–6], sum total: 180.25 dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 11 & Payor 39,
Badr al-Dīn Makkī), #812 (Payor 9) and #968 (Debtor 14).
Jerusalemite shāfiʿī scholar and judge (d. 817/1414–15; al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns
al-jalīl, II, 130 and al-Sakhāwī, Ḍawʾ, III, 129/30); probably identifiable
as ‘al-Qāḍī Badr al-Dīn Ḥasan’, who appears twice in documents from the
Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus as representative of the wakīl bayt al-māl (#380
and #772a, cf. Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 410).
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|
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
(book 127) al-Wasīṭ; Price: 38. (cf. book 102, 142b, 265b)
(book 128) al-Qurʾān; six parts of (sittat ajzāʾ min) the Koran; Price: 14.5;
C: Koran – text.
(book 129) al-Qurʾān; eight parts of (thamānīyat ajzāʾ min) the Koran; Price:
17; C: Koran – text.
(obj18) bisāṭ: carpet, Price: 50.
(obj19) khizāna: (book-?)case, Price: 41.
(obj20) tanjīr: cooking pot; The most likely reading here is ṭanjīr with the
initial emphatic ‘ṭ’ written as a ‘t’, Price: 15.5.
Pr
es
s
(book 130) al-Qurʾān; two quarters (rubʿayn sharīfayn) of the full text
(cf. book 19, 35, 126, 190). Price: 4.25; C: Koran – text.
rs
ity
#180a left = page 4 (Plate I.3)
ni
ve
BUYER 15 Muḥammad al-Andalusī [ll. 1–2], sum total: 36.5 dirhams. Listed
in #793 (Debtor 27) and #968 (Debtor 52).
Ed
i
nb
u
rg
h
U
Not identifiable, except as ‘the Andalusian’ and at this point being resident in the Manjakīya Madrasa in Jerusalem (our reading of ‘bi-madrasat
Ibn Manjā’). He is the only buyer for which a place of residence is given.
This was most likely a scholar who was passing through Jerusalem or had
only arrived at the madrasa founded by Sayf al-Dīn Manjak (d. 776/1375)
shortly before the sale. Cf. Burgoyne, Mamluk Jerusalem, 384–98 and
al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, II, 37.
(book 131) Muṣḥaf sharīf; a complete copy of the Koran; Price: 36.5;
C: Koran – text.
BUYER 16 Burhān al-Dīn al-Ṣallatī [ll. 3–5], sum total: 19.5 dirhams. Listed
in #793 (Debtor 28 & Payor 15), #800 (Payor 12), #812 (Payor 37) and #968
(Debtor 53).
not identified
(book 132) Dīwān al-Mutanabbī; FI: wa-ghayruhu; A: Aḥmad al-Mutanabbī
(d. 354/955); Ashrafīya, no. 397; Price: 9.75; C: poetry.
th e sal e book l et
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241
(book 133) Dīwān al-Mutanabbī wa-Yatīmat al-Dahr; A: Aḥmad
al-Mutanabbī (d. 354/955) and al-Thaʿālibī (d. 429/1038); Ashrafīya,
no. 1388; Price: 9.75; C: poetry.
BUYER 17 ʿUmar al-Zajjāj [ll. 6–7], sum total: 15 dirhams. Listed in #793
(Payor 23), #800 (Payor 23), #812 (Payor 45) and #968 (Debtor 54).
not identified
(book 134) al-Tabṣira; A: Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200); Price: 15; C: sermons/
paraenesis. (cf. book 75)
ity
Pr
es
s
BUYER 18 Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm b. Aḥmad al-Maqdisī al-Shāfiʿī Ibn Abī
Maḥmūd [ll. 8–10], sum total: 66.75 dirhams. Listed in #793 (Payor 5), #800
(Payor 4), #812 (Payor 28) and #968 (Debtor 55).
rs
Jerusalemite scholar (d. 821/1418–19; al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, II, 168).
ni
ve
(book 135) al-Tadhkira; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn, I, 391–3)
and thus not identifiable; FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 22. (cf. book 32)
rg
h
U
(book 136) al-Ṣafwa; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn, II, 1,079–80)
and thus not identifiable; FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 18.25.
Ed
i
nb
u
(book 137) al-Fatḥ; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn, II, 1,231–6) and
thus not identifiable; Price: 26.5.
BUYER 19 Shams al-Dīn Ibn al-Quṭb [ll. 11–14], sum total: 142 dirhams
[138 w-z-n]. Listed in #793 (Payor 4), #800 (Payor 8), #812 (Payor 27) and
#968 (Debtor 56).
not identified
(book 138) al-Akhṭār wa-al-miḥan; tentative reading, not identified;
Price: 23.
(obj21) aqlām: pens, Price: 8.
(obj22) bisāṭ: carpet, Price: 75.
(obj23) sudda khashab: wooden bench, Price: 36.
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|
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
BUYER 20 al-Yatīm Maḥmūd Jamāl al-Dīn Kamāl [ll. 15–19], sum total:
56.5 dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 29) and #968 (Debtor 57).
Pr
es
s
Burhān al-Dīn’s son Kamāl, a minor. He is known to us from the Ḥaram
al-sharīf documents #106, #115 and #118, where his guardian, Shihāb
al-Dīn, acknowledges receipt of monthly maintenance payments for
under-age heirs (see Appendix 2). In contrast to most other buyers Kamāl
does not settle his dues in cash (as we find for many buyers in account sheet
#812). Instead the sum is (as we see in document #106) deducted later from
the monthly maintenance payments that the judge’s trustee, al-Adhraʿī,
paid his guardian. Document #106 deducts the sum of 56 dirhams
and lists some of the objects that we see here (liḥāf, bisāṭ and mikhadda).
As Kamāl was a minor this sale must have been conducted on his behalf by
Shihāb al-Dīn, whom we find further down as Buyer 24.
U
ni
ve
rs
ity
(book 139) Khatma; We take the term niṣf to refer to one half of the full text of
the Koran. Niṣf can also refer to one half of a juzʾ, a thirtieth part of the full text.
However, this would mean that here one half of a thirtieth, that is a sixtieth, is sold
for 10 dirhams. This would give a potential, and unlikely, price of 600 dirhams
if the copy had been complete. Price: 10; C: Koran – text. (cf. book 124)
rg
h
(obj24) liḥāf yamanī: Yemeni cloth, Price: 20.
nb
u
(obj25) bisāṭ ṣaghīr: small carpet, Price: 15.
(obj26) mikhadda zarqā: blue cushion, Price: 10.
Ed
i
(obj27) kursī khashab: wooden stool (cf. obj54, obj75), Price: 1.5.
BUYER 21 Shams al-Dīn al-Khaṭīb [ll. 20–2], sum total: 12.25 dirhams. Listed
in #793 (Debtor 30, Ibn al-Khaṭīb), #800 (Payor 36) and #968 (Debtor 58).
not identified
(book 140) Kitābayn ṭibb; Price: 12.25; C: medicine.
BUYER 22 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. al-Zayn [ll. 23–5], sum total: 14.5 dirhams.
Listed in #793 (Debtor 31) and #968 (Debtor 59).
not identified
th e sal e book l et
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243
(book 141) al-Sīra; This is most likely an incomplete (min) biography of
the Prophet. There are several possibilities, but considering what books the
Ashrafīya cataloguer entered as ‘sīra’, the most likely authors are: (1) Ibn
Isḥāq (d. 150/767)/Ibn Hishām (d. 218/833 or 213/828) (Ashrafīya, no. 547)
and (2) Aḥmad Ibn Fāris (d. 395/1004) (Ashrafīya, no. 1222c); Price: 14.5;
C: history – biography of the Prophet. (cf. book 80, 211, 240a)
BUYER 23 Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm b. Shīdha [ll. 26–8], sum
total: 10.25 dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 32, Shihāb al-Dīn Shīdha), #800
(Payor 32) and #968 (Debtor 60).
es
s
not identified
h
U
ni
ve
rs
ity
Pr
(book 142a) al-Tahdhīb; The two title terms in 142a and 142b would not
be identifiable on their own on account of numerous book titles containing
them. However, extracts from these two works (min) are combined here
in one single book so that they most likely shared a theme. In this case, it is
highly likely that the first refers to Tahdhīb al-asmāʾ wa-al-lughāt by A: Yaḥyā
b. Sharaf al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277), an author who has at least one other work
in this list (book 7, in addition to the other likely entries book 11, 43, 197 and
231). C: fiqh – shāfiʿī.
Ed
i
nb
u
rg
(book 142b) al-Wasīṭ; most likely A: al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), author of
al-Wasīṭ fī al-madhhab (Ashrafīya, no. 1376). Al-Nawawī repeatedly refers
to al-Ghazālī’s al-Wasīṭ. Price: 10.25; C: fiqh – shāfiʿī. (cf. book 102, 127,
265b)
BUYER 24 al-Waṣī Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Aḥmad [ll. 29–31], sum total:
117.16 dirhams. Listed in #793 (Payor 21), #800 (Payor 19), #812 (Payor 43)
and #968 (Debtor 61).
To identify this person as the legal guardian of Burhān al-Dīn’s son
Kamāl (see above Buyer 20) was a long process. Firstly, Shihāb al-Dīn is
mentioned in other Ḥaram al-sharīf documents (#106, #115 and #118),
where he acknowledges receipt of the monthly maintenance payments
for Kamāl (see Appendix 2). In two of these documents (#115 and #118
[archival note]) he is also called ‘Ibn al-Bawwāb’. This addition was crucial
244
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owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
for identifying him and matching him in the documentary network in
the next step: such an ‘Ibn al-Bawwāb’ (without any further addition) is
listed in the documents #793, #800 and #812, whom we could initially not
identify. The sums this individual owed and paid in these accounts match
in turn the sum that the individual called ‘al-Waṣī’ (guardian) had to pay
according to the sale booklet. There is thus no doubt that this ‘guardian’ is
Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Aḥmad Ibn al-Bawwāb.
(book 143) al-Witrīya; A: Mālik b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Māliqī
(d. 672/1273–4; Baghdādī, Hadīyat al-ʿārifīn, II, 1); Price: 8.75; C: Prophet
Muḥammad – devotional.
Pr
es
s
(book 144) Zād al-musāfir; several possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn, II, 946–7)
and thus not identifiable; Price: 4.
ity
(obj28) sayf: sword, Price: 80.
rs
(obj29) kisāʾ ṣaʿīdī: Upper Egyptian garment, Price: 21.
ve
(obj30) haykal, ghayruhu: part of an oven (?), other (cf. obj17), Price: 2.16.
U
ni
(obj31) dawāt: writing case, Price: 1.25.
nb
u
rg
h
BUYER 25 ʿAlī b. Raslān [ll. 32–4], sum total: 70 dirhams. Listed in #793
(Payor 28), #800 (Payor 28), #812 (Payor 50) and #968 (Debtor 62).
not identified
Ed
i
(book 145) Muṣḥaf; a complete copy of the Koran; Price: 18; C: Koran –
text.
(obj32) takht khashab: wooden box, Price: 52.
BUYER 26 Jamāl al-Dīn Yūsuf al-Naqīb [ll. 35–7], sum total: 16 dirhams.
Listed in #968 (Debtor 63, Yūsuf Ibn al-Naqīb).
Document #968 calls him ‘Yūsuf Ibn al-Naqīb’ and this is most likely
Yūsuf Ibn al-Naqīb al-Ḥanafī, a notary witness who repeatedly appears
in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus (Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 309, 323
and 574/5).
th e sal e book l et
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245
(book 146) Kashf ʿulūm al-ākhira; arguably the al-Durra al-fākhira fī kashf
ʿulūm al-ākhira by A: al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111; tr. and ed. L. Gautier, La perle
précieuse: traité d’eschatologie musulmane, Geneva 1878); Price: 9.5; C: theology.
(obj33) dawāt khashab: wooden writing case, Price: 6.5.
BUYER 27 Shams al-Dīn al-Muwaqqiʿ [ll. 38–40], sum total: 48 dirhams.
Listed in #968 (Debtor 64).
not identified; This was most likely a court secretary, for his role
see Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 268–80.
es
s
(obj34) ḥulla sābigha: wide garment, Price: 40.
(obj35a) fanārayn: two lanterns.
U
ni
#180b right = page 5 (Plate I.4)
ve
rs
ity
Pr
(obj35b) wa-jaʿba khashab: a wooden case (Dozy, Supplément, I, 197; in
Ḥaram al-sharīf document #772a we find a leather jaʿba in the sense of a
quiver), Price: 8.
rg
h
BUYER 28 Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Naṣr Allāh al-Shāfiʿī al-Karakī [ll. 1–2],
sum total: 50 dirhams.17 Listed in #793 (Debtor 33) and #968 (Debtor 65).
Ed
i
nb
u
Jerusalemite deputy judge (d. c. 830/1426; al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl,
II, 168).
(obj36) farjīya zarqā: blue overgarment (Dozy, Dictionnaire détaillé,
327–34), Price: 50.
BUYER 29 Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Kutubī [ll. 3–5], sum total: 6.75 dirhams.
Listed in #793 (Payor 43), #812 (Payor 13) and #968 (Debtor 66).
not identified
(obj37a) thalāthat maqālim: 3 penboxes.
17
The sum total was originally 150 dirhams, but was subsequently corrected to 50. We still find the
sum of 150 dirhams in his entry in #968.
246
|
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
(obj37b) bayt kutub; bookcase.
(obj37c) sakākīn: penknives, Price: 6.75.
BUYER 30 Shams al-Dīn al-Tūnisī [ll. 6–7], sum total: 3.5 dirhams. Listed in
#968 (Debtor 67).
not identified
(book 147) Kitāb; incomplete (kharm, cf. book 95) book; Price: 3.5.
BUYER 31 al-Nāṣirī al-Dallāl [ll. 8–10], sum total: 24.3 dirhams. Listed in
#793 (Debtor 34), #800 (Payor 40) and #968 (Debtor 68).
es
s
not identified
Pr
(obj38) jubba ṭirḥ: long robe, Price: 19.
ve
rs
ity
(obj39) zawjayn qabāqīb: 2 pairs of wooden clogs (Dozy, Dictionnaire
détaillé, 347–9), Price: 5.3.
U
ni
BUYER 32 Shihāb al-Dīn Saḥlūl [ll. 11–13], sum total: 28 dirhams. Listed in
#793 (Debtor 35, Ibn Saḥlūl) and #968 (Debtor 69, Ibn Saḥlūl).
rg
h
not identified
nb
u
(book 148) al-Qurʾān; parts of (ajzāʾ min) the Koran; Price: 28; C: Koran – text.
Ed
i
BUYER 33 Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm b. al-Ḥasan al-Shāfiʿī al-ʿArrābī [ll. 14–16],
sum total: 12 dirhams. Listed in #968 (Debtor 70).
Jerusalemite deputy judge (d. 841/1437–8; al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl,
II, 172; al-Sakhāwī, Ḍawʾ, I, 40) who also taught in the Ṣalāḥīya Madrasa.
(book 149) al-Tafsīr; part of ( juzʾ min) a Koran commentary; Price: 12;
C: Koran – study of.
BUYER 34 Ghars al-Dīn Khalīl b. al-Duwayk [ll. 17–19], sum total: 30
dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 36, Khalīl al-Duwayk) and #968 (Debtor 71).
not identified
(obj40) kisāʾ ṣūf: woollen garment, Price: 30.
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247
BUYER 35 Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm al-Ḥawrānī [ll. 20–2], sum total: 10
dirhams. Listed in #793 (Payor 44), #812 (Payor 14) and #968 (Debtor 72).
not identified
(obj41) ʿubwatayn zajjāj: two glass jars (cf. obj86), Price: 10.
BUYER 36 ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm al-Shāfiʿī al-Rabbāwīya [ll. 23–5], sum total: 5.75
dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 37 & Payor 46, al-Rabbāwī), #812 (Payor 17)
and #968 (Debtor 73.
judge (d. 841/1437; al-Sakhāwī, Ḍawʾ, V, 157–8).
es
s
(obj42) labbād: felt cloth, Price: 5.75.
ity
Pr
BUYER 37 Yūsuf al-Jītī [ll. 26–7], sum total: 36 dirhams. Listed in #793
(Payor 22), #800 (Payor 21), #812 (Payor 44) and #968 (Debtor 74).
ve
rs
not identified
ni
(obj43) khizānat khashab: wooden (book-?)case, Price: 36.
Ed
i
not identified
nb
u
rg
h
U
BUYER 38 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Iskandarī [ll. 28–30], sum total: 10
dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 38) and #968 (Debtor 75, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān
al-Iskandānī).
(obj44a) ṭāsa ṣughrā: small bowl (Dozy, Supplément, II, 67).
(obj44b) dast ṣaghīr: small dish (Dozy, Supplément, I, 441), Price: 5.
BUYER 39 Muḥammad al-Sakākīnī [ll. 31–3], sum total: 8.875 dirhams.
Listed in #793 (Debtor 39) and #968 (Debtor 76).
not identified
(obj45) saqraq nuḥās: copper vessel (saqraq in the meaning of vessel is, for
instance, mentioned in Abū Shāma, Rawḍatayn, II, 280/1), Price: 6.375.
(cf. obj47, obj73, obj74)
(obj46a) silsila: chain.
248
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owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
(obj46b) ḥajar: (sharpening?) stone.
(obj46c) mashṭ: comb, Price: 2.5.
BUYER 40 Ḥusayn al-Ḥalabī [ll. 34–6], sum total: 11.5 dirhams. Listed in
#793 (Payor 37), #812 (Payor 7) and #968 (Debtor 77).
not identified
(obj47) saqraq nuḥās: copper vessel [P: 8.125]. (cf. obj45)
(obj48a) saṭl: bathing bucket.
es
s
(obj48b) shamʿadān, ghayruhu: candlestick, other, Price: 3.375.
Pr
#532a left = page 6 (Plate I.5)
ve
rs
ity
BUYER 41 Fakhr al-Dīn Īyās [ll. 1–3], sum total: 296.5 dirhams. Listed
in #793 (Payors 6 and 33), #800 (Payor 24), #812 (Payor 3) and #968
(Debtor 15).
Ed
i
nb
u
rg
h
U
ni
The large amount this buyer spends indicates a wealthy individual. This
might be the officer Fakhr al-Dīn Iyās, who endowed the primary school
in Jerusalem in the late eighth/fourteenth century (Richards, Primary
Education) where Burhān al-Dīn taught. We only know of this primary
school, and its patron, from the two Ḥaram al-sharīf documents linked to
Burhān al-Dīn (#003 and #049).
(book 150) Sharḥ Muslim; unidentified commentary on the ḥadīth compendium Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim by Muslim al-Nīsābūrī (d. 261/875); Price: 166;
C: ḥadīth – commentary. (cf. book 268)
(book 151) Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim; A: Muslim al-Nīsābūrī (d. 261/875); Price: 110;
C: ḥadīth. (cf. book 235)
(book 152) al-ʿAzīzī; not identified; Price: 10.5; C: adab. (cf. book 270b)
(book 153) Sirāj al-mulūk; first part of (al-awwal min); A: Muḥammad
b. al-Walīd al-Ṭurṭūshī (d. 520/1126?); Ashrafīya, no. 559; Price: 10; C:
political thought – mirror for princes. (cf. book 119)
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249
BUYER 42 Shihāb al-Dīn al-Sarāʾī [ll. 4–6], sum total: 69.5 dirhams. Listed
in #793 (Payor 20), #800 (Payor 18), #812 (Payor 42) and #968 (Debtor 16).
not identified; mentioned in account sheet #812 as ‘Shihāb al-Dīn
b. al-Sarāʾī’.
(book 154) Majmūʿ; large (kabīr) composite or multiple-text manuscript;
Price: 26.
(book 155) Majmūʿ; composite or multiple-text manuscript; Price: 16.
es
s
(book 156) al-Kashshāf; first part (al-awwal min); possibly the exegetical
tafsīr-work by Maḥmūd b. ʿUmar al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144); Ashrafīya,
no. 1434; Price: 27.5; C: Koran – exegesis.
ity
Pr
BUYER 43 Junayd al-Kaylānī [ll. 7–9], sum total: 44 dirhams. Listed in #793
(Payor 18), #800 (Payor 16), #812 (Payor 40) and #968 (Debtor 17).
ve
rs
not identified
ni
(book 157) Thamarat al-ikhlāṣ; not identified; Price: 11.
h
U
(book 158) Muḥyī al-qulūb; not identified; Price: 33.
Ed
i
nb
u
rg
BUYER 44 Zayn al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAlī Ibn al-Naqīb al-Ḥanafī
[ll. 10–12], sum total: 78 dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 12, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān
al-Naqīb), #800 (Payor 35) and #968 (Debtor 18).
Notary witness in Jerusalem between 788/1386 and 797/1394 (Müller,
Kadi und seine Zeugen, 271–2, 323); brother of Buyer 45. The scribe
of the sale booklet notes that eight dirhams are paid by a third person
(‘rasūl’?) so that the remaining sum total for this buyer was 70 dirhams.
(book 159) Manāqib al-abrār; arguably Manāqib al-abrār min maḥāsin
al-akhyār by A: al-Ḥusayn b. Naṣr Ibn Khamīs al-Shāfiʿī (d. 552/1157);
Ashrafīya, no. 928; Price: 33; C: sufism – biographies.
(book 160) Subul al-khayrāt; A: Yaḥyā b. Najāḥ al-Qurṭubī (d. 422/1031);
Kashf al-ẓunūn, II, 978; Price: 22; C: sermons/paraenesis.
250
|
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
(book 161) al-Futūḥāt; Haarmann, Library, 331 suggests al-Futūḥāt
al-Makkīya fī asrār al-mālikīya wa-al-mulkīya by A: Muḥammad b. ʿAlī Ibn
al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240). On account of the numerous ṣūfī works in this inventory this is possible, but clearly this must be an abridgement or incomplete
copy of the massive complete work. Price: 23; C: sufism.
BUYER 45 al-Shaykh Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. ʿAlī Ibn al-Naqīb, his brother
[ll. 13–17], sum total: 101 dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 13 & Payor 29),
#800 (Payor 31, Naqīb), #812 (Payor 51) and #968 (Debtor 19).
es
s
Jerusalemite scholar (d. 816/1413; al-Sakhāwī, Ḍawʾ, II, 32); brother of
Buyer 44.
ity
Pr
(book 162) Manṭiq; That this ‘keyword’ has no article indicates that either
the scribe of the sale booklet was not able to identify the text or that this was a
text without title (such as a notebook). FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 11.5; C: logic.
U
ni
ve
rs
(book 163) al-Mashāriq; The two strongest contenders for this keyword are
Mashāriq al-anwār ʿalā ṣiḥāḥ al-āthār by al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ b. Mūsā (d. 544/1149)
and Mashāriq al-anwār al-nabawı̄ ya by al-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad al-Ṣaghānī
(d. 650/1252). FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 25; C: ḥadīth – study of.
rg
h
(book 164) Kitabayn two incomplete (kharm, cf. book 95) books; Price: 14.5.
nb
u
(book 165) Thalāthat kutub; three incomplete (kharm, cf. book 95) books;
Price: 11.
Ed
i
(book 166) Faṣīḥ; A: Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā Thaʿlab (d. 291/904); Price: 13.25;
C: grammar.
(obj49) thalāthat kumājāt: The reading is clearly كماجاتand this term refers
to ‘ash bread’ (Dozy, Supplément, II, 487). Even if the price fits, it seems rather
unlikely that ‘3 pieces of ash bread’ were on offer at this auction. Price: 0.75.
(book 167) Muṣḥaf; a complete copy of the Koran; Price: 25; C: Koran – text.
BUYER 46 Yūsuf b. Dhā al-Nūn [ll. 18–20], sum total: 100 dirhams. Listed
in #793 (Debtor 14) and #968 (Debtor 20).
not identified
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251
(book 168) Maṭlaʿ al-Nayyirayn; unidentified; Price: 26.
(book 169) al-Shifāʾ; A: al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ b. Mūsā al-Yaḥṣubī (d. 544/1149);
Ashrafīya, no. 577; Price: 74; C: Prophet Muḥammad – devotional. (cf. book
4, 230)
BUYER 47 al-Shaykh Ismāʿīl, wakīl al-zawja [ll. 21–33], sum total: 446.625
dirhams.18 Listed in #812 (Payor 23) and #968 (Debtor 21).
The identity of this proxy (wakīl) of Shīrīn (‘al-zawja’) is unknown.
Shīrīn most likely appointed him during the sensitive period when Burhān
al-Dīn’s estate was being settled (see Chapter 3).
es
s
(book 170) Tanbīh; Price: 20; C: sermons/paraenesis. (cf. book 33)
ity
Pr
(book 171) Majmūʿ; not identifiable multiple-text (or composite) manuscript; Price: 11.
ve
rs
(book 172) al-Muhadhdhab; numerous possibilities; Price: 9; arguably
C: fiqh – shāfiʿī. (cf. book 63)
U
ni
(book 173) Shuʿab al-īmān; A: al-Ḥusayn b. al-Ḥasan al-Ḥalīmī al-Shāfiʿī
(d. 403/1012–13); Price: 32; C: theology.
rg
h
(book 174) Kitāb fī al-ʿarūḍ; Price: 5; C: poetry – metrics.
nb
u
(book 175a) al-Azharī; unidentified.
Ed
i
(book 175b) al-Taysīr; numerous possibilities and thus not identifiable;
Price: 26.
(book 176) al-Mufaṣṣal fī al-naḥw; most likely A: Maḥmūd b. ʿUmar
al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144); Price: 7.5; C: grammar.
(book 177) Majmūʿ fī al-ḥadīth; most likely composite manuscript, Hirschler,
Monument; Price: 12; C: ḥadīth.
(book 178) Nasāʾim al-asḥār; most likely the Persian Nasāʾim al-asḥār
(ed. Urmawī, Tehran 1338/1959) by Naṣīr al-Dīn Kirmānī; Price: 15;
C: history – biographical dictionary (wazīrs).
18
The sum given in the sale booklet is 441.5 dirhams.
252
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owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
(book 179) Majmūʿ; Turkic (turkī) composite or multiple-text manuscript;
Price: 9.
(book 180) Muṣḥaf sharīf; a complete copy of the Koran; Price: 22;
C: Koran – text.
(book 181a) al-Ḥuṣrīya; A: ʿAlī b. ʿAbd al-Ghanī (d. 488/1095); Kashf
al-ẓunūn, II, 1337; C: Koran – recitation.
(book 181b) al-Alfīya; most likely A: Ibn Mālik (d. 672/1274); Price: 13.5;
C: grammar.
es
s
(book 182) Muṣḥaf sharīf; a complete copy of the Koran; Price: 7;
C: Koran – text.
(book 183) Juzʾ fī al-tārīkh; not identifiable; Price: 46.5; C: history.
rs
ity
Pr
(book 184) Ṭahārat al-qulūb wa-al-khuḍūʿ li-ʿallām al-ghuyūb; A: ʿAbdal-ʿAzīz al-Dīrīnī (d. 694/1295); ed. Miṣr: al-Jamālīya al-Ḥadītha; Price: 30;
C: sufism.
ni
ve
(book 185) Jawāhir al-kalām; first part of (al-awwal min); several possibilities and thus not identifiable; Price: 15.5.
rg
h
U
(book 186) al-Shihāb; most likely A: Muḥammad b. Salāma al-Quḍāʿī
(d. 454/1062); Ashrafīya, no. 576; Price: 5.75; C: ḥadīth.
Ed
i
nb
u
(book 187a) Safīna; unidentified oblong-shaped book bound at the top of
the folia with the lines running parallel to the spine (Hirschler, Ashrafīya
Library Catalogue, 62) arguably in the sense of an adab multiple-text manuscript (ʿAwwād, al-Safīna, 551); C: adab.
(book 187b) Zahr al-ḥadāʾiq; possibly ʿAlī b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Qayrawānī
(d. 539/1144), who authored a commentary on al-Raqāʾiq by ʿAbd Allāh b.
al-Mubārak (d. 181/797); Kaḥḥāla, Muʿjam, II, 466; Price: 13.5; C: sermons/
paraenesis.
(book 188) Qirāʾat Warsh; referring to the recitation according to ʿUthmān
b. Saʿīd Warsh (d. 197/812); Price: 12.25; C: Koran – recitation.
(book 189) al-Lumaʿ; A: Abū al-Fatḥ Ibn Jinnī (d. 392/1002); Ashrafīya,
no. 897; Price: 13; C: grammar. The scribe of the sale booklet erroneously
wrote ‘al-Majmūʿ li-Ibn’ then realised his mistake and crossed it out.
th e sal e book l et
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253
(book 190) Muṣḥaf; one quarter (rubʿ) of the full text (cf. book 19, 35, 126,
130); Price: 7.5; C: Koran – text.
(book 191) Karrāsayn; most likely two quires of one book or two different
books; on this term cf. Hirschler, Monument; Price: 5.75.
(obj50) khūja: cloth (Dozy, Dictionnaire détaillé, 127–31), Price: 61.
(obj51) qamīṣ: robe, Price: 17.25.
(obj52) mallūṭatayn, 2 overgarments (Dozy, Dictionnaire détaillé, 412–13;
Ḥallāq/Ṣabbāg̣, al-Muʿjam al-jāmiʿ, 210), Price: 20.
(obj53) lafḥa, ṭāqiya: scarf?, headgear, Price: 2.25.
rs
ity
#532b right = page 7 (Plate I.6)
Pr
(obj55) raff khashab: wooden shelf, Price: 2.375.
es
s
(obj54) kursī khashab: wooden stool, Price: 4. (cf. obj27)
U
ni
ve
BUYER 48 ʿAlī Ibn al-Ḥamawī [ll. 1–3], sum total: 20.25 dirhams. Listed in
#793 (Payor 16, ʿAlī al-Ḥamawī), #800 (Payor 14), #812 (Payor 38) and #968
(Debtor 22).
rg
h
not identified
Ed
i
nb
u
(book 192) al-Wajīz fī al-fiqh; possibly al-Wajīz fī fiqh madhhab al-imām
al-Shāfiʿī by al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111); Price: 9.5; C: fiqh – shāfiʿī. (cf. book
241)
(book 193) al-Mustajād; arguably a part ( juzʾ) of al-Mustajād min faʿlāt
al-ajwād by A: al-Muḥassin b. ʿAlī al-Tanūkhī (d. 384/994) (authorship disputed); Ashrafīya, no. 992; Price: 10.75; C: adab.
BUYER 49 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿUmar al-Qibābī al-Maqdisī al-Ḥanbalī
[ll. 4–6], sum total: 87.5 dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 15), #800 (Payor 38)
and #968 (Debtor 23).
Jerusalemite ḥadīth scholar (d. 838/1438; al-Sakhāwī, Ḍawʾ, IV, 113/4;
al-ʿUlaymī, al-Manhaj, V, 217/8).
254
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owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
(book 194) Maqāmāt; A: al-Qāsim b. ʿAlī al-Ḥarīrī (d. 516/1122); Price: 18;
C: adab. (cf. book 26, 267)
(book 195) Risālat al-Qushayrī; A: ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072);
Ashrafīya, no. 467; Price: 22; C: sufism.
(book 196a) Kitāb al-Ishārāt; numerous possibilities and thus not identifiable. (cf. book 200b)
(book 196b) Shajarat al-ʿaql; arguably the work by the secretary, adīb and
poet A: Sahl b. Hārūn b. Rāhawayh (d. 215/830); Ashrafīya, no. 640; Price:
20.5; C: adab?
U
ni
ve
rs
ity
Pr
es
s
(book 197) Sharḥ al-Tanbīh; On account of the strong shāfiʿī profile of this
book collection and the large number of commentaries on al-Tanbīh fī furūʿ
al-shāfiʿīya (Kashf al-ẓunūn, I, 489), this is most likely a commentary on
this work by Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī al-Shīrāzī (d. 476/1083). The most likely author
is thus A: Yaḥyā b. Sharaf al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277), who has at least one
work in this list (book 7, in addition to the other likely entries book 11, 43,
142a and 231) and who is suggested by Haarmann, Library, 332. Price: 27;
C: fiqh – shāfiʿī.
nb
u
rg
h
BUYER 50 Shams al-Dīn al-Azharī [ll. 7–11], sum total: 167.5 dirhams. Listed
in #793 (Payor 11), #800 (Payor 1), #812 (Payor 33) and #968 (Debtor 24).
not identified
Ed
i
(book 198) al-Waqf wa-al-ibtidāʾ; numerous possibilities (cf. book 261) and
thus not identifiable; Price: 24; C: Koran – recitation.
(book 199) Sharḥ al-Alfīya; most likely a commentary on the Alfīya by Ibn
Mālik (d. 672/1274, cf. book 113); Price: 14; C: grammar.
(book 200a) Shamāʾil al-Nabī; most likely A: Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā al-Tirmidhī
(d. 279/892); Shamāʾil al-Nabī, ed. M. Y. Faḥl, Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī
2008; C: Prophet Muḥammad – devotional.
(book 200b) al-Ishārāt; not identified, cf. book 196a; Price: 13.5.
(book 201a) al-Talfīq; not identified.
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255
(book 201b) al-Ḥalabīya; arguably a part of (juzʾ min) al-Risāla al-Ḥalabīya
fī al-ṭarīqa al-Muḥammadīya by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawzīya (d. 751/1350; Kashf
al-ẓunūn, I, 861); Price: 16.
(obj56) farjīya zarqā: blue overgarment (see obj36), Price: 100.
BUYER 51 al-Sharīf al-Maghribī [ll. 12–14], sum total: 23.5 dirhams. Listed in
#793 (Debtor 16, al-Zayn al-Maghribī), #812 (Payor 26) and #968 (Debtor 25).
not identified
(book 202) Manāfiʿ al-Qurʾān; numerous possibilities; Price: 15.
ity
Pr
es
s
(book 203) Kitāb Ḥikāyāt al-ṣāliḥīn; arguably Rawḍ al-rayaḥīn fī ḥikāyat
al-ṣāliḥīn by ʿAbd Allāh b. Asʿad al-Yāfiʿī (d. 768/1367, ed. I. ʿUbaydī, Cairo:
al-Ḥalabī 1955); Price: 8.5; C: sufism.
ve
rs
BUYER 52 Qāsim al-ʿAjamī [ll. 15–16], sum total: 15 dirhams. Listed in #793
(Payor 7), #800 (Payor 20), #812 (Payor 29) and #968 (Debtor 26).
ni
not identified
nb
u
rg
h
U
(book 204) Qudūrī; arguably the Mukhtaṣar on Ḥanafī fiqh by A: Aḥmad
b. Muḥammad al-Qudūrī (d. 428/1037), especially as the buyer seems to come
from the ḥanafī ʿAjamī family (cf. Buyer 5); Price: 15; C: fiqh – ḥanafī.
Ed
i
BUYER 53 ʿAbd Allāh al-Firyābī [ll. 17–19], sum total: 92.5 dirhams. Listed
in #793 (Payor 17), #800 (Payor 15), #812 (Payor 39) and #968 (Debtor 27).
not identified
(book 205) Akhbār Makka; several possibilities and thus not identifiable;
Haarmann, Library, 332 suggests Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Azraqī as
author. Price: 18.5; C: history.
(book 206) Manāqib al-aḥbab; arguably the biographical compendium
Manāqib al-aḥbab wa-marātib ūlī al-albāb by Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan
al-Shāfiʿī (d. 776/1374–5; Kashf al-ẓunūn, I, 689 and II, 1836), a summary of the Ḥilyat al-awliyāʾ by Abū Nuʿaym (d. 430/1038); Price: 74;
C: ḥadīth – study of.
256
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owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
BUYER 54 al-Shaykh ʿAlī al-Qalyūbī [ll. 20–8], sum total: 355.75 dirhams.
Listed in #793 (Debtor 17 & Payor 30), #800 (Payor 33, al-Shaykh ʿAlī), #812
(Payor 21) and #968 (Debtor 28).
not identified; The title ‘al-Shaykh’ indicates a scholarly background.
(book 207) Muṣḥaf sharīf; a complete copy of the Koran; Price: 60;
C: Koran – text.
(book 208) Mukhtār ʿuyūn al-ḥikāyāt; possibly selection from the ʿUyūn
al-ḥikāyāt by Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200); Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, Fihrist, no. 15;
Price: 16.
es
s
(book 209) al-Najm; several possibilities and thus not identifiable; Price: 13.5.
Pr
(book 210) ʿUyūn al-akhbār; numerous possibilities and thus not identifiable;
Price: 14.5; possibly C: adab.
ni
ve
rs
ity
(book 211) al-Sīra; most likely the second and third part (al-thānī wa-althālith) of the Sīrā by Ibn Isḥāq (d. 150/767)/Ibn Hishām (d. 218/833 or
213/828); Ashrafīya, no. 547; Price: 31; C: history – biography of the Prophet.
(cf. book 80, 141, 240a)
rg
h
U
(book 212) al-Mudhish; most likely the work by A: Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200);
Ashrafīya, no. 926; FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 15; C: sermons/paraenesis.
nb
u
(book 213) al-Amālī; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn, I, 161–6) and
thus not identifiable; FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 17.5.
Ed
i
(book 214) Rawḍat al-khāṭir; not identified; FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 22.25.
(book 215) Faḍāʾil al-aʿmāl; several possibilities (Ashrafīya, nos 805 and 1189a
and Kashf al-ẓunūn, II, 1274) and thus not identifiable; FI: wa-ghayruhu;
Price: 13.5; C: ḥadīth – merits.
(book 216) Yāqūtat al-mawāʿiẓ; A: Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200); ed. A.ʿA.
ʿAwḍā, Cairo: Dār al-faḍīla 1994; FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 20; C: sermons/
paraenesis.
(book 217) Tārīkh Miṣr; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn, I, 303–4)
and thus not identifiable; FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 46.75; C: history.
(book 218) Tisʿat kutub; nine incomplete (kharm, cf. book 95) books; Price: 39.
th e sal e book l et
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257
(book 219) Dīwān shiʿr; unidentified; Price: 15.25; C: poetry.
(obj57) miʾzar abyaḍ: white overgarment (Dozy, Dictionnaire détaillé,
38–46), Price: 20.
(obj58a) miṣfā: sieve (Dozy, Supplément, I, 839).
(obj58b) ṭāsa: bowl (cf. obj44a), Price: 11.
(obj59) qushsha: small pieces of furniture (cf. obj10), Price: 0.5.
es
s
BUYER 55 al-Shaykh Muḥammad b. Saʿīd [ll. 29–31], sum total: 30.25
dirhams. Listed in #793 (Payor 8), #800 (Payor 22), #812 (Payor 30) and #968
(Debtor 29).
Pr
possibly al-Anṣārī al-Zawārī al-Shāfiʿī who served briefly as judge of
Jerusalem, fl. 788/1386 (Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 249).
rs
ity
(book 220) Khuṭab; A: Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200); Price: 11; C: sermons/
paraenesis.
h
U
ni
ve
(book 221) ʿAqāʾid al-Ghazālī; A: al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111); most likely the
chapter Kitāb Qawāʿid al-ʿAqāʾid of his Iḥyāʾ (cf. book 262); Price: 11.25;
C: creed.
nb
u
rg
(docum 1) ḥawāla for him [the deceased] from Burhān al-Dīn al-Naqīb;
Price: 8.
Ed
i
BUYER 56 Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm al-ʿAjamī [ll. 32–5], sum total: 179.75
dirhams. Listed in #793 (Payor 2), #800 (Payor 6, Ibrāhīm), #812 (Payor 25)
and #968 (Debtor 30).
not identified
(book 222) al-Baghawī; This term most likely refers to the shāfiʿī scholar
al-Ḥusayn b. Masʿūd al-Baghawī (d.c. 516/1122) whose fame rested on two
ḥadīth collections, Sharḥ al-sunna and Maṣābīḥ al-sunna. It is impossible to
know what text(s) exactly are meant here, yet as the author’s full name is not
given a ḥadīth text is highly likely. The hefty price indicates that this must have
been a large work. Price: 118; C: ḥadīth.
258
|
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
(book 223) al-Tabṣira; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn, I, 337–9)
and thus not identifiable; Price: 9.
(book 224) ʿUlūm al-ḥadīth; arguably the famous introduction to ḥadīth
studies by A: Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ al-Shahrazūrī (d. 643/1245) that also carries this title
(ʿUlūm al-ḥadīth, ed. N. ʿItr, Damascus: Dār al-Fikr 1986); FI: wa-ghayruhu;
Price: 25.5; C: ḥadīth.
(book 225) al-Muwaṭṭaʾ; A part of (juzʾ min) the ḥadīth collection by A: Mālik
b. Anas (d. 179/796); Price: 20; C: ḥadīth.
(obj60) qamīṣ: robe, Price: 7.25.
es
s
#532b left = page 8 (Plate I.6)
ity
Pr
BUYER 57 Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ghazzī [ll. 1–3], sum total: 157 dirhams. Listed in
#793 (Payor 31), #812 (Payor 1) and #968 (Debtor 31, al-Ghazāwī).
ni
ve
rs
arguably the ḥanafī scholar and short-term deputy judge of Jerusalem
Muḥammad b. Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad, d. 844/1441 (al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns
al-jalīl, II, 223–4).
rg
h
U
(book 226) Sharḥ al-Mufaṣṣal; one of the many commentaries on the work
by al-Zamakhsharī (cf. book 176); Price: 70; C: grammar.
nb
u
(book 227) Sharḥ al-Alfīya; most likely a commentary on the Alfīya by Ibn
Mālik (d. 672/1274, cf. book 113); Price: 35.5; C: grammar.
Ed
i
(book 228) Sharḥ al-Alfīya; the Jerusalem scholar A: Aḥmad b. Ḥasan
al-Qudsī al-Ḥanafī Ibn al-Raṣṣāṣ/al-Raṣṣāṣī (d. 790/1388–9; al-ʿUlaymī,
al-Uns al-jalīl, II, 218); Price: 51.5; C: grammar.
BUYER 58 Zayn al-Dīn Maḥmūd Ibn al-Sarāʾī [ll. 4–8], sum total: 242
dirhams. Listed in #793 (Payor 27, Maḥmūd al-Sarāʾī), #800 (Payor 30), #812
(Payor 49) and #968 (Debtor 32).
not identified; most likely identifiable as Zayn al-Dīn Maḥmūd b. Khalīl,
the person to whom al-Adhraʿī lent money from Burhān al-Dīn’s estate
(#016, see Appendix 2).
th e sal e book l et
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259
(book 229) Mukhtaṣar Muslim; unidentified summary of the ḥadīth compendium Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim by Muslim al-Nīsābūrī (d. 261/875); Price: 32;
C: ḥadīth.
(book 230) al-Shifāʾ; most likely A: al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ b. Mūsā al-Yaḥṣubī
(d. 544/1149); Price: 71.5; C: Prophet Muḥammad – devotional. (cf. book
4, 169)
es
s
(book 231) al-Adhkār; There are numerous possibilities for works with
the term ‘adhkār’ (invocation and recollection of God), but in the context of Jerusalem in this period the work by A: Yaḥyā b. Sharaf al-Nawawī
(d. 676/1277), an author who has at least one work in this list (book 7, in
addition to the other likely entries book 11, 43, 142a and 197), is very likely.
Price: 66; C: sufism. (cf. book 11)
ity
Pr
(book 232) Majmaʿ al-baḥrayn; several possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn,
II, 1599) and thus not identifiable; Price: 11.5.
ve
rs
(book 233) Uṣūl al-Dīn; not identified; FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 17;
C: theology.
h
U
ni
(book 234) al-Mukhtār; numerous possibilities and thus not identifiable;
FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 21.5.
nb
u
rg
(book 235) Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim; parts of (ajzāʾ min) A: Muslim al-Nīsābūrī
(d. 261/875); Price: 22.5; C: ḥadīth. (cf. book 151)
Ed
i
BUYER 59 ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn ʿAlī b. ʿUthmān al-Ḥawārī al-Shāfiʿī [ll. 9–11], sum
total: 171.5 dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 18 & Payor 34), #812 (Payor 4)
and #968 (Debtor 33).
Jerusalemite scholar (account sheet #812 names him ‘shaykh’) and deputy
judge, d. 830/1427 (al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, II, 170).
(book 236) al-Jamʿ bayna al-ṣaḥīḥayn; several possibilities and thus not identifiable; Price: 101.5; C: ḥadīth. (cf. book 24)
(book 237) al-Ghunya; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn,
II, 1211–13) and thus not identifiable, though the Ghunya by al-Qāḍī
ʿIyāḍ b. Mūsā al-Yaḥṣubī (d. 544/1149, ed. M. Z. Jarrār, Beirut 1982) is
260
|
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
likely on account of the numerous books on ḥadīth in this sale booklet;
Price: 70; C: ḥadīth?
BUYER 60 Khalīl al-Ḥadīthī [ll. 12–14], sum total: 67.25 dirhams. Listed
in #793 (Debtor 19 & Payor 9), #800 (Payor 3), #812 (Payor 31) and #968
(Debtor 34).
not identified
(book 238) Qiṣṣat Yūsuf; not identified; Price: 21.25; C: qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ.
es
s
(book 239) Futūḥ Miṣr; A: ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAbd Allāh Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam
(d. 257/871); Ashrafīya, no. 1429; Price: 25.5; C: history.
ity
Pr
(book 240a) al-Sīra; most likely two parts of (juzʾayn min) the Sīrā by Ibn
Isḥāq (d. 150/767)/Ibn Hishām (d. 218/833 or 213/828); Ashrafīya, no. 547;
C: history – biography of the Prophet. (cf. book 80, 141, 211)
ni
ve
rs
(book 240b) Manāsik; most likely unidentified Manāsik al-ḥajj work on
pilgrimage rituals; Price: 20.5; C: rituals.
nb
u
not identified
rg
h
U
BUYER 61 ʿUmar al-Ghānimī [ll. 15–17], sum total: 64 dirhams. Listed in
#793 (Payor 41), #812 (Payor 11, ʿUmar b. Ghānim) and #968 (Debtor 35).
Ed
i
(book 241) al-Wajīz; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn, II, 2001–4),
but on account of previous entry book 64 this might be al-Wajīz fī fiqh
madhhab al-imām al-Shāfiʿī by al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111); Price: 21; C: fiqh –
shāfiʿī. (cf. book 192)
(book 242) Taḥrīr al-tanbīh; A: Aḥmad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Ṭabarī (Kashf
al-ẓunūn, I, 489); commentary on al-Tanbīh fī furūʿ al-shāfiʿīya by al-Shīrāzī
(d. 476/1083); Price: 11; C: fiqh – shāfiʿī.
(book 243) Mawālid; Price: 12; FI: wa-ghayruhu; C: Prophet Muḥammad –
devotional. (cf. book 59, 61)
(book 244) al-Tafsīr; Price: 20; a part of (juzʾ min) an unidentified work of
C: Koran – exegesis.
th e sal e book l et
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261
BUYER 62 Shams al-Dīn al-Muqriʾ [ll. 18–20], sum total: 45 dirhams. Listed
in #793 (Payor 19, Ibn al-Muqriʾ), #800 (Payor 17), #812 (Payor 41) and #968
(Debtor 36, Ibn al-Muqriʾ).
not identified
(book 245) Qūt al-qulūb; A: Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Makkī (d. 386/998);
Ashrafīya, no. 850; Price: 45; C: sufism.
BUYER 63 al-Shaykh Taqī al-Dīn Abū Bakr b. ʿUthmān al-Ḥawrānī al-Ḥanafī
[ll. 21–3], sum total: 39 dirhams. Listed in #793 (Payor 42), #812 (Payor 12)
and #968 (Debtor 37).
Pr
es
s
Jerusalemite scholar, deputy judge and notary witness, d. 804/1401–2
(Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 271–2, 272).
ve
rs
ity
(book 246) Asrār al-tanzīl; A: Muḥammad b. ʿUmar Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī Ibn
al-Khaṭīb (d. 606/1210); Asrār al-tanzīl wa-anwār al-taʾwīl, ed. ʿA. ʿUmayra,
Cairo 2000; Price: 25; C: Koran – exegesis.
h
U
ni
(book 247) Tārīkh Baghdād; numerous possibilities (Kashf al-ẓunūn, I, 288)
and thus not identifiable; Price: 14; C: history.
Ed
i
nb
u
rg
BUYER 64 Zayn al-Dīn Muqbil b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Shihābī al-Yaghmūrī
[ll. 24–6], sum total: 68 dirhams.19 Listed in #793 (Payor 10), #800 (Payor 10),
#812 (Payor 32) and #968 (Debtor 38).
Officer who belonged to the household of Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad
al-Yaghmūrī (d. 811/1408), the governor of Jerusalem in 796/1394.20
Muqbil is mentioned in an estate inventory dated to 796/1394 (#496).
(book 248) Futūḥ al-Shām; several possibilities and thus not identifiable;
Price: 23; C: history.
(book 249) al-Tanzīl; Price: 36; most likely C: Koran – study of.
(obj61) bisāṭayn, ghayruhu: 2 carpets, other, Price: 9.
19
20
The sum given in the sale booklet is 67.5.
Müller, Der Kadi und seine Zeugen, 416, follows al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, II, 166, who gives his
death date as 801. However, earlier sources agree on 811/1408 (most importantly Ibn Ḥajar, Inbāʾ
al-ghumr).
262
|
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
BUYER 65 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Aḥmad al-Ghazzī [ll. 27–9], sum total: 9.5
dirhams. Listed in #800 (Payor 37) and #968 (Debtor 39).
Jerusalemite notary witness, fl. 805/1402–3 (Müller, Kadi und seine
Zeugen, 227, n. 490).
(book 250) al-Buldān; several possibilities and thus not identifiable;
Price: 9.5.
es
s
BUYER 66 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Qarawī al-Maghribī [ll. 30–4], sum total: 41.5
dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 20 & Payor 3), #800 (Payor 7, al-Qarawī),
#812 (Payor 26, al-Sharīf al-Maghribī) and #968 (Debtor 40).
Pr
not identified
ity
(book 251) al-Tahdhīb; first part of (al-awwal min); numerous possibilities
(Kashf al-ẓunūn, I, 515-8) and thus not identifiable; Price: 7.5.
U
ni
(obj62a) mandīl azraq: blue cloth.
ve
rs
(book 252) al-Arbaʿīn al-Wadʿānīya; with reference to Ibn Wadʿān
(d. 494/1101); Price: 6.75; C: ḥadīth – collection – 40.
h
(obj62b) shadd: kerchief (Dozy, Supplément, I, 213–15), Price: 14.
nb
u
rg
(obj63) naṭʿayn ʿitq; 2 circular antique leather cloths, Price: 13.25.
Ed
i
#532a right = page 9 (Plate I.5)
BUYER 67 Sharaf al-Dīn ʿĪsā b. Aḥmad al-ʿAjlūnī [ll. 1-3], sum total: 76.25
dirhams. Listed in #793 (Payor 26), #800 (Payor 27), #812 (Payor 48) and
#968 (Debtor 42).
Notary witness in Jerusalem from 777/1376 until at least 805/1402–3
(Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 322, 325–7, 559–60).
(book 253) Ḥawāshī al-Alfīya; most likely a commentary on the Alfīya by
Ibn Mālik (d. 672/1274) as we find them in high numbers in the Ibn ʿAbd
al-Hādī collection (Hirschler, Monument); Price: 18; C: grammar.
th e sal e book l et
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263
(book 254) al-Irshād; numerous possibilities and thus not identifiable;
FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 13.5. (cf. book 9b)
(obj64) bisāṭ: carpet, Price: 46.
BUYER 68 Wakīl bayt al-māl Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Miṣrī
[ll. 4–6], sum total: 51.5 dirhams.21 Listed in #793 (Payor 36, al-Muqriʾ
al-muʾadhdhin), #812 (Payor 6, Shihāb al-Dīn al-muʾadhdhin) and #968
(Debtor 43).
(obj65) bisāṭ: carpet, Price: 41.
ity
(obj66) miṭraqa: scutcher (cf. obj84b), Price: 2.25.
Pr
es
s
Notary witness in Jerusalem from 789/1387 onwards; was also imām and
intermittently head of treasury from 795/1392 onwards (Müller, Kadi
und seine Zeugen, 404–5, 415, 456–7).
rs
(obj67) mudawwara jild: parchment scroll, Price: 2.25.
ve
(obj68a) bayt mashṭ: comb case.
U
ni
(obj68b) dawāt: writing case, Price: 6.125.
nb
u
not identified
rg
h
BUYER 69 Badr al-Dīn Ibn Qāsim [ll. 7–9], sum total: 10.25 dirhams.
Ed
i
(book 255) Majmūʿ; composite or multiple-text manuscript; Price: 10.25.
BUYER 70 Muḥammad ʿAshā, the document’s scribe [ll. 10–12], sum total:
102.375 dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 23 & Payor 50, Ibn ʿAshā), #812
(Payor 19) and #968 (Debtor 44).
not identified
(book 256) Sharḥ al-Khubayṣī; A: Muḥammad b. Abī Bakr al-Khubayṣī
(d. 731/1330–1); most likely his commentary on al-Kāfiya by Ibn al-Ḥājib
(d. 646/1249; Kashf al-ẓunūn, II, 1370); Price: 17.5; C: grammar.
21
The sum of the individual prices gives rather a sum of 51.675 dirhams.
264
|
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
(book 257) al-Rawḍāt; not identifiable; Price: 23.
(obj69) busuṭ: carpets, Price: 32.75.
(obj70) farjīya bayḍā: white overgarment, Price: 18.
(obj71) qabʿayn: two pieces of headgear (Dozy, Dictionnaire détaillé, 344–7),
Price: 1.625.
(book 258a) al-Tajrīd; most likely A: Razīn b. Muʿāwiya al-ʿAbdarī
(d. 524/1129 or 535/1140); C: ḥadīth. (cf. book 50, 121, 122b)
es
s
(book 258b) al-Taʿjīz; most likely A: ʿAbd al-Raḥīm b. Muḥammad al-Shāfiʿī
(d. 671/1272) who authored al-Taʿjīz fī ikhtiṣār al-Wajīz on shāfiʿī law
(Kashf al-ẓunūn, I, 417); Price: 9.5; C: fiqh – shāfiʿī.
ity
Pr
BUYER 71 Jamāl al-Dīn al-Dayrī [ll. 13–15], sum total: 63 dirhams. Listed in
#968 (Debtor 45).
rs
not identified
h
U
ni
ve
(book 259) Masāʾil al-khilāf; most likely a legal treatise; arguably anonymous
and thus similar to such works in Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, Fihrist, nos 508d and
514b; Price: 9.5; C: fiqh.
nb
u
rg
(obj72) sikr bāb: door bolt (This term is clearly readable in another Ḥaram
al-sharīf document, namely #772b.), Price: 11.25.
Ed
i
(book 260) al-ʿUmda; numerous possibilities (Ashrafīya, no. 1457); FI: waghayruhu; Price: 9.25. (cf. book 263)
(book 261) al-Waqf; Price: 13.25; probably one of the many works entitled
al-Waqf wa-al-ibtidāʾ (Kashf al-ẓunūn, II, 1470) on C: Koran – recitation.
(obj73) saqraq nuḥās: copper vessel (cf. obj45), Price: 12.25.
(obj74) saqraq nuḥās: copper vessel, Price: 7.5. (cf. obj45)
BUYER 72 Ibrāhīm al-Ḥarjāwī [ll. 16–18], sum total: 20 dirhams. Listed in
#793 (Payor 13), #800 (Payor 11) and #812 (Payor 35).
not identified
th e sal e book l et
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265
(book 262) al-Iḥyāʾ; a part of (juzʾ min) the work by A: al-Ghazālī
(d. 505/1111); Ashrafīya, no. 1448; Price: 20; C: sufism. (cf. book 221)
BUYER 73 Taghrī W-r-m-sh mamlūk al-Sayfī Bulūṭ [ll. 19–21], sum
total: 20.75 dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 24 & Payor 51) and #968
(Debtor 46).
not identified, cf. Buyer 3 for Bulūṭ
(book 263) al-ʿUmda; FI: wa-ghayruhā; Price: 14.75. (cf. book 260)
(obj75) kursīyayn khashab: 2 wooden stools (cf. obj27), Price: 6.
Pr
es
s
BUYER 74 Shams al-Dīn al-Ramlī [ll. 22–4], sum total: 39.5 dirhams. Listed
in #968 (Debtor 47).
ity
not identified
rs
(book 264) Kashf al-ʿaqāʾiq wa-al-ḥaqāʾiq; not identified; Price: 21.5.
nb
u
rg
h
U
ni
ve
(book 265a) al-Muhadhdhab; There are numerous possibilities for this
keyword. As it is combined with the following title in one part (juzʾ) it might
refer to al-Muhadhdhab by Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī al-Shīrāzī (d. 476/1083), as
this period’s authors combined these two legal works in commentaries and
abridgements (e.g. Kashf al-ẓunūn, II, 1620). C: fiqh – shāfiʿī. (cf. book 63
and 172)
Ed
i
(book 265b) al-Wasīṭ; There are numerous possibilities for this keyword.
As it is combined with the preceding title in one part (juzʾ) it might refer
to al-Wasīṭ by al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) as this period’s authors combined
these two legal works in commentaries and abridgements (e.g. Kashf al-ẓunūn,
II, 1620). Price: 5.5; C: fiqh – shāfiʿī. (cf. book 102, 127, 142b)
(obj76) sajjāda sūdā: black prayer carpet, Price: 11.5.
266
|
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
BUYER 75 Badr al-Dīn Ḥusayn al-Mālikī [ll. 25–7], sum total: 150.5
dirhams.22 Listed in #793 (Debtor 25), #800 (Payor 29), #812 (Payor 52) and
#968 (Debtor 48).
not identified
(book 266) al-Mahdawī; Here the scribe of the sale booklet seemingly identified a book by its author. There are several possibilities and the title is thus not
identifiable. Price: 17.5.
(obj77) farjīya sūdā ʿalā farwa: black overgarment with fur, Price: 133.
ity
Pr
es
s
BUYER 76 Sharaf al-Dīn Ḥamdān al-Zarʿī [ll. 28–30], sum total: 85
dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 26 & Payor 25, Ḥamdān al-Zarī), #800
(Payor 25, Ḥamd al-Zarī), #812 (Payor 47) and #968 (Debtor 49, Ḥamdān
al-Zarʿī).
rs
not identified
ni
ve
(book 267) Maqāmāt; A: al-Qāsim b. ʿAlī al-Ḥarīrī (d. 516/1122); Ashrafīya,
no. 1095; Price: 15; C: adab. (cf. book 26, 194)
Ed
i
nb
u
rg
h
U
(book 268) Sharḥ Muslim; first and fourth part (al-awwal wa-al-rābiʿ min)
of an unidentified commentary on the ḥadīth compendium Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim
by Muslim al-Nīsābūrī (d. 261/875); Price: 70; C: ḥadīth – commentary.
(cf. book 150)
BUYER 77 Aḥmad al-Qaramānī [ll. 31–2], sum total: 16.5 dirhams.23 Listed
in #793 (Payor 24), #800 (Payor 26), #812 (Payor 46) and #968 (Debtor 50).
not identified
(book 269) Sirr al-arwāḥ wa-Muʾnis al-nafs; not identified; Price: 16.5.
22
23
The sum total was originally 160.5 dirhams, but was subsequently corrected to 150.5. We still find
the sum of 160.5 dirhams in his entry in #968.
The sum total was originally 36.5 dirhams, but was subsequently corrected to 16.5. We still find the
sum of 16.5 dirhams in his entry in #968.
th e sal e book l et
|
267
BUYER 78 Shihāb al-Dīn (Ibn al-)Muthbit [ll. 33–5], sum total: 50.5
dirhams. Listed in #793 (Debtor 21 & Payor 12, Ibn al-Muthbit), #800 (Payor
2), #812 (Payor 34) and #968 (Debtor 51).
This is most likely the notary witness Aḥmad b. Muḥammad Ibn alMuthbit, who appears in #741 (dated 15.12.793/1391).
(book 270a) al-Wasīla; numerous possibilities and thus not identifiable.
es
s
(book 270b) al-ʿAzīzī; possibly the anonymous al-ʿAzīzī al-muḥallā bi-aldhahab, a copy of which is in the Khālidīya Library in Jerusalem (MS 1692;
Ju’beh/Salameh, Fihris makhṭūṭāt al-Maktaba al-Khālidīya, 739) or
al-Lāmiʿ al-ʿAzīzī by Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (d. 449/105); Price: 26; C: adab.
(cf. book 152)
ity
Pr
(book 271) Ṭabaqāt al-qurrāʾ; numerous possibilities and thus not identifiable; FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 16.25; C: history – biographical dictionary.
ni
ve
rs
(book 272) Sharḥ al-sunna; one part (juzʾ min); several possibilities (e.g. Ibn
ʿAbd al-Hādī, Fihrist, no. 504a); FI: wa-ghayruhu; Price: 8.25.
h
U
#180b left = page 10 (Plate I.4)
Ed
i
not identified
nb
u
rg
BUYER 79 Muḥammad al-Iskandarī [ll. 1–3], sum total: 10.25 dirhams.
Listed in #793 (Debtor 40, different nisba) and #968 (Debtor 78).
(obj78) ṣandūq: chest, Price: 7.75.
(obj79) qushsha: small pieces of furniture (cf. obj10), Price: 2.5.
BUYER 80 Abū Yazīd al-ʿAjamī [ll. 4–6], sum total: 3 dirhams. Listed in #968
(Debtor 79).
not identified
(obj80a) sikkīn: knife.
(obj80b) mūsayn: two razors, Price: 3.
268
|
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
BUYER 81 Aḥmad al-Saqqā [ll. 7–8], sum total: 6.5 dirhams. Listed in #793
(Debtor 41, Aḥmad Saqqā) and #968 (Debtor 80).
not identified
(obj81) hāwan maksūr: broken mortar, Price: 6.5.
BUYER 82 al-Bawwāb ʿAlī [ll. 9–10], sum total: 2.75 dirhams. Listed in #793
(Debtor 42) and #968 (Debtor 81).
not identified
es
s
(obj82) qushsha: small pieces of furniture (cf. obj10), Price: 2.75.
ity
Pr
BUYER 83 ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm al-Ṣāʾigh [ll. 11–12], sum total: 4 dirhams. Listed in
#793 (Payor 45), #812 (Payor 15) and #968 (Debtor 82).
rs
not identified
ni
ve
(obj83) mīzān: scale, Price: 4.
nb
u
rg
h
U
BUYER 84 Muḥammad Shuqayr [ll. 13–14], sum total: 3.375 dirhams.
Listed in #793 (Payor 38), #800 (Payor 13), #812 (Payor 8) and #968
(Debtor 83).
not identified
Ed
i
(obj84a) miqaṣṣ: scissors.
(obj84b) miṭraqa: scutcher (cf. obj66).
(obj84c) mighrafa: cup, Price: 3.375.
BUYER 85 Yūsuf al-Miṣrī al-Dallāl al-Ḍarīr [ll. 15–16], sum total: 3 dirhams.
Listed in #793 (Debtor 43) and #968 (Debtor 84, al-Ḍarīr).
not identified
(obj85) sikkīn ḥadīd: iron knife, Price: 3.
th e sal e book l et
|
269
BUYER 86 Ibn Sharwīn [ll. 17–18], sum total: 0.25 dirham. Listed in #968
(Debtor 85).
not identified; the Jerusalemite scholar mentioned in al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns
al-jalīl, II, 362 has the same name, but his death date 897/1492 is
too late. As ‘Sharwīn’ is a rare name it is likely that the Ibn Sharwīn
mentioned in this inventory is an ancestor of the scholar mentioned by
al-ʿUlaymī.
(obj86) ʿubwatayn bi-bayt nuḥās: two glass jars with copper casing (cf. obj41),
Price: 0.25.
Pr
es
s
BUYER 87 Muḥammad b. Yūnus [ll. 19–20], sum total: 12.5 dirhams. Listed
in #793 (Debtor 44), #800 (Payor 34, Ibn R-y-s) and #968 (Debtor 86).
ity
not identified
Ed
i
nb
u
rg
h
U
ni
ve
rs
(book 273) Muṣḥaf sharīf; a complete copy of the Koran; Price: 12.5;
C: Koran – text.
270
|
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
Edition of the Sale Booklet (Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic
Museum #061, #180 and #532)
To facilitate comparison with the original, this edition edits the document as
we find it today, in three separate sheets. Thus, it does not follow the order of
pages when these sheets were nested together as a booklet. The above English
list, by contrast, follows the booklet’s order of pages.
Symbols used:
rs
يمين/ أ61
ity
Pr
es
s
|| interlinear text
[ ] editors’ insertion of letters or words
[?] tentative reading
[…] non-legible or missing word(s)
* = vertical strikethrough of name
Ed
i
nb
u
rg
h
U
ni
ve
الحمد هلل رب العالمين
مفردات األسماء المباعة من تركة المرحوم برهان الدين
الناصري المتوفى إلى رحمة هللا تعالى قبل تاريخه باسم من يذكر فيه
الشيخي النجمي أعاد هللا من بركته ورحم سلفه الكريم
ســــــــــــــــــــــــــــه
شرح مختصر
البخاري أساس
األصفهاني
البالغة
361
27
74
260
المقر الناصري
الرقائق
الشفا
لطائف
ديوان رياض
الخطب الصالحين اإلشارات
32
50
27
22
171
فضائل
الجهاد الصرصري األذكار فضائل
القدس
األئمة
واإلرشاد
32
17
37
33
20
ســــــــــــــــــــــــــــه
إخوان
466
25
المقر السيفي بلوط
-1
-2
-3
-4
-5
-6
-7
-8
-9
-10
-11
-12
-13
-14
271
-15
-16
-17
-18
-19
-20
-21
-22
es
s
ity
rs
سه
ســـــــــــــه
ni
h
109
25
nb
u
قبــــــض
-2
-3
-4
وزن
التذكرة
الشيخ شمس الدين القلقشندي نفع هللا به
تنبيه
األخبار في فوائد عكاز حديد
األخيار
¼5
12
25
ربعين مصاحف شريفة
هكذا في األصل والصواب المنتقى.
مضروب عليها في األصل.
87
Ed
i
-1
25
ســـــــــــــــــــــه
وزن
الشيخ عالء الدين بن
24
160
ســـه
346
194
61أ /يسار
-5
-6
زوج صناديق
rg
-28
المقامات
للحريري
½16
U
-27
ربعة
شريفة
21
8
أجزاء من
ربع
مصحف القرآن
7
18
صندوق خشب
¼4
سيدنا الحاكم الشافعى أسبغ هللا ظله
أدب الدنيا
الجمع بين
الدرة
والدين
الفريدة الصحيحين
13
½52 27
الشاطبية اإلفصاح
اإليضاح الخطب
وشرح
وغيره البن نباتة
األصفهاني
48
4
¾17¼ 15
الحاكم الحنفى نفع
هللا به
أجزاء من صحون صندوق
شرح
قيشاني خشب
اآلثار مسلم
17
9
نُقل
61
المنتقا
24
مختصر ديوان شعر مصحف
شريف
القدوري
70
¼20 14
سيبا
دعاء
ثمن
مصحف ومجموع
¼5
12
¼6
ve
-25
-26
|
Pr
-23
-24
th e sal e book l et
النقيب الحنفى نفع
هللا به
¾65
ركوة
½4
ســـه
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
-7
-8
-9
-10
-11
Pr
es
s
-12
-13
-14
-15
-16
½8
أخوه الشيخ برهان الدين
الناسخ والمنسوخ استدعاء وغيره مشكل
الصحيحين
½7
5
½18
من جهة مقر
سيفي بلوط 4
الشيخ شمس الدين الديري
مختصر بن الحاجب رعاية المحاسبي أدب الدنيا وغيره
41
27
½11
برهان الدين بن قاسم
26
الروضة
المحرر للرافعى مرآت الزمان
¼55
كاملية
بيضاء
21
ity
البخاري كراريس
من
البخاري
40
172
ســـــــــــه
rg
30½ -22
-23ملخص الرازي
18
المفتاح ألهل
الدين والصالح
¾18
½7
شمس المطالب
موالد وغيره
14 -26
-27المهذب
¼13
¼20
مشارق األنوار غريب القرآن
26
تجريد الصحاح
½72
مشكل الحديث
هكذا في األصل والصواب (مرآة الزمان).
nb
u
قبــــــض
U
ni
ve
قبض
265بقي
566
291
زهر
اآلداب
38
جوامع
الفقر
46
موالد
وغيره
¾28
شعار
الدين
شرح
اإلشارات
11
مناقب
عمر
42
شرح
الحروف
¼18
الشاطبية فصيح
وغيرها ثعلب
Ed
i
-21دالئل األحكام
النوادر
11¼ -24
-25ديوان ابن نباتة
ســــــــــــه
¾94
h
-19
-20شهاب الدين بن المهندس
ســـــــه
52
االهتمام
¼15
rs
305 -17
-18
28
11
|
272
273
th e sal e book l et
|
30¼ -28
-29المدخل
10
كنز األبرار
½19
ديوان الوردي
60 -30
-31التبصرة
35
األحكام وغيره
20
الدالئل
6¾ -32
-33
¼34
¼27
¼18
30
من
أنس
النفوس الطبقات
¾35¼ 21
مجموع
من
البخاري لغة
18
32
وزن
¾17
جزو من
التاريخ
38
جزو من
السيرة
23
61ب /يمين
Pr
es
s
أثر السفر؟
-1صفة الجنة فصول بن مجموع وغيره
وغيره
معطي وغيره
والنار
24
½14
32
25⅛¾ -2
المسائل المكنونة وغيره جزو التعليق
اإلفصاح
-3راحت
لمحمد
وغيره
القلوب
بن يحيى
وغيره
19
25
27
17⅛¼ -4
27
رسالة
كتاب طب مواعض وغيره
-5أخبار
الفيومية
فصيح
وغيره
وغيره
الكالم
½14
21
22
17¼ -6
تسع كتب ثالث كتب
-7جزء من ديوان وغيره جزوين من القرآن
ثمانية
خرم
الموطأ
8
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ 19
½11
12 -8
-9قشة
وكتاب التعبد واألدب
مجموع وفصيح ثعلب وغيره
ديوان بن
28
وغيره
نباتة
½11
½10
10
23¼ -10
من جهة الشيخ عالء
-11البدر المنير أجزاء من الحديث من يد جنيد
في التعبير
الدين بن النقيب
وغيره
ity
rs
ve
ni
U
h
rg
nb
u
Ed
i
27
28
هكذا في األصل والصواب مواعظ.
هكذا في األصل والصواب ديوان ابن نباتة.
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
½33
11 -12
13
-14شمس الدين الخليلي
26¼ -16
-17المصابيح
es
s
ity
rs
½17
16
تنبيه الغافلين األلوف واألرواح؟
ni
طراحة
½36
12
½9
ســــــه
½510
ثمانية أجزاء من القرآن بساط
17
12
المنتخب والمحصول
h
38 -34
-35ربعين
شريفين
4¼ -36
ستة أجزاء
من القرآن
½14
جواهر
القرآن
¼18
شرحين
للحاجبية
24
سراج
الملوك
26
جزوين من
القرآن
½7
بساط رومي
rg
¼18
تجريد
الصحاح
½13
½15
ربعين من القرآن
مصحف
كامل أرباع
2
¼8
قبقاب
تنور هياكل
¾2
¾3
½
خاله بدر الدين حسن بن مكي
-29
-30
-31
-32
-33الوسيط
¼16
المحرر والتجريد
المسلسالت
nb
u
-27
-28
20
الزهد
والرقائق
16
خطب البن
الجوزي
½12
نصفين من
القرآن
10
مراوح
وزن
252
U
-25
-26
66
غرس الدين خليل بن مكي
عوارف الشريشي
مصحف شريف
المعارف
72
50
70
سير السلف المجالسات شرح األلفية
ve
-23
-24
¾26
سيرة اإلسكندري
عوارف
المعارف
70
ســــــه
½32
Pr
-21
-22
واألستدار*
Ed
i
-18
-19
-20
1295
فرجية بيضاء جبة بيضاء
½30
ســـــــــــــه
20
قبض
-15الوسيط
|
274
50
خزانة
تنجير
41
½15
ســه
¼180
275
th e sal e book l et
|
180أ /يسار
es
s
Pr
ity
سه
142
ve
ni
U
سه
½56
rg
h
كرسي خشب
½1
nb
u
29
وزن
شمس الدين الخطيب
كتابين طب
سه
¼12
Ed
i
-15
-16
-17
-18
-19
-20
-21
-22
-23
-24
-25
-26
-27
-28
-29
-30
سه
¾66
rs
-1
-2
-3
-4
-5
-6
-7
-8
-9
-10
-11
-12
-13
-14
محمد األندلسي بمدرسة بن منجا
مصحف شريف
برهان الدين الصلتي
سه
ديوان المتنبي وغيره ديوان المتنبي ويتيمة الدهر
½19
¾9
¾9
سه
عمر الزجاج*
التبصرة البن الجوزي وغيره 15
برهان الدين بن أبي محمــود*
الفتح
الصفوة وغيره
التذكرة وغيره
½26
¼18
22
شمس الدين بن القطــب*
سدة خشب
بساط
األخطار ]و[ المحن أقالم
36
75
8
23
وزن
وزن
29
]]138
اليتيم كمال
بساط صغير مخدة زرقا
لحاف يمني
نصف ختمة
10
15
20
10
سه
½36
عبد الرحمن بن الزيـن*
من السيرة
شهاب الدين أحمد بن شيذة
من التهذيب والوسيط
الوصي
الوترية زاد المسافر
سيف
أي َو َزنَ 138دره ًما من أصل 142دره ًما.
سه
½14
سه
¼10
كساء صعيدي هيكل وغيره دواة
سه
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
-31
-32
-33
-34
-35
-36
-37
-38
-39
-40
¾4 8
علي بن رسالن*
مصحف
18
جمال الدين النقيب
كشف علوم اآلخرة
½9
شمس الدين المـوقع*
حلة سابغة
40
80
⅙2
21
|
¼1
تخت خشب
52
سه
70
دواة خشب
½6
سه
16
فنارين وجعبة خشب
8
سه
48
وزن
es
s
180ب /يمين
Pr
-1شمس الدين الكركي
-2فرجية زرقاء
-3شهاب الدين أحمد الكتبي*
-4ثالث مقالم ،وبيت كتب ،وسكاكين
-5
-6شمس الدين التونسي
سه
rs
ity
50
قبض
½3
rg
h
وزن
¾6
سه
nb
u
سه
⅓24
سه
Ed
i
-7كتاب خرم
-8الناصري الدالل
زوجين قباقيب
-9جبة طرح
⅓5
19 -10
-11شهاب الدين سحلول
-12أجزاء من القرآن
-13
-14برهان الدين العرابي
-15جزء من التفسير
-16
-17غرس [الدين] خليل بن الدويك
-18كساء صوف
-19
-20برهان الدين الحوراني
-21عبوتين زجاج
U
ni
ve
سه
28
سه
12
ســـــــــــه
30
سه
276
⅙117
277
|
10
سه
¾5
سه
36
سه
ودست صغير
5
10
سه
سلسلة وحجر ومشط
½2
¾⅛8
سه
Pr
es
s
-22
-23علي الرباوي
-24لباد
30
5¾ -25
-26يوسف الجيتي*
-27خزانة خشب
-28عبد الرحمن اإلسكندري
-29طاسة صغرى
5 -30
-31محمد السكاكيني
-32سقرق نحاس
6⅛¼ -33
-34حسين الحلبي*
-35سقرق نحاس
[8⅛] -36
th e sal e book l et
سطل وشمعدان وغيره
¼⅛3
rs
ity
½11
U
h
rg
nb
u
30
هذا الرقم مكرر.
قشة
½2
سه
¼10
وزن
وزن
وزن
سه
3
سه
½6
سه
¾2
سه
4
سه
¼⅛3
Ed
i
-1
-2
-3
-4
-5
-6
-7
-8
-9
-10
-11
-12
-13
-14
محمد اإلسكندري
صندوق
¾7
أبو يزيد العجمي*
سكين وموسين
3
أحمد السقا
هاون مكسور
البواب علي
قشة
عبد العظيم الصايغ*
ميزان
محمد شقير*
مقص ومطرقة ومغرفة
ni
ve
180ب /يسار
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
-15
-16
-17
-18
-19
-20
يوسف المصري الدالل
سكين حديد
ابن شروين*
عبوتين ببيت نحاس
محمد بن يونس
مصحف شريف
|
سه
3
سه
¼ درهم
سه
½12
278
es
s
Pr
ity
rs
ve
ni
U
h
rg
nb
u
Ed
i
279
th e sal e book l et
|
532أ /يمين
شرف الدين عيسى العجلوني*
سه
اإلرشاد وغيره بساط
حواشي األلفية
¼76
46
½13
18
شهاب الدين*
وكيل بيت المال
المصري
قبــــــض
-1
-2
-3
-4
-5بساط
مطرقة
مدورة جلد
-6
-7
-8
-9
-10
-11
¼2
¼2
بيت مشط
31
ودواة
⅛6
بسط
فرجية
بيضاء
18
Pr
ity
rs
ve
ni
U
¼9
قبــــــض
32
¼11
h
31
سكر باب
العمدة وغيره الوقف
وزن
سقرق سقرق
نحاس نحاس
¼7½ 12
nb
u
-20
-21
جزء من اإلحياء
20
32
تغري ورمش
مملوك السيفي
بلوط
العمدة وغيرها
¾14
23
¾32
قبعين التجريد
والتعجيز
¼⅛102
⅛½9½ 1
سه
¼13
سه
63
Ed
i
9½ -15
-16إبراهيم
الحرجاوي*
½⅛51
سه
¼10
rg
17½ -12
-13جمال الدين
الديري
-14مسائل الخالف
-17
-18
-19
وزن
es
s
41
بدر الدين بن قاسم
مجموع
¼10
كاتبه محمد عشا
الروضات
شرح الخبيصي
سه
سه
20
كرسيين خشب سه
¾20
6
في األصل داوة.
وقد يُقرأ االسم تغري قرمش/قرقش ،ولكن أثبتنا «تغري ورمش» استنادًا إلى الوثيقة /793أ /يمين -السطر .12
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
-23
-24
-25
-26
قبــــــض
-22شمس الدين
الرملي
|
280
كشف العقائق
والحقائق
½21
بدر الدين حسين
المالكي
المهدوي
سجادةسودى
جزء المهذب
والوسيط
½5
33
وزن
½11
½39
سه
فرجية سودى
على فروة
133
34
½150
es
s
17½ -27
-28شرف الدين*
الزرعي
-29مقامات الحريري األول والرابع
من شرح مسلم
70
15 -30
-31أحمد القرماني*
سر األرواح
-32ومؤنس النفس
-33شهاب الدين
مثبت*35
سه
Pr
سه
ity
ni
ve
rs
85
سه
U
½16
قبــــــض
h
rg
nb
u
Ed
i
-34الوسيلة والعزيزي طبقات القراء جزء من شرح
السنة وغيره
وغيره
¼8
¼16
26 -35
سه
½50
532أ /يسار
33
34
35
36
قبــــــض
-1
فخر الدين
الدين 36إياس*
هكذا في األصل والصواب سجادة سوداء .ولكن يُالحظ أنه يكتب األلف الممدودة في نهاية الكلمة ألفا ً مقصورة.
هكذا في األصل والصواب فرجية سوداء.
يمكن أن يقرأ االسم (منيب) ،ولكنه ور َد معجما ً (ابن المثبت) في /793أ /يمين -السطر .10
مكرر في األصل.
281
th e sal e book l et
|
-3
166
شهاب الدين
السرائي*
110
½10
-4
-5
-6
األول من الكشاف
½27
مجموع
16
es
s
سه
44
وزن
Pr
ity
ثالث كتب
خرم
11
rs
الفتوحات
منحوا عنه من
جهة رسول
8
ve
h
rg
9 -27
½14
nb
u
-25
-26
كتابين خرم
70
فصيح
ثعلب
¼13
سه
101
سه
100
المهذب
شعب اإليمان
½7
مصحف شريف
9
مجموع في
الحديث
12
الحصرية واأللفية
32
نسائم األسحار
22
½13
11
المفصل
الباقي سه
Ed
i
-23
-24
25
½11
ثالث كماجات مصحف
25
¾
يوسف بن ذا النون
الشفا
مطلع النيرين
74
26
الشيخ إسماعيل وكيل الزوجة
مجموع
تنبيه
23
U
22
33 -12
-13أخوه الشيخ شهاب الدين
المشارق وغيره
-14منطق وغيره
20
األزهري
والتيسير
26
مجموع تركي
وزن
ni
-8ثمرة اإلخالص محيي القلوب
33
11 -9
-10زين الدين عبد الرحمن بن النقيب
-11مناقب األبرار سبل الخيرات
-15
-16
-17
-18
-19
-20
21
-22
سه
½69
قبــــــض
-7
مجموع كبير
26
جنيد*
الكيالني
½296
قبــــــض
-2
شرح مسلم
صحيح مسلم
العزيزي
األول من
سراج الملوك
10
سه
15
مصحف
شريف
7
كتاب في
العروض
5
جزء في
التاريخ
½46
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
-28طهارة القلوب
30 -29
-30قرات ورش
37
12¼ -31
-32ملوطتين
20 -33
الشهاب
األول من جواهر
الكالم
½15
38
المجموع البن
¾5
ربع مصحف
اللمع البن جني
13
لفحة وطاقية
¼2
½7
كرسي خشب
4
سفينة وزهر
الحدائق
½13
كراسين
|
جوخة
61
¾5
رف خشب
¼⅛2
532ب /يمين
-1
قبــــــضPr
es
s
علي بن
الحموي*
الوجيز في الفقه المستجاد
جزؤ
¾10
½9
عبد الرحمن
القبابي
ity
-2
قبــــــض
41
rs
40
ni
U
39
h
38
هكذا في األصل والصواب قراءة.
مضروب عليها في األصل.
الصواب .446.125
هكذا في األصل والصواب القشيري.
هكذا في األصل والصواب فرجية زرقاء.
27
nb
u
-9
-10
-11
-12
شرح التنبيه
½87
Ed
i
رسالة
مقامات
القيشري
الحريري
22
18
شمس الدين األزهري
الوقف واالبتداء شرح األلفية شمائل النبي صلعم
واإلشارات
½13
14
24
41
سه
فرجية زرقى
½167
100
الشريف المغربي
40
-6
-7
-8
كتاب اإلشارات
وشجرة العقل
½20
سه
rg
-5
وزن
¼20
ve
-3
-4
37
سه
التلفيق وجزؤ
من الحلبية
16
282
قميص
¼17
سه
441½39
283
-14
-15
15
قاسم*
-16
-17
قدوري
عبد هللا
*الفريابي
-18
أخبار مكة
|
سه
كتاب حكايات
الصالحين
½8
العجمي*
½23
سه
15
قبــــــض
سه
es
s
مناقب
األحباب
74
Pr
قبــــــض
½18
القليوبي
وزن
½92
ve
rs
ity
-19
-20
قبــــــض
-13
منافع القرآن
th e sal e book l et
U
ni
-21مصحف شريف مختار عيون النجم
الحكايات
½13
16
60 -22
روضة الخاطر
-23المدهش وغيره األمالي
وغيره
وغيره
¼22
½17
15 -24
تاريخ مصر تسع كتب خرم
-25ياقوتة
42
المواعض
وغيره
وغيره
39
¾46
20 -26
-27مصفاة وطاسة قشة
½
11 -28
سعيد*
-29الشيخ محمد بن
nb
u
Ed
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قبــــــض
42
هكذا في األصل والصواب المواعظ.
rg
h
عيون األخبار الثاني والثالث
من السيرة
31
½14
فضائل األعمال
وغيره
½13
مئزر أبيض
ديوان شعر
¼15
20
سه
¾355
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
عقائد
الغزالي
¼11
-33
التبصرة
البغوي
علوم الحديث
وغيره
½25
9
118
قبضت من يد برهان الدين ¾179
-34
-35
¼30
قبــــــض
-30
-31
-32
سه
حوالة عليه من جهة
برهان الدين النقيب
8
خطب بن
الجوزي
11
برهان الدين
*العجمي
43
|
284
جزؤ من
الموطأ
20
ss
532ب /يمين
قبــــــضrs
ity
Pr
e
-3
-4
70
زين الدين محمود بن
-5
مختصر مسلم
شرح األلفية
ve
-2
شرح المفصل
¼7
¾179
شرح
األلفية البن
الرصاصي
½51
السرائي
سه
h
قبــــــض
rg
½71
أجزاء من مسلم
½22
66
nb
u
43
الشفا
األذكار
هكذا في األصل والصواب خطب ابن الجوزي.
وزن
157
مجمع أصول الدين
البحرين وغيره
½17 11
Ed
i
32 -6
-7المختار وغيره
21½ -8
-9عالء الدين الحواري
-10الجمع بين الصحيحين
101½ -11
-12خليل الحديثي
½35
U
ni
-1
*ناصر الدين الغزي
قميص
سه
سه
242
الغنية
70
سه
½171
285
th e sal e book l et
|
21¼ -14
-15عمر الغانمي*
½25
جزوين
من السيرة
ومناسك
½20
¼67
قبــــــض
-13قصة يوسف
فتوح مصر
سه
-16الوجيز
تحرير التنبيه موالد
وغيره
12
11
جزؤ من
التفسير
وزن
20
64
وزن
سه
45
Pr
es
s
قبــــــض
21 -17
-18شمس الدين المقرئ*
سه
h
قبــــــض
44
هكذا في األصل والصواب .68
rg
-26
-27
-28
-29
-30
23
عبد الرحمن الغزي
البلدان
½9
عبد الرحمن القروي المغربي
36
مقبل*
بساطين
وغيره
9
Ed
i
-25فتوح الشام
التنزيل
وزن
سه
39
nb
u
-22أسرار التنزيل
25 -23
-24زين الدين
تاريخ بغداد
14
U
ni
ve
قبــــــض
rs
ity
-19قوت القلوب
45 -20
-21الشيخ تقي الدين الحوراني*
وزن
سه
½67
44
سه
½9
286
|
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نطعين عتق
13¼
منديل
أزرق
وشد
14
األربعين
الودعانية
األول من التهذيب-31
6¾
7½ -32
-33
-34
Ed
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سه
41½
8
Analysis and Edition of the Documentary
Network around the Sale Booklet
n addition to the sale booklet, the trustee al-Adhraʿī and his men produced
four further documents after the auction of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate in the
process of settling the estate: list #812 (a list of payments) and list #968 (a list
of receivables), as well as the accounts #800 (an accounts with payments and
expenses) and accounts #793 (another accounts with payments and expenses
in addition to receivables). These four documents, along with the sale booklet,
make up what we refer to as the ‘documentary network’. We employ this term
for the entire network of documents that we navigated in order to fathom the
underlying logic behind what was written in the sale booklet and reach conclusions about these buyers and what these purchases can tell us about them and
the deceased’s library. The intricate system of documents created around such
a mundane auction is also crucial for our argument that pragmatic literacy
had deeply penetrated the social fabric of a town such as Jerusalem by the late
eighth/fourteenth century. This chapter first discusses the network and then
provides editions of the individual accounts and lists.
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I
Analysis of the Documentary Network
These four documents matter firstly because they have been so crucial for
understanding the sale booklet, the auction and Burhān al-Dīn’s books. There
are many lists and accounts in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus, and they can be
quite difficult to understand. In many cases the correct reading of a number
in the sale booklet could only be ascertained after we saw it written in three
slightly varying forms in the network documents. The same is true for names,
where the network documents often offered the decisive clue as to how to read
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a specific name. In addition, the documents allowed us to identify further
individuals as the scribes often used different parts of the name of a person
to identify him in the various documents, such as the first name (ism, e.g.
Muḥammad), the father’s name (nasab, e.g. Ibn Yūsuf), the honorific (laqab,
e.g. Shihāb al-Dīn) and the relational name (nisba, e.g. al-Qalqashandī). While
this divergence in naming one and the same individual in different documents
is normally a problem for the purpose of identification, the inverse was true
in our case once we understood the documents’ interconnected logic. From
that point onwards, the divergence in naming patterns repeatedly helped us
to identify persons in other sources, especially al-ʿUlaymī’s chronicle al-Uns
al-jalīl.
In order to match an individual bearing different names in the documents,
the sums this individual owed or paid, as well as the repetitive order of names,
were crucial pieces of evidence. For instance, Payor 6 in #812 is a certain
‘Shihāb al-Dīn al-Muʾadhdhin’ (Plate II.1, left side, line 9), but no entry in the
sale booklet seemed to match this name. Yet this individual paid fifty-one-anda-half dirhams and there is only one person in the entire sale booklet who owed
exactly this sum at this position in the order of names, a certain ‘Wakīl bayt
al-māl Shihāb al-Dīn al-Miṣrī’ (Buyer 68 on Plate I.5, right side, line 4). As we
know from other sources that this Shihāb al-Dīn also held religious functions,
it is feasible that the writer of #812 used ‘al-Muʾadhdhin’ (muezzin) to identify
him.
Matching names between documents and thus getting additional identity markers enabled us to identify the buyers in other sources in order to
gain a sense of their historical contexts. To give but three examples of how
we proceeded for this step of identifying individuals: the sale booklet has
‘al-Maqarr al-Nāṣirī’ as Buyer 2. While the name hints at the political elite
there was no further evidence in the booklet to identify the buyer as such.
Yet #968 lists the same person as Debtor 2, but calls him ‘vice-regent’ (nāʾib).
In combination, this information allowed us to identify the individual as the
prominent officer and vice-regent (nāʾib al-salṭana) Nāṣir al-Dīn Muḥammad
b. Bahādar. The sale booklet also includes a certain ‘Shihāb al-Dīn Muthbit’
(Buyer 78; Plate I.5, right side, line 33), who we were not able to identify from
this name alone. However, the additional documents linked to the sale of
Burhān al-Dīn’s estate have him as ‘Ibn al-Muthbit’ (#968: Debtor 51, #800:
The Docum entary networ k
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Payor 2 and #793: Debtor 21/Payor 12). As we know that the laqab ‘Shihāb
al-Dīn’ was generally combined with the name ‘Aḥmad’ it is possible to identify him as the notary witness ‘Aḥmad b. Muḥammad Ibn al-Muthbit’, who
appears in Ḥaram al-sharīf document #741. The final example is Buyer 24
in the sale booklet, who is called only ‘the guardian’ (al-waṣī) – not a very
helpful title with which to identify him. Moreover, this title never occurs in
the other network documents. It was thus evident that he must have been
one of those names in these documents which we were unable to match with
those in the sale booklet. One of those unmatched names was a certain ‘(Ibn)
al-Bawwāb’ (#812: Payor 43, #793: Debtor 42/Payor 21, #968: Debtor 81 and
#800: Payor 19). It was only possible to match this (Ibn) al-Bawwāb with the
booklet’s guardian when we found in Ḥaram al-sharīf documents #106, #115
and #118 that a certain ‘Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Aḥmad Ibn al-Bawwāb’ was
described as ‘the guardian’ for Burhān al-Dīn’s son Maḥmūd Kamāl.
The second reason why these documents are of relevance goes beyond
Burhān al-Dīn’s books, their buyers and these buyers’ identities. The lists
and accounts in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus have to a large extent remained
unstudied, not only because they are challenging to read but because they generally lack context. These are clearly working documents that were produced
for internal purposes to keep track of the movement of specific monies, and
they were clearly written with a rather brief life cycle in mind. For instance,
the beginning of #968, which says ‘al-Khaṭīb: 361; al-Nāʾib: 466; Bulūṭ: 346;
al-Shāfiʿī: 194; al-Ḥanafī: 87’ is in itself meaningless. By reading these accounts
and lists as a network and subsequently linking them to the Burhān al-Dīn
sub-corpus it was possible to understand their logic and their function within
the process of settling the estate. As these documents are among the first such
lists and accounts from the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus to be set into a historical
framework, they might serve future scholarship as it turns to other lists and
accounts in this corpus (or elsewhere).
These network documents elude easy categorisation, and the rather
clumsy descriptors we chose for them reflect our own struggle to make sense
of their precise function. The documents do not fit any legal or administrative
category of documents described in the texts of that period or subsequent
categories devised by modern historians. Their elusiveness is a result of them
being part of a network; they can actually only be read as part of this specific
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network and not as stand-alone pieces. Paul Bertrand (from whom we borrowed the term ‘documentary network’) has argued, for comparable cases in
the medieval European context, that such network documents ‘were at once
different and interconnected, each document functioning correctly with reference to others’.1 In his case, the spread of such unclassifiable documents was
an expression of the spread of pragmatic literacy in the thirteenth century. In
our case the diachronic element is more difficult to argue, but there is no doubt
that the intricate system of documents created around such a mundane auction shows to what extent pragmatic literacy had penetrated the social fabric of
a town such as Jerusalem by the late eighth/fourteenth century.
As Table 8.1 shows, the four documents and the sale booklet served different functions as the trustee and his men were establishing, recalculating
and keeping track of three different sums: the amount each buyer had (still) to
pay; the amount of money already received from the buyers at a given point;
and the expenses incurred in the process of settling the estate. We thus have
separate lists for receivables, for payments and for expenses. To make things
more complicated we find different lists on one and the same document; #793
is the most complex one, as it carries two lists for payments, one receivables list
and one expenses list. Even if a document has only one function the documentary practices can still be complex. For instance, #812 only lists payments, but
it consists of two separate lists, one written by al-Adhraʿī on 3.11.789/1387
on the recto of the sheet and the other written by his scribe Shams al-Dīn
Muḥammad al-Ṣayrafī eleven days later on its verso. We see that some buyers
first made a partial payment to al-Adhraʿī and settled the remainder eleven days
later.2
These documents were used at different moments during the settling of
the estate and were written by different scribes. The documents in Table 8.1
are organised according to the chronology that we suggest for them, but it has
to be underlined that only two of them actually carry a date (#812 and #968).
Further documents may very well have existed, and we have given one example
of such a ‘ghost document’ where we are certain that it must have. This is the
1
2
Bertrand, Documenting the Everyday, Ch. 6.
For instance, Fakhr al-Dīn Īyās (Payor 3), who owes 296.5 dirhams. He pays 69.75 dirhams in the
first accounts and 226.75 dirhams in the second accounts.
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‘live’ transcript of the auction discussed in Chapter 4, that is, a draft document
that must have been written during the auction to keep track of who bought
which lot. The chronology suggested here is based on the documentary logic
evident from these accounts and lists. For instance, documents #793 and #800
are very similar and both are undated. Yet it is highly likely that #793 is the later
document as it pulls together various bits of information that we find in #800
separately, such as the costs for the porters or the payments to Shīrīn.
Document #812 was the first document to keep track of the payments
that started to come in during the auction and in the following days. In parallel with #812, or shortly after, al-Adhraʿī must have decided to let his scribe
Muḥammad (Ibn) ʿAshā write a clean version of the ‘ghost’ live transcript, the
sale booklet. Here, (Ibn) ʿAshā took the information from the live transcript,
which must have been organised by the objects sold, and re-arranged it by
the buyers. This was evidently a much more useful way of organising a list
meant to keep track of receivables and payments. At the same time, al-Adhraʿī
also wanted a short version of this list, and one of his scribes produced #968,
which is a summary of the sale booklet. The scribe of #968 copied the names
of the buyers and the total sums they owed from the sale booklet in exactly
the same order, though the booklet’s sheets were separate rather than folded
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Function of doc.
is to register …
Scribe
Date
No. of
names
Names in
order of …
ghost document
(‘live transcript’)
objects’ prices
al-Adhraʿī or
one of his men
before
3.11.789
prob. 87
sold
objects
#061/#180/#532
(‘sale booklet’)
receivables &
prices
Muḥammad
(Ibn) ʿAshā
before
14.11.789
87
social
status
#812
payments
al-Adhraʿī
al-Ṣayrafī
3.11.789
14.11.789
52
incoming
payments
#968
receivables
al-Adhraʿī or
one of his men
14.11.789
86
= sale
booklet
#800 (‘1st
account’)
payments &
expenses
al-Ṣayrafī
shortly after
14.11.789
40
~ #812
#793 (‘2nd
account’)
payments,
receivables &
expenses
al-Ṣayrafī
shortly after
14.11.789
76 (52
payors)
= sale
booklet &
#812
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into booklet (daftar) form. The sale booklet was clearly more authoritative
than #968 and was continuously updated. For instance, the amounts due from
three buyers were altered in the booklet and this was done by wiping away the
old sums (though they remained legible) and writing the new sums in their
place.3 Yet we see that document #968 retained the old sums in all three cases.
The five documents settling Burhān al-Dīn’s estate form such a dense network that information is often duplicated in a variety of ways. For instance,
#812 and #793 both list buyers’ payments and in each document we find
fifty-two buyers settling their obligations in full or in part. Apart from three
cases the names are exactly identical in both lists, and so are, in most cases, the
amounts they paid.4 Yet we can see why al-Adhraʿī and his scribes had two
lists with the same information, as #793 also has a debtors’ list to simplify the
process of keeping track of receivables.
The underlying logic to this method of keeping track of receivables brings
us to a fascinating feature that has hardly been studied so far in late medieval Arabic lists, namely strikethroughs. As briefly mentioned previously, we
observe in the sale booklet that numerous names have vertical strikethroughs,
and/or the term ‘qubiḍa’ (‘received’) was vertically written across the name
(see Plate I.16). We observe this phenomenon with forty-one buyers, though
with some variation, as we find some names with the term ‘qubiḍa’ and strikethrough (seventeen) and in other cases only the term ‘qubiḍa’ (eight) or only
the strikethrough (sixteen). The logic of these features only became clear to
us when we worked with the other accounts and lists, that is, once we had
reconstituted the documentary network. It transpired that the strikethroughs
and the term were added when the scribe al-Ṣayrafī was writing account #793.
To write #793, al-Ṣayrafī took the list of payments #812 and copied the names
in exactly the same order (the names on page #793a, left, follow the same order
as those on #812b, left, and those on #793b, left, follow the same order as those
3
4
(1) Badr al-Dīn Ḥusayn al-Mālikī (Buyer 75 in the sale booklet) is registered as owing 150.5 dirhams, but this sum was originally 160.5 dirhams, which we also find in #968 (Debtor 48). The
alteration from ‘60’ to ’50’ is clearly visible. (2) Aḥmad al-Qaramānī (Buyer 77) is registered as
owing 16.5 dirhams, but this sum was originally 36.5 dirhams, which we also find in #968 (Debtor
50). The alteration from ‘30’ to ’10’ is again clearly visible. (3) Shams al-Dīn al-Karakī (Buyer 28)
is registered as owing 50 dirhams, but this sum was originally 150 dirhams, which we also find in
#968 (Debtor 65). The alteration to the ‘100’ is once again clearly visible.
Buyers 47, 51 and 75 are in #812, but not in #793. Buyers 34 and 73 are in #793, but not in #812.
Plate Section II
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The Documentary Network
around the Sale Booklet
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II.1 List of payments after the auction of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate, sheet 1a
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #812a, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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II.2 List of payments after the auction of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate, sheet 1b
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #812b, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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II.3 List of receivables after the auction of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #968, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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II.4 First accounts with payments and expenses after the auction of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate,
sheet 1a
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #800a, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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II.5 First accounts with payments and expenses after the auction of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate,
sheet 1b
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #800b, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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II.6 Second accounts with receivables, expenses and payments, sheet 1a
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #793a, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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II.7 Second accounts with receivables, expenses and payments, sheet 1b
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #793b, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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on #812a, left). That al-Ṣayrafī relied on #812 is not too surprising as he had
written half of it himself in the previous days. The next step for producing the
new account #793 was that he wrote a list of those buyers who had not yet fully
settled their obligation. For this list, he took the sale booklet and checked whose
names did not appear among those who had paid in #812. For this debtors’ list
he clearly leafed through the sheets of the sale booklet, as the order of names
follows exactly that of the booklet’s sheets (Debtor 1 in #793 is Buyer 1 in the
sale booklet, Debtor 2 is Buyer 2 and so on). As with #968, we observe here too
that al-Ṣayrafī did not follow the ‘page logic’ of the booklet where the sheets
were nestled together. Rather, he took the sheets of the booklet separately and
first took sheet #061 and copied the names of those still owing monies (Debtors
1 to 11), then took sheet #532 and again copied the relevant names (Debtors 12
to 26), and finally did the same for sheet #180 (Debtors 27 to 44).
The main incentive for al-Adhraʿī and his men in producing this documentary network in the days after the auction of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate was to
make sure that no buyer evaded payment. However, producing ever newer lists
and accounts was not sufficient for this purpose. Rather, they had to engage
with the documents in their hands, in particular the sale booklet, and here we
come to the strikethroughs. While writing #793 al-Ṣayrafī not only copied the
order of names from the sale booklet, but he also used it in a more active way.
While making his way through the booklet he crossed out the names of those
who had settled their obligations in full. In this way he could be sure from
whom he and his colleagues still had to collect the outstanding monies. While
crossing out the names in the sale booklet he did the same in list #812, more
precisely only in the second part that he had written himself.
After this point al-Adhraʿī and his men no longer used the sale booklet to
keep track of the incoming payments (if all names had been crossed out in the
sale booklet we would not have been able to see the work in progress and thus
to identify its function during the writing of document #793). Rather, we see
that the debtors’ list in #793 became the list they henceforth worked from to
collect monies. In this new debtors’ list numerous names carry a strikethrough
that must have been added in the following days (sixteen out of forty-four)
when more and more debtors settled their obligations in full.
The documents on settling Burhān al-Dīn’s estate were not only connected to each other in intricate ways; they were also part of a much wider
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documentary network of which we only see glimpses. For example, the list of
expenses in accounts #800 registers three substantial payments to individuals
otherwise unknown (800 dirhams to Ibn Shujāʿ (?), 300 dirhams to al-Shaykh
Aḥmad and 200 dirhams to Ibn Ṣaṣar). None of these individuals, or the payments, are linked to any person or transaction in the other lists. They were
most likely creditors who successfully claimed repayment of outstanding debts
from Burhān al-Dīn’s estate. To claim these debts, they must have produced
promissory notes that have since disappeared from our historical record.5
Edition of the Documentary Network
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In the lists below, the names appearing in the documents are matched with the
buyers in the sale booklet. We also provide the sum given in the sale booklet
if it differs from the sum mentioned in the respective document. We do not
provide cross-references among the individuals named in the documents as
this information can be found in the respective entry of the individual in the
sale booklet in Chapter 7.
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This document was written by the judge’s trustee al-Adhraʿī and his scribe
al-Ṣayrafī. It is a list of fifty-two payors who settled their obligations either in
part or in full. This list is divided into two sections, with al-Adhraʿī first registering twenty-three payors (dated 3.11.789/1387) and al-Ṣayrafī subsequently
registering twenty-nine payors (dated 14.11.789/1387).
In this document al-Adhraʿī and al-Ṣayrafī registered the names of the
payors without considering the order of names in the sale booklet. That
the order of names is entirely different means that #812 most likely reflects
the order of the actual payments coming in. This list remained subsequently
in use and served as point of reference for at least two further documents,
#793 and #800. The order of names in #793 is identical to the order in #812
and the order of names in #800 is very similar to it. That #793 and #800 were
written after #812 is evident from the fact that these two documents have
5
Such promissory notes often took the form of an acknowledgement deed (iqrār; cf. Müller,
Kadi und seine Zeugen, 472–6). In the context of settling estates, we find in estate inventories the
term masṭūr when the witnesses registered the presence of promissory notes (for instance #146
(795/1393), Muḥammad b. Ḥusayn al-Qāriʾ, l. 7).
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several buyers who settled their obligations in full while these buyers had not
yet done so in #812. That #812 is an early document in the process of settling
Burhān al-Dīn’s estate is also obvious from the fact that it has, like the sale
booklet, a detailed heading, which gives a full rendering of his name, ‘Burhān
al-Dīn al-Nāṣirī’, and the invocation ‘may God have mercy upon him’. In the
subsequent documents, by contrast, the invocation disappears and the name is
shortened to ‘al-Nāṣirī’. At this later point, the scribes clearly knew that these
documents would go into the file of Burhān al-Dīn, which already contained
several network documents.
The document’s two sections each have the heading ‘… [the document’s
writer] Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Adhraʿī from what was sold of the estate
of the late Burhān al-Dīn al-Nāṣirī (may God have mercy upon him) on the 3rd
Dhū al-Qaʿda of the year [78]9’ and ‘What Shams al-Dīn al-Ṣayrafī received on
the 14th Dhū al-Qaʿda 789’.
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Payor 1 Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ghazāwī: 157 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 57
Payor 2 Ghars al-Dīn Khalīl Ibn ʿAskar: 381 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 13
(510.5 dirhams)6
Payor 3 Fakhr al-Dīn Īyās al-ʿAjamī: 69.75 + 226.75 = 296.5 dirhams; in sale
booklet buyer 41. This payor settles his obligations in two instalments.
The second payment is registered in the second list on this accounts’ verso
(see Payor 3b below).
Payor 4 al-Shaykh ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Ibn al-Ḥawārī: 171.5 dirhams; in sale booklet
Buyer 59
Payor 5 Shams al-Dīn Ibn al-Khalīlī: 252 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 12
Payor 6 Shihāb al-Dīn al-Muʾadhdhin: 51.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 687
6
7
This identification is tentative, as the laqab in the accounts seems to read ‘ʿIzz al-Dīn’. However, we
argue here that it should read ‘Ghars al-Dīn’ just as in the sale booklet. This Ghars al-Dīn Khalīl b.
Makkī is the only possible match among the five buyers who spent more than 381 dirhams in the
sale booklet. In addition, we find in #793, which follows the order of the names of #812, in exactly
this position the payment of exactly the amount owed by ‘Khalīl b. Makkī’ according to the sale
booklet.
He is named in the sale booklet quite differently as ‘Wakīl bayt al-māl Shihāb al-Dīn al-Miṣrī’.
However, the match is feasible, as he also held religious functions (Müller, Kadi und seine
Zeugen, 404/5) which might explain ‘al-Muʾadhdhin’, and as the sum of 51.5 dirhams is identical
in both cases.
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Payor 7 Ḥusayn al-Ḥalabī: 11.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 40
Payor 8 Shuqayr: 3.375 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 84
Payor 9 Badr al-Dīn Ibn Makkī: 140 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 14
(180.25 dirhams)
Payor 10 Shams al-Dīn al-Shaykh: 27.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 7
(55.25 dirhams)
Payor 11 ʿUmar b. Ghānim: 64 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 61
Payor 12 Taqī al-Dīn al-Ḥawrānī: 39 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 63
Payor 13 al-Kutubī: 4.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 29 (6.75 dirhams)
Payor 14 Ibrāhīm al-Ḥawrānī: 10 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 35
Payor 15 ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm: 4 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 83
Payor 16 Burhān al-Dīn al-Shaykh: 33.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 8
(52 dirhams)
Payor 17 al-Rabbāwī: 4 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 36 (5.75 dirhams)
subtotal: 1,454 dirhams8
Payor 18 Bulūṭ: 340 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 3 (346 dirhams)
Payor 19 Ibn ʿAshā: 15 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 70 (102.375 dirhams)
Payor 20 Ibn Shihāb: 458.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 29 (466 dirhams)
Payor 21 al-Qalyūbī: 183.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 54 (355.75 dirhams)
subtotal: 2,451 dirhams
Payor 22 Burhān al-Dīn b. Qāsim: 265 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 10
(566 dirhams)10
Payor 23 Ismāʿīl: 2.5;11 in sale booklet Buyer 47 (446.5 dirhams)12
subtotal: 2,718.5 dirhams
Identification of Payors (al-Ṣayrafī’s list)
Payor 24 Shihāb al-Dīn al-Muhandis: 1,295 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 11
Payor 25 Burhān al-Dīn al-ʿAjamī: 179.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 56
8
9
10
11
12
Our readings of the amounts paid by Payor 1 to Payor 17 give the slightly higher sum of
1,460 dirhams.
This match exclusively relies on the sums involved.
The list adds ‘yad kātibihi’, which might mean that the document’s scribe, here al-Adhraʿī, paid
this sum.
On account of damage to the document, the exact sum is not known.
The only buyer with the name Ismāʿīl in the sale booklet is Buyer 47.
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Payor 26 al-Sharīf al-Maghribī: 14.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 66
(41.5 dirhams)
Payor 27 Shams al-Dīn al-Quṭb: 138 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 19
(142 dirhams)13
Payor 28 [Ibn Abī Muḥammad: 66.75 dirhams]; in sale booklet Buyer 1814
see Payor 3 above: Payor 3b Fakhr al-Dīn Īyās: 226.75 dirhams; in sale booklet
Buyer 41
Payor 29 Qāsim al-ʿAjamī: 15 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 52
Payor 30 al-Shaykh Muḥammad b. Saʿīd: 30.25 dirhams; in sale booklet
Buyer 55
Payor 31 al-Ḥadīthī: 54 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 60 (67.25 dirhams)
Payor 32 Muqbil: 67 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 64 (68 dirhams)
Payor 33 Shams al-Dīn al-Azharī: 124 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 50
(167.5 dirhams)
Payor 34 Shihāb al-Dīn (Ibn al-)Muthbit: 50.5 dirhams; in sale booklet
Buyer 78
Payor 35 al-Ḥarjāwī: 20 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 72
Payor 36 al-Shaykh ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Ibn al-Naqīb: 65.75 dirhams; in sale booklet
Buyer 6
Payor 37 al-Ṣallatī: 17.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 16 (19.5 dirhams)
Payor 38 ʿAlī Ibn al-Ḥamawī: 20.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 48
Payor 39 al-Firyābī ʿAbd Allāh: 92.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 53
Payor 40 Junayd: 44 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 43
Payor 41 Shams al-Dīn al-Muqriʾ: 45 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 62
Payor 42 Shihāb al-Dīn Ibn Sarāʾī: 69.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 42
Payor 43 Ibn al-Bawwāb: 42.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 24
(117.16 dirhams)
Payor 44 Yūsuf al-Jītī: 36 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 37
Payor 45 ʿUmar al-Zajjāj: 15 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 17
13
14
‘Wuzina’.
The payor and the sum are not identifiable, owing to damage to the document. The name and sum
proposed here exclusively rely on the position of the name. #793 has the same order of names as
#812 and we find Ibn Abī Muḥammad in #793 at exactly the position at which we have the damage
in this document.
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Payor 46 Aḥmad al-Qaramānī: 16 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 77
(16.5 dirhams)
Payor 47 al-Zarʿī: 6.5 + 78.5 = 85 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 76
Payor 48 Sharaf al-Dīn al-ʿAjlūnī: 75.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 67
(76.25 dirhams)
Payor 49 Zayn al-Dīn Maḥmūd Ibn al-Sarāʾī: 242 dirhams; in sale booklet
Buyer 58
Payor 50 Ibn Raslān: 70 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 25
Payor 51 al-Akh Shihāb al-Dīn: 75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 45
(101 dirhams)
Payor 52 Ḥusayn al-Mālikī: 150 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 75
(150.5 dirhams)
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Symbols used:
|| interlinear text
[ ] editors’ insertion of letters or words
[?] tentative reading
)[…] non-legible or missing word(s
* = vertical strikethrough of name
/812أ/يسار
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[ ...كاتبه؟[ محمد بن عبد هللا األذرعي
مما أبيع من تركة المرحوم برهان الدين الناصري تغمده
هللا برحمته و]ذلك في[ ثالث شهر ذي القعدة الحرام
من شهور سنة تسع و]ثمانين وسبعماية]
من عز الدين خليل بن عسكر
من ناصر الدين الغزاو]ي]
381
157
من الشيخ عالء الدين بن الحواري
من فخر الدين إياس العجمي
½171
¾69
من شهاب الدين المؤذن
من شمس الدين بن الخليلي
½51
252
بدر الدين بن مكي
من شقير
من حسين الحلبي
140
¼⅛3
½11
تقي الدين الحوراني
عمر بن غانم
شمس الدين الشيخ
39
64
½27
برهان الدين الشيخ
عبد العظيم
إبراهيم الحوراني
الكتبي
¾33
4
10
¾4
ابن عشا
بلوط
ســـــــــــــه
الرباوي
15
340
1454
4
ســـه
القليوبي
ابن شهاب
15
2451
16 ،69
¾183½ ،170
¾458
These two numbers refer most likely to two partial payments that this buyer made before he paid
the full sum of 183.5 dirhams.
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/812ب/يمين
1
2
3
4
]يد كاتبه[
من برهان الدين بن قاسم
265
][...
مكملة ][...
إسماعيل
]½[2
½2718
/812ب/يسار
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الشريف المغربي ][...
½14
[فخر[ الدين إياس*
¾226
مقبل*
الحديثي
67
54
الحرجاوي*
20
علي بن الحموي
¼20
شمس الدين المقري
45
يوسف الجيتي
36
الزرعي*
½6½, 78
ابن رسالن
70
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3
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6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
الذي قبضه شمس الدين الصيرفي بتاريخ رابع عشر
ذي القعدة سنة تسع وثمانين وسبعمائة
برهان الدين العجمي*
من شهاب الدين المهندس
¾[1] 79
1295
][...
من شمس الدين القطب*
]¾ [...
138
الشيخ محمد بن سعيد*
*قاسم العجمي
¼30
15
شهاب الدين مثبت*
شمس الدين األزهري*
½50
124
الشيخ عالء الدين بن النقيب* الصلتي
¼17
¾65
جنيد*
الفريابي عبد هللا*
44
½92
ابن البواب
شهاب الدين بن سرائي*
½42
½69
أحمد القرماني
عمر الزجاج
16
15
زين الدين محمود بن السرائي
شرف الدين العجلوني
242
¼،74نقد 2
حسين المالكي
األخ شهاب الدين
]1[50
75
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301
II Document #968 – List of Receivables (Plate II.3)
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This document – we do not know its scribe’s name – was used by al-Adhraʿī and
his men as a very concise summary of the sale booklet containing only the buyers’
names and the total sums they owed. This summary list lists eighty-five of the
eighty-seven names in the sale booklet. We assume that these two names were left
out by mistake.16 The list has also a ‘mystery buyer’, a certain al-Sharīf al-Dallāl
(Debtor 41), who also appears in accounts #793 (Debtor 22). This debtor is not
mentioned in the sale booklet and must have been added later to the list of debtors, either because the scribe forgot to list him in the sale booklet or because this
al-Sharīf al-Dallāl bought items after the sale booklet had been written.
In this document the scribe followed the order of names in the sale booklet, and we see that he first took sheet #061 and copied all its names, then took
sheet #532 and again copied all the names and finally did the same for sheet
#180 (see the footnotes under ‘Identification of Debtors’ below). The close
relationship between the sale booklet and this list is also evident from the fact
that in seventy-seven cases the sums match exactly. In three cases the sums did
originally match, but were subsequently altered in the sale booklet.17 In three
other cases the difference is merely half a dirham.18
The document’s heading reads ‘All that was sold of the estate of the late
al-Nāṣirī, 15 Dhū al-Qaʿda 789’. In our view this list was written shortly after
the sale booklet, but before documents #800 and #793. This assumption
is very much based on the three ‘outdated’ sums that we find in this document. They match sums in the sale booklet, but in the sale booklet they were
subsequently altered, something which did not happen here. Al-Adhraʿī and
his men must have altered the sums in the sale booklet while collecting the
outstanding monies. During this time, they were also producing the accounts
#800 and #793. The present document #968 did thus not have the function
of the sale booklet, which was used for keeping track of monies received and
outstanding monies.
16
17
18
Badr al-Dīn Ibn Qāsim (Buyer 69 in sale booklet) and Ibrāhīm al-Ḥarjāwī (Buyer 72).
Debtors 48, 50 and 65.
Debtors 38, 40 and 61.
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Identification of Debtors
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Debtor 1 al-Khaṭīb: 361 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 1
Debtor 2 al-Nāʾib: 466 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 2
Debtor 3 Bulūṭ: 346 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 3
Debtor 4 al-Shāfiʿī: 194 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 4
Debtor 5 al-Ḥanafī: 87 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 5
Debtor 6 ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Ibn al-Naqīb: 65.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 6
Debtor 7 Shams al-Dīn: 55.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 7
Debtor 8 Burhān al-Dīn: 52 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 8
Debtor 9 Shams al-Dīn al-Dayrī: 94.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 9
Debtor 10 Burhān al-Dīn Qāsim: 576 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 10
(566 dirhams)
Debtor 11 Shihāb al-Dīn al-Muhandis: 1,295 dirhams; in sale booklet
Buyer 11
Debtor 12 Shams al-Dīn al-Khalīlī: 252 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 12
Debtor 13 Khalīl b. Makkī: 510.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 13
Debtor 14 Badr al-Dīn Ibn Makkī: 180.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 1419
Debtor 15 Fakhr al-Dīn Īyās: 296.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 41
Debtor 16 Shihāb al-Dīn al-Sarāʾī: 69.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 42
Debtor 17 Junayd: 44 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 43
Debtor 18 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Naqīb: 70 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 44
Debtor 19 his brother Shihāb al-Dīn: 110 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 45
(101 dirhams)
Debtor 20 Yūsuf b. Dhū al-Nūn: 100 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 46
Debtor 21 al-Shaykh Ismāʿīl: 441.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 47
Debtor 22 ʿAlī al-Ḥamawī: 20.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 48
Debtor 23 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Qibābī: 87.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 49
Debtor 24 al-Azharī: 167.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 50
Debtor 25 al-Sharīf al-Maghribī: 23.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 51
Debtor 26 Qāsim al-ʿAjamī: 15 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 52
Debtor 27 ʿAbd Allāh al-Firyābī: 92.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 53
19
This is the last name taken from sheet #061 of the sale booklet. The following names are taken from
sheet #532.
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Debtor 28 al-Qalyūbī: 355.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 54
Debtor 29 Muḥammad b. Saʿīd: 30.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 55
Debtor 30 Burhān al-Dīn al-ʿAjamī: 179.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 56
Debtor 31 Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ghazāwī: 157 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 57
Debtor 32 Maḥmūd al-Sarāʾī: 242 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 58
Debtor 33 al-Ḥawārī: 171.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 59
Debtor 34 Khalīl al-Ḥadīthī: 67.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 60
Debtor 35 ʿUmar al-Ghānimī: 64 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 61
Debtor 36 Ibn al-Muqriʾ: 45 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 62
Debtor 37 Taqī al-Dīn al-Ḥawrānī: 39 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 63
Debtor 38 Muqbil: 67 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 64 (67.5 dirhams)
Debtor 39 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ghazzī: 9.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 65
Debtor 40 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Qarawī: 41 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 66
(41.5 dirhams)
Debtor 41 al-Sharīf Dallāl: n/a; not in sale booklet, in #793 Debtor 22
(27.25 dirhams)
Debtor 42 Sharaf al-Dīn al-ʿAjlūnī: 76.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 67
Debtor 43 Wakīl bayt al-māl: 51.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 6820
Debtor 44 Ibn ʿAshā: 102.375 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 70
Debtor 45 Jamāl al-Dīn al-Dayrī: 63 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 7121
Debtor 46 Taghrī W-r-m-sh: 20.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 73
Debtor 47 Shams al-Dīn al-Ramlī: 39.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 74
Debtor 48 Badr al-Dīn al-Mālikī: 160.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 75
(150.5 dirhams)22
Debtor 49 Ḥamdān al-Zarʿī: 85 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 76
Debtor 50 Aḥmad al-Qaramānī: 36.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 77
(16.5 dirhams)23
20
21
22
23
The scribe forgot to note down the following entry, which should have been Badr al-Dīn Ibn
Qāsim (Buyer 69 in sale booklet).
The scribe forgot to note down the following entry, which should have been Ibrāhīm al-Ḥarjāwī
(Buyer 72 in sale booklet).
The original sum in the sale booklet was also 160.5 dirhams, but the sum was subsequently altered
to 150.5.
The original sum in the sale booklet was also 36.5 dirhams, but the sum was subsequently altered
to 16.5.
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Debtor 51 Ibn al-Muthbit: 50.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 7824
Debtor 52 Muḥammad al-Andalusī: 36.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 15
Debtor 53 Burhān al-Dīn al-Ṣallatī: 19.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 16
Debtor 54 ʿUmar al-Zajjāj: 15 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 17
Debtor 55 Ibn Abū Maḥmūd: 66.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 18
Debtor 56 Shams al-Dīn Ibn al-Quṭb: 138 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 1925
Debtor 57 al-Yatīm Kamāl: 56.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 20
Debtor 58 Shams al-Dīn al-Khaṭīb: 12.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 21
Debtor 59 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Zayn: 14.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 22
Debtor 60 Shihāb al-Dīn b. Shīdha: 10.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 23
Debtor 61 al-Waṣī: 117 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 24 (117.16 dirhams)
Debtor 62 Ibn Raslān: 70 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 25
Debtor 63 Yūsuf Ibn al-Naqīb: 16 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 26
Debtor 64 al-Muwaqqiʿ: 48 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 27
Debtor 65 Shams al-Dīn al-Karakī: 150 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 28
(50 dirhams)26
Debtor 66 al-Kutubī: 6.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 29
Debtor 67 Shams al-Dīn al-Tūnisī: 3.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 30
Debtor 68 al-Nāṣirī al-Dallāl: 24.3 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 31
Debtor 69 Ibn Saḥlūl: 28 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 32
Debtor 70 al-ʿArrābī: 12 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 33
Debtor 71 Ibn al-Duwayk: 30 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 34
Debtor 72 Ibrāhīm al-Ḥawrānī: 10 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 35
Debtor 73 al-Rabbāwī: 5.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 36
Debtor 74 Yūsuf al-Jītī: 36 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 37
Debtor 75 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Iskandānī: 10 dirhams; in sale booklet
Buyer 38
Debtor 76 al-Sakākīnī: 8.875 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 39
Debtor 77 Ḥusayn al-Ḥalabī: 11.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 40
Debtor 78 Muḥammad al-Iskandānī: 10.25 dirhams; in sale booklet
Buyer 79
24
25
26
This is the last name taken from sheet #532 of the sale booklet. The following names are taken from
sheet #180.
138 dirhams is his obligation in weighted dirhams (see Chapter 7).
The original sum in the sale booklet was also 150 dirhams, but the sum was subsequently altered to 50.
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Debtor 79 Abū Yazīd: 3 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 80
Debtor 80 Aḥmad al-Saqqā: 6.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 81
Debtor 81 al-Bawwāb: 2.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 82
Debtor 82 ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm: 4 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 83
Debtor 83 Muḥammad Shuqayr: 3.375 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 84
Debtor 84 Yūsuf al-Ḍarīr: 3 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 85
Debtor 85 Ibn Sharwīn: 0.25 dirham; in sale booklet Buyer 86
Debtor 86 Ibn Yūnus: 12.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 87
total: 9,242 dirhams27
27
Our readings of the amounts owed by the debtors give a sum of 9,216.75 dirhams.
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
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306
)Edition of Document #968 (Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum
/968أ /يمين
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28سقط سه ًوا من حصره بدر الدين بن قاسم انظر /235أ /يمين -السطر .7
Ed
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2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
جميع ما أبيع من تركة المرحوم الناصري بتاريخ خامس عشر ذي القعدة
ذي القعدة الحرام سنة تسع ثمانين وسبعماية
الحنفي
الشافعي
بلوط
النائب
الخطيب
87
194
346
466
361
شمس الدين الديري
برهان الدين
عالء الدين ابن النقيب شمس الدين
¾94
52
¼55
¾65
شهاب الدين المهندس شمس الدين الخليلي خليل بن مكي
برهان الدين قاسم
½510
252
1295
576
شهاب الدين السرائي جنيد
بدر الدين ابن مكي فخر الدين إياس
44
½69
½296
¼180
عبد الرحمن النقيب أخوه شهاب الدين يوسف ابن ذو النون الشيخ إسماعيل
¼441
100
110
70
الشريف المغربي
عبد الرحمن القبابي األزهري
علي الحموي
½23
½167
½87
¼20
محمد بن سعيد
القليوبي
عبد هللا الفريابي
قاسم العجمي
¼30
¾355
½92
15
الحواري
برهان الدين العجمي ناصر الدين الغزاوي محمود السرائي
½171
242
157
¾179
تقي الدين الحوراني
ابن المقرئ
عمر الغانمي
خليل الحديثي
39
45
64
¼67
عبد الرحمن الغزي عبد الرحمن القروي والشريف دالل
مقبل
][...
41
½9
67
28
ابن عشا
شرف الدين العجلوني وكيل بيت المال
¼⅛102
½51
¼76
307
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The Docum entary networ k
/968أ /يسار
جمال الدين
الديري
63
بدر الدين
المالكي
½160
محمد األندلسي
1
2
3
4
5
حمدان
الزرعي
85
برهان الدين
الصلطي
½19
اليتيم كمال
ity
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¾5
حسين الحلبي
½11
عبد العظيم
4
ســـــه
ni
ve
70
الكتبي
¾6
العرابي
h
30
15
شمس الدين
الخطيب
¼12
ابن رسالن
¾66
عبد الرحمن
الزين
½14
يوسف ابن
النقيب
16
شمس الدين
التونسي
½3
ابن الدويك
30
عبد الرحمن
اإلسنكداني
10
أبو يزيد
3
يوسف الضرير
3
rg
29
1[1]7
شمس الدين
الكركي
150
ابن سحلول
28
الرباوي
½36
عمر الزجاج
½50
ابن أبو محرد
30
12
يوسف الجيتي
36
محمد اإلسكنداني
¼10
محمد شقير
¼⅛3
9242
سقط سه ًوا من حصره إبراهيم الحرجاوي انظر /235أ /يمين -السطر .61
يقصد برهان الدين ابن أبي محمود.
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17
18
19
20
21
22
½56
الوصي
¾20
أحمد القرماني
nb
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12
13
14
15
48
الناصري الدالل
⅓24
إبراهيم
الحوراني
10
السكاكيني
¾⅛8
البواب
¾2
ابن يونس
½12
Pr
es
s
36½ 6
7شمس الدين بن
القطب
138 8
9شهاب الدين بن
شيذة
10¼ 10
11الموقع
تغري ورمش
29
شمس الدين
الرملي
½39
ابن المثبت
أحمد السقا
½6
ابن شروين
¼ درهم
308
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III Document #800 – First Accounts with Payments and Expenses
(Plates II.4 and II.5)
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This document was written by al-Ṣayrafī and has two components: (1) list of
forty payors, that is, those buyers who settled their obligations in part or in
full; and (2) expenses incurred during settling the estate.
When writing this list, al-Ṣayrafī clearly had document #812 in
front of him as the order of names is very similar (though not completely
identical). The position of each payor in #812 is indicated below in brackets. The document’s two sections have the headings ‘Monies received by
Muḥammad al-Ṣayrafī from the [outstanding] dirhams [from the sale of the
estate] of al-Nāṣirī’ and ‘Expenditure by the [document’s] scribe from [the
revenues of the sale of ] al-Nāṣirī’s estate’. We assume that al-Ṣayrafī wrote this
document before #793 as #793 pulls together various bits of information that
we find in #800 separately, such as the costs for the porters or the payments
to Shīrīn.
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Identification of Payors
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Payor 1 al-Azharī: 167 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 50 (167.5 dirhams) [in
#812 no. 33]
Payor 2 Ibn al-Muthbit: 50.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 78 [in #812 no. 34]
Payor 3 al-Ḥadīthī: 58 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 60 (67.25 dirhams) [in
#812 no. 31]
Payor 4 Ibrāhīm Ibn Maḥmūd: 66.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 18
[in #812 no. 28]
Payor 5 Ibn al-Muhandis: 1,295 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 11 [in #812
no. 24]
Payor 6 Ibrāhīm al-ʿAjamī: 179.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 56 (179.75
dirhams) [in #812 no. 25]
Payor 7 Zayn al-Dīn al-Qarawī: 14.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 66 [in #812
no. 26]
Payor 8 Ibn al-Quṭb: 138 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 19 (142 dirhams) [in
#812 no. 27]
Payor 9 ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al-Naqīb: 65.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 6 [in #812
no. 36]
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Payor 10 Muqbil: 67 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 64 (68 dirhams) [in #812
no. 32]
Payor 11 al-Ḥarjāwī: 20 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 72 [in #812 no. 35]
Payor 12 al-Ṣallatī:31 17 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 16 (19.5 dirhams)
[in #812 no. 37]
Payor 13 Muḥammad: 3.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 84 (3.375 dirhams)
[in #812 no. 8]
Payor 14 Ibn al-Ḥamawī: 20 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 48 (20.25 dirhams)
[in #812 no. 38]
Payor 15 al-Firyābī: 91.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 53 (92.5 dirhams)
[in #812 no. 39]
Payor 16 Junayd: 44 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 43 [in #812 no. 40]
Payor 17 Shams al-Dīn al-Muqriʾ: 45 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 62 [in #812
no. 41]
Payor 18 Shihāb al-Dīn al-Sarāʾī: 69.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 42
[in #812 no. 42]
Payor 19 al-Bawwāb: 48.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 24 [in #812
no. 43]
Payor 20 Qāsim: 15 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 51 [not in in #812]
Payor 21 Yūsuf al-Jītī: 36 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 37 [in #812 no. 44]
Payor 22 Ibn Saʿīd: 30.25 dirhams;32 in sale booklet Buyer 55 [in #812
no. 30]
Payor 23 ʿUmar: 15 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 17 [in #812 no. 45]
Payor 24 Fakhr al-Dīn Īyās: 226.75; in sale booklet Buyer 41 (296.5 dirhams)
[in #812 no. 3]
Payor 25 Ḥamd al-Zarī: 85 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 76 [in #812
no. 47]
Payor 26 Aḥmad al-Qaramānī: 16 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 77
(16.5 dirhams)[in #812 no. 46]
Payor 27 al-ʿAjlūnī: 74 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 67 (76.25 dirhams)
[in #812 no. 48]
31
32
Here written as ‘al-Sallatī’.
The ‘.25’ is not visible in the document. However, we find material damage at this position and the
sum total for this buyer in #968 and the sale booklet is 30.25 dirhams.
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Expenses
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Payor 28 Ibn Raslān: 70 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 25 [in #812 no. 50]
Payor 29 Ḥusayn al-Mālikī: 147 dirhams;33 in sale booklet Buyer 75
(150.5 dirhams) [in #812 no. 52]
Payor 30 Maḥmūd al-Sarāʾī: 242 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 58 [in #812
no. 49]
Payor 31 Shihāb al-Dīn al-Naqīb: 75 + 12.5 = 87.5 dirhams;34 in sale booklet
Buyer 45 (101 dirhams) [in #812 no. 51]
Payor 32 Aḥmad b. Shīdha: 10.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 23 [not
in #812]
Payor 33 al-Shaykh ʿAlī al-Qalyūbī: 160 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 54
(355.75 dirhams) [in #812 no. 21]
Payor 34 Ibn R-y-s: 13.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 87 (12.5 dirhams) [not
in #812]
Payor 35 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Naqīb: 70 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 44 [not
in #812]
Payor 36 Shams al-Dīn al-Khaṭīb: 12 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 21
(12.25 dirhams) [not in #812]
Payor 37 al-Ghazzī: 9.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 65 [not in #812]
Payor 38 Ibn al-Qibābī: 87.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 49 [not in #812]
Payor 39 Shams al-Dīn al-Dayrī: 94 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 9
(94.75 dirhams) [not in #812]
Payor 40 al-Nāṣirī: 12 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 31 (24.3 dirhams) [not
in #812]
sum total: 3,955 (0.5 + 0.25 + 0.5)35
2,000 …
al-Shaykh Aḥmad
maintenance payment for [Maḥmūd] Kamāl
witnesses …
Ibn Shujāʿ (?)
33
34
35
300 dirhams
40 dirhams
34 dirhams
800 dirhams
Tentative reading.
Payment in two instalments.
Our readings of the amounts paid by the buyers give a sum of 3,966 dirhams.
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200 dirhams
17 dirhams
15 dirhams
4 dirhams
5 dirhams38
0.5 dirhams39
2 dirhams40
48 dirhams41
50 dirhams
32 dirhams42
15.5 dirhams
40 dirhams
150 dirhams
100 dirhams
570 dirhams
1,084 dirhams
434.5 dirhams
441.625 dirhams
347 dirhams
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Ibn Ṣaṣar
clothing (kiswa)36
retinue of the trustee37
porters
and also the second day
porters of books
candles
washing of corpse and shroud
wife [Shīrīn]
and also
arranging the books
brokerage
witnesses
cemetery
deferred marriage gift (ṣadāq) and kiswa [Shīrīn]
subtotal: 1,015 dirhams
remainder: 8,669.5 dirhams43
Price of …
and also price of …
…
naqd (fees for money-changer?)
total: 2,227.125 dirhams
|
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
Most likely for Maḥmūd Kamāl.
The document has only ‘rajjāla’, but we see in other documents from the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus
(such as #175a, left, l. 28 and #175a, right, l. 27) the term ‘rajjālat al-ḥukm’, which we interpret as
those working for the judge’s trustee.
See the expenses in #793, where we find that the two payments for the porters added up to nine
dirhams.
Cf. #793, where we find the same sum for ‘porters of chests’.
Cf. #793, where we find the same sum.
Cf. #793, where we find the same sum.
Cf. #793, where we find that the two payments for the wife added up to 82 dirhams.
How the remainder has been calculated remains unclear to us.
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
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312
Edition of Document #800 (Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic
)Museum
/800أ /يمين
es
s
Pr
ity
rs
ve
ni
U
إبراهيم ابن محمود
¾66
ابن القطب
138
السلطي
17
جنيد
44
البواب
½48
عمر
15
h
rg
nb
u
محمود السرائي
242
الشيخ علي القليوبي
160
Ed
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1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
مقبوض يد محمد الصيرفي من دراهم الناصري
برهان الدين أبو محمود
الحديثي
ابن المثب
األزهري
58
½50
167
الزين القروي
إبراهيم العجمي
ابن المهندس
½14
½179
1295
الحرجاوي
مقبل
عالء الدين النقيب
20
67
¾65
الفريابي
ابن الحموي
محمد
½91
20
½3
شمس الدين المقرئ شهاب الدين السرائي
½69
45
ابن سعيد
يوسف الجيتي
قاسم
30
36
15
أحمد القرماني
حمد الزري
فخر الدين إياس
16
85
¾226
حسين المالكي
ابن رسالن
العجلوني
147
70
74
ً
أحمد بن زبيدة
شهاب الدين النقيب وأيضا
¼10
½12
75
شمس الدين الخطيب
عبد الرحمن النقيب
ابن الريس
12
70
½13
/800أ /يسار
1
2
3
4
الغزي
½9
ابن القبابي
½87
شمس الدين الديري
94
الناصري
12
ســـــــــــه
)½3955 (½ ،¼ ،
313
5
6
6
7
8
9
10
|
The Docum entary networ k
مصروف من ذلك
ألفي ][...
يد الشيخ أحمد
300
ابن صصر
200
ابن ]شجاع /نخاع؟]
800
شهود ][...
34
رجالة
15
فرض كمال
40
كسوة
17
/800ب /يسار
Pr
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حمل كتب
نصف
وأيضا ً
32
جبانة
100
ity
rs
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nb
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[]...
½⅛441
نقد
347
rg
الباقي
½8669
ثمن [ ]...بجوالين
1084إال ثلث
وأيضا ً ثمن حوائج
½434
ســــــه
45
⅛2227
44
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2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
مصروف من يد كاتبه من تركة الناصري
وأيضا ً ثاني يوم
حمالين
5
4
يد الزوجة
تجهيزه
50
48
شهود
داللة
150
40
شمع
2
ترتيب الكتب
½15
صداق وكسوة
570
ســـــــه
1015
44الجوال :معربه الجوالق ،وهو الشوال :البالة ،حزمة بضائع .ينظر دوزي ،تكملة المعاجم العربية ،ج .389 ،6والبستاني،
محيط المحيط.490 ،
45الصواب .2307.125
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IV Document #793 – Second Accounts with Receivables, Expenses
and Payments (Plates II.6 and II.7)
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This document was written by al-Ṣayrafī and has four components: (1) list
of forty-two debtors,46 that is, a list of the receivables; (2) expenses incurred
during settling the estate; (3) and (4) two lists with a total of fifty-two payors,
that is, those buyers who settled their obligations in part or in full. In total,
this document mentions seventy-six names (there are ninety-four individuals
in the two lists, but several names appear in both lists). We were able to match
seventy-five names appearing in this document, except for the ‘mystery buyer’
al-Sharīf al-Dallāl (Debtor 22) whom we also find in list #968 (Debtor 41).
In this document al-Ṣayrafī proceeded with two different systems, as is
evident from the order of names. For the payors, the scribe took list #812
and copied the names in the exact order. The position of each payor in #812
is indicated in brackets further down. For the debtors, by contrast, he went
through the sale booklet and took first sheet #061, then sheet #532 and finally
sheet #180 to record those who still owed monies (see the footnotes below in
‘Identification of Debtors’).
The document’s four sections have the headings ‘Outstanding obligations
of those mentioned in … of al-Nāṣirī’s estate’ [Debtors’ list], ‘Monies received
by Muḥammad al-Ṣayrafī from [the sale of] al-Nāṣirī’s estate’ [Payors’ list 1],
‘Expenses’ and ‘Monies received by [the document’s] scribe from [the sale of]
al-Nāṣirī’s estate’ [Payors’ list 2].
Identification of Debtors
Debtor 1 al-Shaykh Najm al-Dīn: 361 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 1
Debtor 2 al-Maqarr al-Nāṣir: 466 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 2 (see Payor
48 below)
Debtor 3 al-Maqarr Bulūṭ: 346 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 3 (see Payor
49 below)
Debtor 4 al-Ḥākim: 244 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 4 (194 dirhams)
46
The list has 44 entries, but Debtor 21 was listed by mistake (there is no sum, and we indeed see
further down that this buyer paid his obligations in full as Payor 12). The following entry (Debtor
22 al-Sharīf al-Dallāl: 27.25 dirham) is the ‘mystery buyer’ whom we cannot match with any name
in the sale booklet.
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Debtor 5 al-Ḥanafī: 87 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 5
Debtor 6 al-Shaykh Shams al-Dīn: 28 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 7
(55.25 dirhams), see Payor 40 below
Debtor 7 Burhān al-Dīn: 56 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 8 (52 dirhams), see
Payor 47 below
Debtor 8 Shams al-Dīn al-Dayrī: 94.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 9
Debtor 9 Burhān al-Dīn: 576 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 10 (566 dirhams),
see Payor 52 below
Debtor 10 Khalīl b. Makkī: 127.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 13 (510.5
dirhams), see Payor 32 below
Debtor 11 Badr al-Dīn Makkī: 40.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 14 (180.25
dirhams), see Payor 39 below47
Debtor 12 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Naqīb: 70 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 44
(78 dirhams)
Debtor 13 akhūhu Shihāb al-Dīn: 12.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 45 (101
dirhams), see Payor 29 below
Debtor 14 Yūsuf b. Dhā al-Nūn: 100 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 46
Debtor 15 al-Qibābī: 87.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 49 (87.5 dirhams)
Debtor 16 al-Zayn al-Maghribī: 23.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 51
(23.5 dirhams)
Debtor 17 al-Qalyūbī: 367 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 54 (355.75 dirhams),
see Payor 30 below
Debtor 18 al-Ḥawārī: 10 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 59 (171.5 dirhams),
see Payor 34 below
Debtor 19 al-Ḥadīthī: 8.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 60 (67.25 dirhams),
see Payor 9 below
Debtor 20 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Maghribī: 9.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 66
(41.5 dirhams), see Payor 3 below
Debtor 21 Ibn al-Muthbit: n.a.; in sale booklet Buyer 7848 (see Payor 12 below)
47
48
This is the last name taken from sheet #061 of the sale booklet. The following names are taken from
sheet #532.
No sum is given for Ibn al-Muthbit, and the scribe entered his name probably by mistake as he is
mentioned further down (see Payor 12) as having paid the full sum. That something went wrong
here is also evident from the fact that this is the only point where the order of names (of Debtors
21 to 23) is slightly out of order when compared with the sale booklet.
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Debtor 22 al-Sharīf al-Dallāl: 27.25 dirhams; ‘mystery buyer’ not mentioned in
the sale booklet (cf. #968, Debtor 41, al-Sharīf Dallāl)
Debtor 23 Ibn ʿAshā: 102.375 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 70, see Payor 50
below
Debtor 24 Taghrī W-r-m-sh: 15.75 dirhams (wuzina); in sale booklet Buyer 73
(20.75 dirhams), see Payor 51 below
Debtor 25 al-Mālikī: 160.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 75 (150.5 dirhams)
Debtor 26 al-Zarʿī: 7 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 76 (85 dirhams), see Payor
25 below49
Debtor 27 Muḥammad al-Andalusī: 36.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 15
Debtor 28 Burhān al-Dīn al-Ṣallatī: 2.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 16 (19.5
dirhams), see Payor 15 below
Debtor 29 Jamāl al-Yatīm: 56.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 20
Debtor 30 Ibn al-Khaṭīb: 12.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 21
Debtor 31 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. al-Zayn: 14.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 22
Debtor 32 Shihāb al-Dīn Shīdha: 10.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 23
Debtor 33 al-Karakī: 150 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 28 (50 dirhams)
Debtor 34 al-Nāṣirī: 24.3 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 31
Debtor 35 Ibn Saḥlūl: 120 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 32 (28 dirhams)
Debtor 36 Khalīl al-Duwayk: 30 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 34
Debtor 37 al-Rabbāwī: 5.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 36 (see Payor 46
below)
Debtor 38 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Iskadānī [Iskandarī]: 10 dirhams; in sale booklet
Buyer 38
Debtor 39 al-Sakākīnī: 8.875 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 39
Debtor 40 Muḥammad al-Iskandarī: 10.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 79
Debtor 41 Aḥmad Saqqā: 6.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 81
Debtor 42 al-Bawwāb: 2.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 82
Debtor 43 Yūsuf al-Miṣrī Dallāl: 3 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 85
Debtor 44 Muḥammad b. Yūnus: 12.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 87
sum total: 3,862 dirhams
49
This is the last name taken from sheet #532 of the sale booklet. The following names are taken from
sheet #180.
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Identification of Payors 1
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Payor 1 Ibn al-Muhandis: 1,295 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 11 [in #812
no. 24]
Payor 2 Burhān al-Dīn al-ʿAjamī: 179.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 56 [in
#812 no. 25]
Payor 3 al-Qarawī: 14.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 66 (41.5 dirhams), see
Debtor 20 above [in #812 no. 26]
Payor 4 Shams al-Dīn al-Quṭb: 138 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 19
(142 dirhams [138 w-z-n]) [in #812 no. 27]
Payor 5 Ibn Abū Muḥammad:50 66.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 18 [in
#812 no. 28]
Payor 6 Fakhr al-Dīn Īyās: 226 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 41 (296.5
dirhams), see Payor 33 below
Payor 7 Qāsim al-ʿAjamī: 15 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 52 [in #812 no. 29]
Payor 8 Muḥammad b. Saʿīd: 30.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 55 [in #812
no. 30]
Payor 9 al-Ḥadīthī: 59 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 60 (67.25 dirhams), see
Debtor 19 above [in #812 no. 31]
Payor 10 Muqbil: 67 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 64 (68 dirhams) [in #812
no. 32]
Payor 11 al-Azharī: 124 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 50 (167.5 dirhams) [in
#812 no. 33]
Payor 12 Ibn al-Muthbit: 50.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 78 (see Debtor
21 above) [in #812 no. 34]
Payor 13 al-Ḥarjāwī: 20 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 72 [in #812 no. 35]
Payor 14 ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al-Naqīb: 65.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 6 [in #812
no. 36]
Payor 15 Burhān al-Dīn al-Ṣallatī: 17.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 16
(19.5 dirhams), see Debtor 28 above [in #812 no. 37]
Payor 16 ʿAlī al-Ḥamawī: 20.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 48 [in #812
no. 38]
50
The document reads ‘Ibn Abū M-ḥ-r-d’.
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Payor 17 ʿAbd Allāh al-Firyābī: 92.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 53 [in #812
no. 39]
Payor 18 Junayd: 44 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 43 [in #812 no. 40]
Payor 19 Ibn al-Muqriʾ: 45 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 62 [in #812 no. 41]
Payor 20 Shihāb al-Dīn al-Sarāʾī: 69.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 42 [in
#812 no. 42]
Payor 21 Ibn al-Bawwāb: 48.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 24 (117.16
dirhams) [in #812 no. 43]
Payor 22 Yūsuf al-Jītī: 36 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 37 [in #812 no. 44]
Payor 23 ʿUmar al-Zajjāj: 15 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 17 [in #812 no. 45]
Payor 24 Aḥmad al-Qaramānī: 16 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 77 (16.5
dirhams) [in #812 no. 46]
Payor 25 Ḥamdān al-Zarī: 78.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 76 (85 dirhams),
see Debtor 26 above [in #812 no. 47]
Payor 26 al-ʿAjlūnī: 74.25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 67 (76.25 dirhams)
[in #812 no. 48]
Payor 27 Maḥmūd al-Sarāʾī: 242 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 58 [in #812
no. 49]
Payor 28 Ibn Raslān: 70 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 25 [in #812 no. 50]
Payor 29 Shihāb Ibn al-Naqīb: 75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 45 (101
dirhams), see Debtor 13 above [in #812 no. 51]
Payor 30 al-Qalyūbī: 160 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 54 (355.75 dirhams),
see Debtor 17 above [in #812 no. 21]
subtotal: 3,440.5 dirhams51
Identification of Payors 2
Payor 31 Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ghazzī: 157 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 57 [in
#812 no. 1]
Payor 32 Khalīl b. Makkī: 381 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 13 (510.5
dirhams), see Debtor 10 above [in #812 no. 2]
Payor 33 Fakhr al-Dīn Īyās: 69.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 41 (296.5
dirhams), see Payor 6 above [in #812 no. 3]
51
Our readings of the amounts paid by the buyers give a sum of 3,455.25 dirhams.
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Payor 34 al-Ḥawārī: 171.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 59, see Debtor 18
above [in #812 no. 4]
Payor 35 al-Khalīlī: 252 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 12 [in #812 no. 5]
Payor 36 al-Muqriʾ al-muʾadhdhin: 51.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 68 [in
#812 no. 6]
Payor 37 Ḥusayn al-Ḥalabī: 11.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 40 [in #812
no. 7]
Payor 38 Shuqayr: 3.375 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 84 [in #812 no. 8]
Payor 39 Badr al-Dīn Makkī: 140 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 14 (180.25
dirhams), see Debtor 11 above [in #812 no. 9]
Payor 40 Shams al-Dīn al-Shaykh: 27.5 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 7 (55.25
dirhams), see Debtor 6 above [in #812 no. 10]
Payor 41 ʿUmar al-Ghānimī: 64 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 61 [in #812
no. 11]
Payor 42 Taqī al-Dīn: 39 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 63 [in #812 no. 12]
Payor 43 al-Kutubī: 4.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 29 (6.75 dirhams)
[in #812 no. 13]
Payor 44 Ibrāhīm al-Ḥawrānī: 10 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 35 [in #812
no. 14]
Payor 45 ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm: 4 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 83 [in #812
no. 15]
Payor 46 al-Rabbāwī: 4 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 36 (5.75 dirhams), see
Debtor 37 above [in #812 no. 17]
Payor 47 Burhān al-Dīn: 32.75 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 8 (52 dirhams),
see Debtor 7 above [in #812 no. 16]
Payor 48 Ibn Shihāb: 459; in sale booklet Buyer 2 (466 dirhams), see Debtor 2
above [in #812 no. 20]
Payor 49 Bulūṭ: 342 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 3 (see Debtor 3 above) [in
#812 no. 18]
Payor 50 Ibn ʿAshā: 15 +10 = 25 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 70 (102.375
dirhams), see Debtor 23 above [in #812 no. 19]
Payor 51 Taghrī W-r-m-sh: 16 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 73 (20.75
dirhams), see Debtor 24 above [not in #812]
Payor 52 Burhān al-Dīn: 265 dirhams; in sale booklet Buyer 10 (566 dirhams),
see Debtor 9 above [in #812 no. 22]
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subtotal 1: 2,453 dirhams52
subtotal 2: 2,718 dirhams
subtotal 3: 2,750 dirhams
Pr
48 dirhams53
9 dirhams54
0.5 dirham55
2 dirhams56
1.5 dirhams
1 dirham
82 dirhams57
[3] dirhams
ity
washing of corpse and shroud
porters
porters of chest
candles
one of the farḍ witnesses
naqd (fees for money changer?)
wife [Shīrīn]
…
subtotal: 137 dirhams
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Here follows a list of further items and sums (partly turned by ninety degrees)
that have remained unclear to us.
52
53
54
55
56
57
Our readings of the amounts paid by the buyers give a sum of 2,545 dirhams.
Cf. #800, where we find the same sum.
Cf. #800, where we find two sums for two different days.
Cf. #800, where we find the same sum for ‘porters of books’. The chests were most likely used to
move books during the auction.
Cf. #800, where we find the same sum.
Cf. #800, where we find two sperate payments of 50 and 32 dirhams.
321
The Docum entary networ k
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)Edition of Document #793 (Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum
/793أ /يمين
ity
rs
ve
ni
58
هكذا في األصل والصواب المتبقي.
h
23
rg
19
20
21
22
الزرعي
7
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17
18
][
nb
u
15
16
ابن المثبت
U
9
10
11
12
13
14
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s
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
المتقي 58على من يذكر من المباعات من تركة الناصري تغمده هللا برحمته
الحاكم
المقر بلوط
الشيخ نجم الدين المقر الناصر
244
346
466
361
الشيخ شمس الدين برهان الدين *شمس الدين الديري
الحنفي
¾94
56
28
87
بدر الدين مكي عبد الرحمن النقيب*
خليل بن مكي
برهان الدين
70
½40
½127
576
يوسف ابن ذا
أخوه شهاب
الزين المغربي
القبابي*
النون
الدين
¼23
¼87
100
½12
عبد الرحمن المغربي*
الحديثي*
الحواري*
القليوبي
½9
¼8
10
367
المالكي
تغر ورمش
الشريف الدالل* ابن عشا
½160
وزن ¾15
¼⅛102
¼27
ابن الخطيب*
جمال اليتيم
محمد األندلسي برهان الدين
السلطي*
¼12
½56
½2
½36
شهاب الدين*
عبد الرحمن*
الناصري*
الكركي*
شيذة
بن الزين
⅓24
150
¼10
½14
عبد الرحمن*
الرباوي*
خليل الدويك
ابن سحلول
اإلسكداني
10
¾5
30
120
البواب*
محمد األسندوني* أحمد سقا*
السكاكيني*
¾2
½6
¼10
½¼⅛8
محمد بن يونس
يوسف
المصري دالل*
½12
3
ســـــــــــه
3862
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
|
322
/793أ /يسار
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
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يوسف الجيتي
36
العجلوني
¼74
ve
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ســـــــه
½3440
h
nb
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طعم
حملوه صندوق
½
يد الزوجة
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103
½8
عـ :ال ندري ما المقصود به ،وربما يكون (عنه).
هكذا في األصل وربما يريد ( َح َملَة صناديق).
60
شمع
2
][...
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ســــــــــه
147
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حمالين
9
نقد
درهم
59
8
59
60
مصروف عـ
تجهيزه
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أحد شهود فرض
درهم و½
400
/793ب /يمين
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
138
محمـ[ـد] بن سعيد الحديثي
59
¼30
عالء الدين النقيب
الحرجاوي
¾65
20
جنيد
rg
15
16
17
شمس الدين القطب
rs
9
10
11
12
13
14
المقبوض يد الصيرفي محمد من تركة الناصري
ابن المهندس برهان الدين العجمي القروي
½14
¾179
1295
قاسم العجمي
ابن أبو محرد فخر الدين إياس
15
226
¾66
ابن المثب
األزهري
مقبل
½50
124
67
عبد هللا
علي الحموي
برهان الدين
الفرابي
السلطي
½92
¼20
¼17
شهاب الدين السرائي ابن البواب
ابن المقرئ
½48
½69
45
حمدان الزري
عمر الزجاج أحمد القرماني
½78
16
15
شهاب ابن
محمود السرائي ابن رسالن
النقيب
75
70
242
القليوبي
160
11
10
الصيرفي تركاته
باق
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12
13
14
15
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يد عالء الدين
من الحمام 102
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الذي قبضه كاتبه من تركة الناصري
من خليل بن مكي فخر الدين إياس
من ناصر
الدين الغزي
¾69
381
157
المقرئ المؤذن
من الحواري ابن الخليلي
½51
252
½171
شمس الدين الشيخ
بدر الدين مكي
من شقير
½27
140
¼⅛3
إبراهيم الحوراني
الكتبي
تقي الدين
10
¾4
39
بلوط
برهان الدين ابن شهاب
342
459
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تغر ورمش
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16
15
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برهان الدين قاسم
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265
ســــــه
2453
718
تأخر على
من يذكر
1615
ni
U
h
rg
nb
u
20
من حسين الحلبي
½11
عمر الغانمي
64
عبد العظيم
4
Ed
i
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
ve
rs
ity
1
2
1600 3160 3400
323
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The Docum entary networ k
الرباوي
4
سه
1377
ســـــه
2453/2439
2750/2718
Appendix 1 Overview of Documents
Linked to Burhaˉn al-Dıˉn’s Life and Estate
his appendix provides an overview of all those documents from the
Ḥaram al-sharīf collection that are linked to Burhān al-Dīn. In the course
of working on this book we have examined all the documents from the Ḥaram
al-sharīf collection (almost 1,000), and we are now in a position to confidently
state that there are no further documents linked to Burhān al-Dīn. The corpus
assembled here differs in some cases from that of previous scholarship. We
identified additional documents in the known Ḥaram al-sharīf core corpus
(#180, #532 and #793) and found new documents in the Ḥaram al-sharīf plus
corpus (#897 and #968). For instance, document #793 was ascribed to an
unknown ‘an-Nāṣirī’ or to the estate of the trader Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ḥamawī.1
Yet document #793 is beyond doubt one of the accounts that were used in settling the estate of Burhān al-Dīn. The names of the payors and debtors, as well
as the sums owed, are identical to those in the other accounts and lists used in
settling his estate.2 We not only added, but also discarded: for instance, Ḥaram
al-sharīf document #667 is an acknowledgement deed in which a widow
receives the monthly obligatory maintenance payment (farḍ) for her children from her deceased husband’s estate. Nine other such deeds in the Ḥaram
al-sharīf corpus are linked to Burhān al-Dīn.3 However, #667 has in our view –
and in contrast to previous scholarship – nothing to do with Burhān al-Dīn
as we read the name of the deceased husband in #667, ‘al-Dayrī’, differently
(though reading names in the documentary scripts employed in the Ḥaram
al-sharīf documents is far from an exact science). More importantly, this
Ed
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1
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3
Little, Catalogue, 369 and Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 180 and 188–91.
These other documents were #061/#180/#532 (sale booklet), #800, #812 and #968.
#106, #108, #115, #118, #183, #188, #192, #313 and #676.
324
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document summarily refers to ‘the mother of the half-orphans’, that is, one
single mother of the children left by the deceased husband. As Burhān al-Dīn
left ‘half-orphans’ to several mothers the acknowledgement deeds linked to
him always set out exactly who received the sum in question as there was more
than one single widow/recipient. In consequence, it is unlikely that #667
belongs to the Burhān al-Dīn documentary corpus.
It was particularly painful discarding the diploma of appointment #214
from the corpus, because it feels very much like one of his Burhān al-Dīn’s
documents. It is a diploma appointing a person in the Turbat Ṭāz (the other
five documents on this turba in the Ḥaram al-sharīf corpus are all linked with
Burhān al-Dīn).4 This diploma was issued by an administrator called Malik
(the other three documents issued by this administrator in the Ḥaram al-sharīf
corpus are all linked with Burhān al-Dīn).5 In addition, this person is appointed
as reciter for a rather modest monthly salary (exactly the professional world of
Burhān al-Dīn). This person is called Ibrāhīm al-Nāṣirī (exactly the ism and
nisba of Burhān al-Dīn), but he carries the laqab Ṣārim al-Dīn rather than
Burhān al-Dīn. It was perfectly normal for an individual to be known under
more than one laqab and it might be the case that our Burhān al-Dīn was
known by the honorific Ṣārim al-Dīn at a younger age. However, as a matter
of precaution and in the absence of other evidence for such a double laqab we
decided to discard this document from the Burhān corpus.
In the following, first, the documents are grouped according to the terminology used in this book. Secondly, a list according to the call numbers in
the Islamic Museum in Jerusalem is provided. Identical or variant readings of
a document’s date in previous publications are indicated in brackets after the
date. We provide, in all relevant cases, the reference to the document’s edition.6
Burhān al-Dīn’s documentary corpus: This is the analytical category for
those fifty-two documents that are directly linked to Burhān al-Dīn and that
were produced during his lifetime (twenty-four on his working life (#002,
4
5
6
#005, #007, #014, #303 and #310.
#005, #014 and #310.
Several documents have been edited previously, especially by al-ʿAsalī. We edited all remaining
documents except for those cases where we were not fully satisfied with our readings of the text
(#622 and the four payment orders for the salary of Burhān al-Dīn #665, #666, #668 and #835). The
launch of the Comparing Arabic Legal Documents database, https://cald.irht.cnrs.fr (last accessed
5 September 2022), in 2021 has added numerous additional documents.
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#003, #004, #005, #007, #009, #010, #012, #013, #014, #026, #049, #203,
#303, #305, #310, #490, #508, #509, #603, #665, #666, #668, #835), seventeen
on settling his estate (#016, #052, #061/#180/#532, #106, #108, #111, #115,
#118, #183, #188, #192, #313, #676, #793, #800, #812, #968) and eleven on
other matters (#039, #109, #289, #336, #382, #458, #622, #699, #843, #850,
#897). All documents in this appendix are part of this corpus except for #369
and #619, which are sale deeds of the house that Burhān al-Dīn bought in #039
and were written before his lifetime.
Estate archive on Burhān al-Dīn: These are the fifty-four documents
brought together to settle Burhān al-Dīn’s estate. All documents in this appendix were part of this archive.
Burhān al-Dīn’s home archive: Thirty documents that Burhān al-Dīn
himself preserved before they went into the estate archive (#002, #003, #004,
#005, #007, #009, #010, #012, #013, #014, #026, #039, #109, #203, #289,
#303, #305, #310, #336, #369, #458, #490, #508, #509, #603, #619, #699,
#843, #850, #897).
Organisational archives: Five documents preserved in Jerusalem’s endowments before they went into the estate archive (#049, #665, #666, #668, #835).
Shīrīn’s home archive: Two documents that Shīrīn herself preserved before
they went into the estate archive (#382, #622).
Ed
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#002 declaration of intent (stipend, ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Aqbughā Yankī),
beg.3.788/1386
ed. al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 199/200 (em. Diem,
Philologisches, 36)
#003 diploma of appointment (maktab Fakhr al-Dīn Īyās), 25.1.781/1379
(= Little, Catalogue and Diem)
ed. al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 195/6 (em. Diem, Philologisches,
32–4)
#004 declaration of intent (stipend, Ḥaydar al-ʿAskarī al-Manṣūrī),
25.1.782/1380 (Little, Catalogue proposes ‘781’; Müller, Kadi und
seine Zeugen, 170 suggests ‘782’; Diem reads ‘783’; al-ʿAsalī did not
suggest a year)
ed. al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 197/8 (em. Diem, Philologisches,
34/5)
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#005 diploma of continued appointment (Ṭāz Mausoleum), 20.6.784/1382
(Little, Catalogue reads ‘Rabīʿ’)
ed. Frenkel, Relationship, 107
#007 petition (#007/1) + diploma of continued appointment (#007/2) (Ṭāz
Mausoleum), 10.12.777/1376 (#007/2)
ed. al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 203–5; em. Diem, Philologisches,
38–40
#009 petition (#009/1) + diploma of appointment (#009/2) (al-Ḥaram
al-sharīf), 18.12.781/1380 (= Little, Five Petitions; Müller, Kadi und
seine Zeugen, 170 suggests ‘782‘; Burgoyne [= Richards], Mamluk
Jerusalem, 72: ‘763’) (#009/2)
ed. Little, Five Petitions, 381–8
#010 petition (#010/1) + diploma of appointment (?) (#010/2) (unnamed
madrasa-cum-ribāṭ), 20.2.775/1373 (= Diem; al-ʿAsalī reads ‘770’;
Little, Catalogue and Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 171 read ‘780’)
(#010/2)
ed. al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 212–14 (em. Diem, Philologisches,
46–8)
#012 declaration of intent (stipend, ʿAlī b. Qōjā al-ʿAlāʾī), 6.3.783/1381
(al-ʿAsalī: ‘730’; Little, Catalogue proposes ‘Rabīʿ II 780’; Diem and
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 169: ‘773’)
ed. al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 208 (em. Diem, Philologisches,
40–2)
#013 petition (#013/1) + report/diploma of appointment (#013/2) (Manṣūrī
Ribāṭ), 1.2.770/1368 (= Little, Catalogue and al-ʿAsalī; Müller, Kadi
und seine Zeugen, 171 and Diem: ‘777’) (#013/2)
ed. al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 209–11 (em. Diem, Philologisches,
42–6)
#014 diploma of continued appointment (Ṭāz Mausoleum), 17.2.785/
1383
ed. al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 201–2 (em. Diem, Philologisches,
37–8)
#016 two acknowledgement deeds (debt), 18.12.789/1387 (#016/1),
?.4.790/1388 (#016/2) (Little, Catalogue: ?.3.790)
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Appendix 2)
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#026 request to change places and times of recitation (stipend, Ibrāhīm b.
ʿUmar Ṣārim al-Dīn), undated (780s/1380s?)
ed. al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 206
#039 sale contract (house) (#039/1) + certification (#039/2) + ratification
(#039/3), 21.11.780/1379 (#039/1), 23.11.780/1379 (#039/2) and
25.11.780/1379 (#039/3)
ed. Müller, Écrire, 86–93
#049 annual accounts sheet (children school, Fakhr al-Dīn Īyās),
14.4.781/1379
ed. Richards, Primary Education, 228/29
#052 two decisions by judge (farḍ), 6.11.789/1387 (#052/1), 22.2.790/1388
(#051/2)
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Appendix 2)
#061 sale booklet concerning Burhān al-Dīn’s estate (incl. #180 and #532),
undated (most likely on same date as #968, i.e. 15.11.789/1387)
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Chapter 7)
#106 acknowledgement deed by Aḥmad b. Aḥmad (farḍ), undated (most
likely Muḥarram 790/1388)
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Appendix 2)
#108 acknowledgement deed by Shīrīn (farḍ), 3.7.790/1388
ed. Lutfi, Six Fourteenth Century Iqrārs, 267–9 (em. Lutfi/Little,
Iqrārs from Al-Quds)
#109 receipt for payment of rent, 2.1.779/1377 (= Müller, Kadi und seine
Zeugen, 171; Little, Catalogue: ‘2.1.774‘)
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Appendix 2)
#111 two decisions by judge (farḍ), 6.11.789/1387 (#111/1), 1.3.790/1388
(#111/2)
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Appendix 2)
#115 acknowledgement deed by Aḥmad b. Aḥmad (farḍ), 4.9.790/1388
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Appendix 2)
#118 acknowledgement deed by Aḥmad b. Aḥmad (farḍ), 7.6.790/1388
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Appendix 2)
#180 see #061 (ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler, Chapter 7)
#183 acknowledgement deed by Shīrīn (farḍ), 4.9.790/1388
ed. al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 107
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#188 acknowledgement deed by Shīrīn (farḍ), 22.2.790/1388
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Appendix 2)
#192 acknowledgement deed by Shīrīn (farḍ), 5.1.790/1388
ed. al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 105
#203 diploma of appointment (Awḥadīya Mausoleum), 13.12.780/1379
(= al-ʿAsalī and Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 169; Little, Catalogue:
‘?.12.787’)
ed. al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 169
#289 acknowledgement deed by divorced wife (Fāṭima bt. ʿAbd Allāh),
4.10.782/1381
ed. al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 116; Lutfi, Six Fourteenth Century
Iqrārs, 258/9 (em. Lutfi/Little, Iqrārs from Al-Quds)
#303 diploma of continued appointment (Ṭāz Mausoleum), 10.8.780/1378
(Frenkel, Relationship, 108: ‘708’; Little, Catalogue: ‘20 Muḥarram’;
Burgoyne [= Richards], Mamluk Jerusalem, 76: ‘without date’).
ed. Frenkel, Relationship, 108
#305 petition (#305/1) + diploma of continued appointment (#305/2)
(al-Aqṣā Mosque), 8.8.781/1379 (#305/2)
ed. Little, Five Petitions, 372–9
#310 petition (#310/1) + diploma of appointment (#310/2) (Ṭāz
Mausoleum), 15.9.775/1374 (#310/2)
ed. Little, Five Petitions, 365–72
#313 acknowledgement deed by Shīrīn (farḍ), 4.5.790/1388
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Appendix 2)
#336 neighbour’s permission to extend building, 22.6.788/1386
ed. al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 280/1; Ṣāliḥīya, Min wathāʾiq,
70–6
#369 three sale contracts (#369/1, #369/2 and #369/4) + 2 certifications
(#369/3 and #369/5) (Roman vault and courtyards), 10.1.771/1369
(#369/1), 19.1.771/1369 (#369/2), 4.2.771/1369 (#369/3),
3.5.773/1371 (#369/4), 5.5.773/1371 (#369/5)
#382 sale contract (slave), 17.7.784/1382 (al-ʿAsalī and Burgoyne
[= Richards], Mamluk Jerusalem, 72: ‘740’)
ed. al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, I, 252/3; Little, Six Fourteenth
Century Purchase Deeds, 313–17
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#458 acknowledgement deed by brother of divorced wife Fāṭima bt. ʿAbd
Allāh, 18.3.783/1381 (= al-ʿAsalī; Little, Catalogue: ‘Rabīʿ II’)
ed. al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, II, 115
#490 diploma of appointment (legal proxy, Aḥmad b. Sayf al-Dīn Bustumur),
25.10.781/1380 (al-ʿAsalī: ‘15’)
ed. al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, II, 140
#508 declaration of intent (stipend, Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Shādī),
16.1.782/1380
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Appendix 2)
#509 declaration of no further claims, 1.8.780/1378
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Appendix 2)
#532 see #061 (ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler, Chapter 7)
#603 declaration of intent (stipend, Salāma b. Abī Bakr al-Fāriqānī),
17.6.774/1372
ed. al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya, II, 167
#619 sale contract (house), ?.11.780/1379 (Müller, Ventes de Biens
Immobiliers, 224: 5.11.778/1377)
#622 sale of household items to Shīrīn, 22.9.788/1386
#665 payment order for salary of Burhān al-Dīn (al-Ḥaram al-sharīf ),
781/1379–80 (= Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 171; Little, Catalogue:
‘787’)
#666 payment order for salary of Burhān al-Dīn (al-Ḥaram al-sharīf),
789/1387–8 (= Little, Catalogue; Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen,
171: ‘784’)
#668 payment order for salary of Burhān al-Dīn (al-Ḥaram al-sharīf),
786/1384–5 (Little, Catalogue: no date; Müller, Kadi und seine
Zeugen, 171: ‘783’)
#676 acknowledgement deed by Muḥammad [Aḥmad] b. Aḥmad (farḍ),
20.11.789/1387
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Appendix 2)
#699 acknowledgement deed by divorced wife (Maryam), 12.2.784/1382
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Appendix 2)
#793 second accounts with payments, receivables & expenses for estate of
Burhān al-Dīn, undated (shortly after 15.11.789/1387)
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Chapter 8)
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#800 first accounts with payments & expenses for estate of Burhān al-Dīn,
undated (shortly after 15.11.789/1387)
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Chapter 8)
#812 list of payments received from the sale of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate, 3. and
14.11.789/1387 (Little, Catalogue, 369 and Müller, Kadi und seine
Zeugen, 172 only refer to the second date. What they have as the recto
side is rather the verso side that was written subsequently.)
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Chapter 8)
#835 payment order for salary of Burhān al-Dīn (al-Ḥaram al-sharīf),
787/1385–6
#843 receipt for payment of rent, 12.1.778/1376 (= Little, Catalogue;
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 171: ‘18.1.778’)
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Appendix 2)
#850 receipt for payment of rent for three months in year 778/1376,
30.6.778/1376 (?)
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Appendix 2)
#897 division of the estate of Fāṭima 1 (deceased wife of Burhān al-Dīn)
this draft list (written on the verso of an old document) is undated
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Appendix 2)
#968 list of receivables from sale of Burhān al-Dīn’s estate, 15.11.789/1387
ed. Aljoumani/Hirschler (Chapter 8)
Appendix 2 Edition of Sixteen Documents
Linked to Burhaˉn al-Dıˉn’s Life and Estate
his appendix contains the edition of sixteen previously unedited Ḥaram
al-sharīf documents that were relevant for affairs during Burhān al-Dīn’s
lifetime (seven documents) and for settling his estate (nine documents). The
documents are thus concerned with rent payments (#109, #843 and #850), a
stipend (#508), claims against him (#509), divorce (#699), the death of his wife
Fāṭima (#897) and his estate (#016, #052,#106, #111, #115, #118, #188, #313
and #676). The documents will be described only briefly as more details can be
found in the book’s main text. Plate Section III contains the reproduction of
the documents edited here.
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[ ] editors’ insertion of letters or words
[?] tentative reading
[…] non-legible or missing word(s)
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Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #016 (Plates III.1a and
)III.1b
Acknowledgement deed of a certain Zayn al-Dīn (most likely identifiable as
Buyer 58 in the sale booklet), to whom al-Adhraʿī lent money from Burhān
al-Dīn’s estate with acknowledgement deed by al-Adhraʿī on verso stating that
the debt was repaid and with archival note on verso (this document has a second
erroneous archival note linking this document to ‘the orphans of [the trader
Nāṣir al-Dīn] al-Ḥamawī’, whose estate al-Adhraʿī and his men were also
)handling at this point
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1بسم هللا الرحمن الرحيم
2أقر الشيخ الصالح زين الدين محمود بن خليل بن داوود من القدس الشريف إقراراً
3صحيحا ً شرعيا ً في صحة منه وسالمة وجواز أمر َّ
أن عليه وفي ذمته بحق صحيح شرعي
أليتام
4برهان الدين إبراهيم الناصري المحجور عليهم حجر الشرع الشريف من الدراهم الفضة
5الجيدة معاملة يومئذ بالشام المحروس ماية درهم وأربعين درهما نصفها
6سبعون درهما مؤجلة تحل عليه جملة واحدة عند مضي أربعة أشهر من بعد
7تاريخه أقر بالمالءمة والقدرة على ذلك وقبض العوض الشرعي عن ذلك من يد
8الصدر األجل شمس الدين محمد بن جمال الدين عبد هللا األذرعي أمين الحكم
9العزيز بالقدس الشريف أعزه هللا تعالى وبه شهد عليه ثامن عشر ذي الحجة الحرام
10من شهور سنة تسع وثمانين وسبعماية وحسبنا هللا ونعم الوكيل
شهد عليه بذلك
شهد على إقراره بذلك
11شهد عليه بذلك
3
2
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كتبه عيسى بن أحمد العليمي
كتبه أبو بكر أحمد الحنفي
12كتبه محمد بن أبي العمري
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يحلها عاشر ربيع
اآلخر
/16ب
أليتام الحموي
حجة
الشيخ محمود
بإقرار فيها
الحمد هلل
See Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 565: ‘al-Ghamrī’.
See Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 543.
See Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 561.
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owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
أقر الشيخ شمس الدين محمد أنه قبض وتسلم وصار إليه
من المقر المذكور باطنا
4
جميع المبلغ المعين باطنا وجملته 140د ]المتأخرين؟[
كتبه
المقر ] [... ...وبه شهد عليه في شهر ربيع اآلخر سنة
تسعين وسبعمية
شهد على ذلك
كتبه ناصر بن ]شاهين؟]
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شهدت على ذلك و
كتبه حسن بن القاسمي
5
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د ،مختصر درهما.
See Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 558.
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Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #052 (Plates III.2a and
)III.2b
Decision on the monthly obligatory maintenance payment (farḍ) for ʿAlī and
Muḥammad, the sons of Shīrīn and Burhān al-Dīn, by Abū Bakr b. Ibrāhīm
al-Ṣarfanī, the shāfiʿī deputy judge of Jerusalem6 (#052/1), revised some three
months later (#052/2), with archival note on verso
)6.11.789/1387 (#052/1) and 22.2.790/1388 (#052/2
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بسم هللا الرحمن الرحيم
فرض قدره كاتبه العبد الفقير إلى هللا تعالى أبو بكر بن إبراهيم الصرفني الشافعي النائب في
الحكم العزيز بالقدس الشريف أعانه هللا تعالى ولطف به
لمحمد وعلي يتيمي برهان الدين الناصري المقيم والدهما كان بالقدس الشريف المستمرين
تحت َحجْ ر الشرع الشريف وحضانة والدتهما
شيرين بنت عبد هللا المقيمة بالقدس الشريف في مالهما المخلف لهما عن والدهما المذكور
أعاله برسم طعامهما وشرابهما
وزيتهما وصابونهما وحمامهما وأجرة حضانتهما وما عساهما يحتاجان إليه خال الكسوة في
كل شهر يمضي من تاريخه
8
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من الدراهم الفضة الوازنة الجارية في المعاملة أربعين ما نصفها عشرون ما بينهما بالسوية
ثم أذن الفارض المذكور
أعاله للحاجة المذكورة أعاله أن تقبض القدر المعين أعاله من المال المخلف لهما المستقر
تحت يد أمين الحكم وتنفقه على األوالد المذكورين
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فرضت ذلك وأذنت فيه
/52أ1/
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Most likely Buyer 4 in the sale booklet; see also Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 263/4: ‘Abū Bakr
lbrāhīm al-Ṣarwī (?) {P 116}’.
7ما ،مختصر درهماً.
8أي درهماً.
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8وأن تقترض عند العذر وترجع عند اإلمكان إذنا شرعيًا وبه أشهد عليه في سادس شهر القعدة
سنة تسع وثمانين ]و[ سبعمية
أشهد على سيدنا الحاكم
9شهد على الحاكم المشار إليه أشهد على سيدنا الحاكم
المشار
أعاله
10أيده هللا تعالى بما نسب إليه فيه المشار إليه أعاله أيده هللا تعالى إليه أعاله أيده هللا تعالى بما
نسب إليه
أعاله
فيه أعاله في تاريخه كتبه
11في تاريخه أعاله كتبه إبراهيم بما نسب إليه فيه أعاله كتبه
10
9
محمد بن عبد ]الغني [...
علي بن أبي بكر
بن محمود
/52أ2/
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الحمد هلل
ثم فرض كاتبه أبو بكر بن إبراهيم
الشافعي النائب في الحكم العزيز
بالقدس الشريف للمفروض لهما
زيادة على الفرض المذكور
تسوية في كل شهر يمضي من تاريخه
11
بما فيه من كسوة عشرين ما
تتمة ذلك ستون ما
وأذن لها أن تقبض القدر
المعين وتنفقه في مصالح
المذكورين وأشهد عليه
في ثاني عشري شهر صفر
المبارك سنة تسعين وسبعماية
فرض أوالد
الناصري
See Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 277 and 558.
Might be identical to the notary witness identified in Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 325.
أي درهماً.
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Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #106 (Plates III.3a and
)III.3b
Acknowledgement deed by Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Aḥmad Ibn al-Bawwāb
(Buyer 24), guardian of Burhān al-Dīn’s son Maḥmūd Kamāl, stating that
he received the monthly obligatory maintenance payment (farḍ) for the period
Muḥarram to Rabīʿ II 790/1388, with archival note on verso
)undated (most likely Muḥarram 790/1388
/106أ
بسم هللا الرحمن الرحيم
أق َّر الصدر األجل شهاب الدين أحمد بن المرحوم شهاب الدين أحمد بن شرف الدين عيسى
إقرارًا شرعيًا أنه قبض وتسلَّم وصار إليه من يد الصدر األجل شمس الدين محمد
ابن المرحوم جمال الدين عبد هللا أمين الحكم العزيز بالقدس الشريف من الدراهم
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الفضة معاملة يومئذ ماية درهم نصفها خمسون ما 12وذلك عن فرض كمال
ولد المرحوم برهان الدين الناصري │وكسوته│عن أربعة شهور أولهم مستهل سنة
تاريخه وآخرهم سلخ شهر ربيع اآلخر منها وذلك بما في القبض المذكور من ثمن
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لحاف وطراحة وبساط ومخدة الثمن عن ذلك ستة وخمسون ما 13وبقية المبلغ
ً
كامال ولم يتأخر له من المبلغ المعين أعاله
فضة قبض ذلك قبضًا وافيًا
الدرهم الفرد وعليه الخروج من تبعة ذلك بطريقه الشرعي وبه مخرجه
وكسوته وهو صحيح في تاريخه المعين أعاله والحمد هلل وحده
شهد عليه بذلك
شهد عليه بذلك
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كتبه إبراهيم بن محمود
إبراهيم بن محمد بن داود
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/106ب
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فرض كمال
[ابن الناصري]
ما ،مختصر درهماً.
أي درهماً.
See Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 559.
See Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 277 and 558.
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)Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #109 (Plate III.4
Receipt issued by Fāṭima bt. ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn ʿAlī for Burhān al-Dīn, confirming
that he paid the rent for the house for four months up to the end of the year
778/1377
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قبض من الشيخ برهان الدين الناصري أجرة الدار سكنه
الجارية في ملك فاطمة ابنة المرحوم عالء الدين علي بن السكاكي
عن أربع شهور آخرها سلخ الحجة سنة تسع [و] سبعين [و] سبعمية
قاله سيدنا العبد الفقير إلى هللا تعالى أقضى القضاة
عالء الدين الحاكم بالقدس الشريف أيده هللا تعالى
32
نصفها 16
تاريخ ثاني شهر [الحجة] الحر[ا]م سنة تسع [و] سبعين [و] سبعمية
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أذنت في ذلك
على ما درج فيه
كتبه علي بن محمد الشافعي
2.1.779/1377
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Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #111 (Plates III.5a and
)III.5b
Decision on the monthly obligatory maintenance payment (farḍ) for Maḥmūd
al-Subāʿī, the son of Fāṭima bt. ʿAbd Allāh and Burhān al-Dīn, by Abū Bakr
b. Ibrāhīm al-Ṣarfanī, the shāfiʿī deputy judge of Jerusalem16 (#111/1), revised
some four months later (#111/2), with archival note on verso
)6.11.789/1387 (#111/1) and 1.3.790/1388 (#111/2
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بسم هللا الرحمن الرحيم
فرض قدره كاتبه العبد الفقير إلى هللا تعالى أبو بكر إبراهيم الصرفني الشافعي النائب في
الحكم العزيز بالقدس الشريف أعانه
هللا تعالى ولطف به لمحمود السباعي يتيم برهان الدين الناصري المقيم كان بالقدس
الشريف المستمر تحت حجر الشرع الشريف وحضانة
جدته أم أمه المدعوة أم محمد المقيمة بالقدس الشريف في ماله المخلف له عن والده
المذكور برسم طعامه وشرابه وزيته
وصابونه وحمامه وأجرة حضانته وما عساه يحتاج إليه خال الكسوة في كل شهر يمضي
من تاريخه من الدراهم الفضة
الوازنة الجارية في المعاملة عشرين ما 17نصفها عشرة دراهم فرضا ً شرعيا ً ثم أذن
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/111أ1/
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الفارض المذكور أعاله للحاجة المذكورة أعاله أن تقبض
القدر المعين أعاله من المال المخلف لليتيم عن والده المذكور وتنفقه عليه وأن تقترض عند
العذر وترجع عند اإلمكان
إذنا ً شرعيا ً وبه أشهد عليه في سادس شهر القعدة الحرام سنة تسع وثمانين [و] سبعمية
الحمد هلل
)?( Most likely Buyer 4; see also Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 263/4: ‘Abū Bakr lbrāhīm al-Ṣarwī
{P 116}’.
17ما ،مختصر درهماً.
16
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9شهدت على سيدنا وموالنا
المشار إليه
10أعاله أيده هللا تعالى بما نسب
إليه فيه
11أعاله في تاريخه كتبه
18
إبراهيم بن محمود
12
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أشهد على سيدنا الحاكم
أشهد على سيدنا الحاكم
المشار إليه أعاله أيده هللا
تعالى
بما نسب إليه فيه أعاله كتبه
محمد بن عبد [الغني ]...
المشار إليه أعاله أيده
هللا تعالى
بما نسب إليه فيه أعاله
في تاريخـ[ـه]
19
كتب علي بن أبي بكر
/111أ2/
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ثم
ثم فرض كاتبه المذكور أعاله
لليتيم المذكور أعاله خارجًا
عن الفرض المذكور أعاله في
كل شهر يمضي من تاريخه من
الدراهم الفضة زيادة على
المعين تسوية عشرة دراهم
تتمة ثالثين فرضًا شرعيًا ]صحيحا]ً
أشهد عليه في مستهل ربيع األول سنة تسعين وسبعمية
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1فرض جمال
2ابن الناصري
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/111ب
See Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 277 and 558.
Might be identical to the notary witness identified in Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 325.
18
19
Plate Section III
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Sixteen Documents Linked to
Burhān al-Dīn’s Life and Estate
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III.1a Acknowledgement deed on money lending from Burhān
al-Dīn’s estate
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #016a, © Mohammad
H. Ghosheh
III.1b Acknowledgement deed on repayment of debt and archival
notes (incl. erroneous note on the right ascribing the document to the
estate archive of Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ḥamawī)
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #016b, © Mohammad
H. Ghosheh
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III.2a Decisions on the monthly obligatory maintenance payment
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #052a, © Mohammad
H. Ghosheh
III.2b Archival note
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #052b, © Mohammad
H. Ghosheh
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III.3a Acknowledgement deed by Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Aḥmad
Ibn al-Bawwāb
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #106a, © Mohammad
H. Ghosheh
III.3b Archival note
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #106b, © Mohammad
H. Ghosheh
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III.4 Receipt for payment of rent
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #109, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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III.5a Decisions on the monthly obligatory maintenance payment
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #111a, © Mohammad
H. Ghosheh
III.5b Archival note
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #111b, © Mohammad
H. Ghosheh
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III.6a Acknowledgement deed by Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Aḥmad
Ibn al-Bawwāb
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #115a, © Mohammad
H. Ghosheh
III.6b Archival note
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #115b, © Mohammad
H. Ghosheh
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III.7a Acknowledgement deed by Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Aḥmad
Ibn al-Bawwāb
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #118a, © Mohammad
H. Ghosheh
III.7b Archival note
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #118b, © Mohammad
H. Ghosheh
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III.8a Acknowledgement deed by Shīrīn
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic
Museum, #188a, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
III.8b Archival note
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic
Museum, #188b, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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III.9 Acknowledgement deed by Shīrīn
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #313, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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III.10 Declaration of intent (stipend, Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Shādī)
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #508, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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III.11 Declaration of no further claims
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #509, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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III.12 Acknowledgement deed by Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Aḥmad Ibn al-Bawwāb
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #676, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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III.13 Acknowledgement deed by Burhān al-Dīn’s divorced wife Maryam
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #699, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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III.14 Receipt for payment of rent
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #843,
© Mohammad H. Ghosheh
III.15 Receipt for payment of rent
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #850, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
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III.16 Division of the estate of Fāṭima 1 (deceased wife of Burhān al-Dīn)
Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #897, © Mohammad H. Ghosheh
341
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Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #115 (Plates III.6a and
)III.6b
Acknowledgement deed by Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Aḥmad Ibn al-Bawwāb
(Buyer 24), guardian of Burhān al-Dīn’s son Maḥmūd Kamāl, stating that
he received the monthly obligatory maintenance payment (farḍ) for the period
Rajab to Ramaḍān 790/1388, with archival note on verso
4.9.790/1388
/115أ
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بسم هللا الرحمن الرحيم
أقر الصدر األجل شهاب الدين أحمد بن الشيخ شهاب الدين أحمد عُرف بابن البواب
إقرارًا صحيحًا شرعيًا أنه قبض وصار إليه من يد الفقير إلى هللا تعالى الشيخ اإلمام
شمس الدين محمد بن المرحوم الشيخ شهاب الدين أحمد الحسباني أمين الحكم العزيز
الشافعي بالقدس
20
من الدراهم الفضة الجيدة تسعون ما نصفها خمس وأربعين عن فرض ثالث شهور
آخرهم سلخ شهر تاريخه فرض كمال بن المرحوم برهان الدين الناصري و[أجزت؟]
القابض
قبض ذلك قبضًا شرعيًا باعترافه وبه شهد في رابع شهر رمضان المعظم سنة تسعين
وسبعماية
شهد عليه بذلك
شهد عليه بذلك
شهد عليه بذلك
23
كتبه عبد هللا بن [ 21]...كتبه أحمد بن إبراهيم 22كتبه محمد بن محمد بن أبي العمري
Ed
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/115ب
1إشهاد
2قبض أحمد بن البواب
3فرض ابن الناصري تسعين
20
ما ،مختصر درهماً.
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 535 proposes ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Dayrī’.
See Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 544/5.
See Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 565: ‘al-Ghamrī’.
21
22
23
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Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #118 (Plates III.7a and
)III.7b
Acknowledgement deed by Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Aḥmad Ibn al-Bawwāb
(Buyer 24), guardian of Burhān al-Dīn’s son Maḥmūd Kamāl, stating that he
received the monthly obligatory maintenance payment (farḍ) for the two months
Jumādā I and Jumādā II 790/1388, with archival note on verso
7.6.790/1388
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10كتبه عيسى بن أحمد العجلوني
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بسم هللا الرحمن الرحيم
أقر الصدر األجل المحترم شهاب الدين أحمد بن المرحوم شهاب الدين أحمد بن شرف الدين
عيسى التركي الحنفي المقيم بالقدس الشريف
إقرارًا صحيحا شرعيًا طوعًا في صحته وسالمته أنه قبض وتسلم وصار إليه من يد الفقير
إلى هللا تعالى شمس الدين محمد بن المرحوم
شهاب الدين أحمد بن محمد الحسباني الشافعي أمين الحكم العزيز بالقدس الشريف من
الدراهم الفضة معاملة الشام المحروس
ستين درهم نصفها |ثالثين| وذلك فرض محمود الملقب بكمال ولد المرحوم الشيخ برهان
الدين إبراهيم بن رزق هللا الناصري عن مدة
شهرين كاملين أخرهما سلخ شهر جمادى اآلخرة من شهور سنة تاريخه بما فيه من السلف
ً
كامال برسم
قبض ذلك قبضًا تا ًما
نفقة اليتيم المذكور وعليه الخروج من عهدة ذلك بطريقه الشرعي وبه شهد عليه في سابع
شهر جمادى اآلخرة
من شهور سنة تسعين وسبعماية والحمد هلل وحده
شهد عليه بذلك
شهد عليه بذلك
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فرض ذلك بحضوري كتبه
أبو بكر الشافعي
/118أ
24
كتبه ناصر بن [شاهين؟[
See Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 559.
24
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/118ب
1
2
3
4
إشهاد قبض
شهاب الدين أحمد بن البواب
أليتام الناصري
ستين
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Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #188 (Plates III.8a and
)III.8b
Acknowledgement deed by Shīrīn, widow of Burhān al-Dīn, stating that she
received the monthly obligatory maintenance payment (farḍ) for her sons
Muḥammad and ʿAlī for the two months Rabīʿ I and Rabīʿ II 790/1388, with
archival note on verso
22.2.790/1388
/188أ
5
أعاله محمد وعلي من الدراهم معاملة دمشق المحروسة ماية وعشرون ما
Pr
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بسم هلل تعالى
أقرت الحرمة شيرين بنت عبد هللا التي كانت زوجا لبرهان الدين الناصري إقرارا شرعيا
في صحة منها وجواز أمر أنها قبضت وتسلمت وصار إليها من الشيخ األوحد
شمس الدين محمد بن جمال الدين عبد هللا األذرعي الوصي على أوالدها من زوجها
المذكور
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6نصفها ستون ما 26وذلك عن فرض ولديها المذكورين أعال[ه] عن مدة
7شهرين كاملين آخرهما سلخ شهر ربيع اآلخر سنة تاريخه وكسوتهما قبضا
8تاما وافيا كامال باعترافها بشهادتها في ثاني عشري شهر صفر المبارك
9سنة تسعين وسبعماية
شهد على إقرارها به
10شهد على إقرارها به
28
27
كتبه خليل بن يوسف []...
11كتبه إبراهيم بن محمود
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/188ب
1فرض
2أوالد
النا[صري]
ٍ
25
26
ما ،مختصر درهماً.
أي درهماً.
See Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 277 and 558.
See Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 557.
27
28
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)Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #313 (Plate III.9
Acknowledgement deed by Shīrīn, widow of Burhān al-Dīn, stating that she
received the monthly obligatory maintenance payment (farḍ) for her sons
Muḥammad and ʿAlī for the month of Shawwāl 789/1387 and for the two
months Jumādā I and Jumādā II 790/1388
4.5.790/1388
5
بالقدس الشريف أعزه هللا تعالى من الدراهم معاملة دمشق المحروسة ماية وخمسون ما
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بسم هللا تعالى
أقرت الحرمة شيرين بنت عبد هللا زوج المرحوم برهان الدين الناصري كانت
إقرارًا صحيحًا شرعيًا في صحة منها وجواز أمر أنها قبضت وتسلمت وصار إليها من يد
الشيخ شمس الدين محمد بن جمال الدين عبد هللا بن يحيى األذرعي الجابي على أوقاف
المدرسة الصالحية
29
ity
6من ذلك ثالثون ما 30عن شوال سنة 789والباقي وهو ماية وعشرون ما
7عن شهرين آخرهما سلخ شهر جمادى اآلخرة سنة تاريخه وذلك فرض أوالدها محمد
ً
كامال باعترافها بشهادتها في رابع
8وعلي قبضت ذلك قبضًا تا ًما وافيًا
9شهر جمادى األول سنة تسعين وسبعمية
شهد على المقرين به
10شهد على إقرارهما به
33
32
كتبه عيسى بن أحمد العجلوني
11كبته إبراهيم بن محمود
31
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30
31
ما ،مختصر درهماً.
أي درهماً.
أي درهماً.
See Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 277 and 558.
See Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 559.
32
33
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)Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #508 (Plate III.10
Declaration of intent by ‘al-janāb al-karīm’ Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Shādī
from al-Ramla to pay Burhān al-Dīn ten dirhams per month in exchange for
reciting miʿād sessions in his name three times a week at the Chain Gate
16.1.782/1380
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1بسم هللا الرحمن الرحيم
2يقول الفقير إلى هللا تعالى الجناب الكريم العالي المولوي السندي المخدومي الشهابي
3شهاب الدين أحمد بن األمير شادي من أهل الرملة المحروسة أعز هللا تعالى أنصاره أني
أذنت
4للفقير إلى هللا تعالى الشيخ برهان الدين الناصري قارئ الميعاد بالقدس الشريف أن
5يقرأ لي بالقدس الشريف بباب السلسلة بالمسجد األقصى كل جمعة ثلثة [ثالثة] أوقات بكرة
االثنين
6والثلثا [الثالثاء] وبعد صالة الجمعة وأن يقرأ التفسير والحديث والرقائق وله من
ي
7المعلوم في كل شهر يمضي عشرة دراهم نصفها خمسة دراهم وهذا خطي شاهد عل َّ
8وأن يدعو عقبه لي ولوالدتي [سروح؟ ]...سادس عشر شهر هللا الحرام
9من شهور سنة اثنتين [و] ثمانين [و] سبعماية والحمد هلل وحده وصلى هللا على سيدنا محمد
وآله وصحبه
10أشهد على األمير شهاب الدين المذكور بما أشهد على األمير شهاب الدين اآلذن المذكور
أعاله بما نسب إليه فيه أعاله
11نسب إليه فيه أعاله
كتبه []...
12كتبه محمد بن أحمد بن نصر []...
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)Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #509 (Plate III.11
Declaration by a certain Muḥammad al-Ṣafadī of no further claims against
Burhān al-Dīn regarding the salary (jāmakīya) for recitations at the Sitt
ʿĀʾisha endowment on the Ḥaram al-sharīf
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بسم هللا الرحمن الرحيم
يقول كاتبه محمد بن محمد ابن حسن الصفدي عفا هللا عنهم أنني ال أستحق
اليوم تاريخه في ذمة الشيخ اإلمام القدوة برهان الدين إبراهيم
ابن المرحوم رزق هللا الناصري أحد السادة الصوفية بالخانقاه
الصالحية بالقدس الشريف وال عنده وال تحت يده حقًا وال بقية
من حق من جهة جامكية الميعاد الجاري في وقف الست
الجليلة المرحومة عايشة زوجة المرحوم السليماني كانت مما قبضه
قبل تاريخه من يد األمير الكبير ركن الدين بيبرص [بيبرس] نائب النطر
بالمسجد األقصى الشريف بإذن الجناب العالي البدري األوحد أعز هللا
نصره وبذلك وضعت خطي في مستهل شعبان المكرم سنة ثمانين وسبعمية
أشهد على الواضع خطه
شهدت على الواضع خطه
أشهد على الواضع خطه
أعاله أعزه هللا تعالى بما
أعزه هللا تعالى بما نسب
أعاله أعزه هللا تعالى بما
نسب إليه فيه
إليه فيه
نسب إليه فيه
أحمد
بن
عيسى
كتبه
كتبه
تاريخه
أعاله في
أعاله في تاريخه كتبه علي
34
العجلوني
محمد بن نصر هللا
[عبد الغني الجزري؟]35
Ed
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12
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اعترف الواضع خطه بذلك
عند علي بن محمد الشافعي
1.8.780/1378
See Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 559.
See Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 552: ‘ʿAlī b. ʿAbd al-Qādir al- …’.
34
35
348
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Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #676 (Plate III.12)
Acknowledgement deed by Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Aḥmad Ibn al-Bawwāb
(Buyer 24, here called ‘Muḥammad b. Aḥmad’), guardian of Burhān al-Dīn’s
son Maḥmūd Kamāl, stating that he received the monthly obligatory maintenance payment (farḍ) for the two months Shawwāl and Dhū al-Qaʿda 789/1387
20.11.789/1387
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الحمد هلل الموفق
يقول كاتبه محمد بن أحمد أنني قبضت وتسلمت من الشيخ شمس الدين محمد الوصي
الحكمي على األيتام بالقدس الشريف │مبلغ أربعين نصفه عشرين│من مال محمود بن
المرحوم برهان الدين الناصري
المرصد تحت يد الوصي المذكور أعاله برسم نفقته عن مدة شهري شوال
والقعدة الحرام من سنة تاريخه قبضت ذلك لمحمود المذكور وبذلك
ي بتاريخ عشرين القعدة من سنة تسع وثمانين وسبعمية
َّ وضعت خطي هذا شاهدًا عل
شهد على الواضع خطه به
شهد عليه بذلك أعزه هللا تعالى
37
36
]كتبه محمد بن [الجود؟
كتبه أبو بكر بن أحمد الحنفي
36
37
See Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 543.
See Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 568 proposes ‘Muḥammad b. Muḥammad al-Ḥanafī‘.
1
2
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Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #699 (Plate III.13)
Acknowledgement deed by Burhān al-Dīn’s divorced wife Maryam bt. ʿUmar38
stating that she has no further claims against him except the ṣadāq (deferred
marriage gift)
12.2.784/1382
1
2
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6
7
8
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]بسم هللا [الرحمن الرحيم؟
أقرت المرأة الكامل مريم بنت عمر مطلقة الشيخ اإلمام برهان الدين إبراهيم بن المرحوم
رزق هللا أحد الصوفية بالخانقات الصالحية بالقدس الشريف إقرارًا شرعيًا
في صحة منها وسالمة وجواز أمر أنها ال تستحق على ال ُمطَلِّق المذكور كسوة وال نفقة
وال متعة وال حق من حقوق الزوجة سوى الصداق المذكور في صداقها
عليه على حكم تقسيطه وبه شهد في ثاني عشر شهر صفر سنة أربع وثمانين وسبعمية
شهد عليها بذلك
شهد عليها بذلك
40
39
علي بن أبي بكر
]...[ أحمد بن
38
39
40
Little, Catalogue, 220 misreads the name as ‘Qaratamur bint ʿAmr’, and Müller, Kadi und seine
Zeugen, 175, has ‘Qaratamar bt. ʿUmar’.
Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 549 suggests ‘Aḥmad b. Thābit al-Anṣārī ‘.
Might be identical to the notary witness identified in Müller, Kadi und seine Zeugen, 325.
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
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)Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #843 (Plate III.14
Receipt issued by Fāṭima bt. ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn ʿAlī for Burhān al-Dīn confirming
that he paid the rent for the house up to the end of the year 779/1378
12.1.778/1376
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الحمد هلل وحده
الحمد هلل
صحيح ذلك
قُبض من الشيخ برهان الدين إبراهيم الناصري المحدث بالقدس الشريف
أجرة الدار المخلفة عن المرحوم الشيخ عالء الدين علي بن محمد بن
عمار بن السكاكي سكنى برهان الدين المذكور بها وصار ذلك جميعه
إلى مستحق ميراث عالء الدين المذكور وذلك إلى آخر سنة
سبع وسبعين [و] سبعمية قبض ذلك قبضًا تا ًما
ولم يتأخر في ذمة برهان الدين المذكور إلى آخر المدة الدرهم
الفرد وبه أشهدت في ثاني عشر شهر هللا المحرم سنة ثمان
شهدت بذلك
وسبعين [و] سبعمية
كتبه أحمد بن محمد بن [ ]...الشافعي
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Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #850 (Plate III.15)
Receipt issued by Ṣārim al-Dīn Ibrāhīm in the name of Fāṭima bt. ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn
ʿAlī for Burhān al-Dīn, confirming that he paid the rent for the house for three
months up to the end of Jumādā II 778/1376
30.6.778/1376 (?)
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الحمد هلل المولى برهان الدين يصرف للصارم إبراهيم
مشد الرباط من أجرة سكنه الدار المخلفة عن عالء الدين
السكاكي رحمه [هللا] وذلك أجرة [ثال]ثة أشهر آخرها سلخ جمادى آخر
24
سنة ثمان وسبعين وسبعمية
ليصرف ذلك في فرض فاطمة بنت عالء الدين المذكور أعاله
1
2
3
4
5
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352
)Jerusalem, al-Ḥaram al-sharīf, Islamic Museum, #897 (Plate III.16
Draft of the division of the estate of Fāṭima 1, the deceased wife of Burhān
al-Dīn and mother of Khadīja and Maḥmūd Kamāl. This draft was written
on the verso of a disused document.
undated
الذي يخص إبراهيم الناصري من المبيعات المخلفة عن زوجه فاطمة
41
بساط
تخت
عباءة سوداء طراحات
خمسة وثالثون خمسون
خمسة وخمسون خمسون
1
2
3
4
قطارميز
سماط
43
ثالث دسوت
44
رف وزبادي
وخابية 47وغطاء
ثالثون
49
زجاج وبراني
46
45
es
s
خمسة وثالثون
Pr
ity
rs
وأيضا ً
ve
9
10
عشرة
ثمانية عشر
ni
7
8
ثالثون
قشة
ستة
U
أربع بقج
48
ستة وعشرون أربعة وثالثون
سجادة ماردي
قباء أبيض
وزبادي
سبعة
اثنا عشر
عشرة
ثالث مقاعد
َس ْفرة 50ومنديل نقد
وعلبة
أزرق
عشرون
من أصل ثمانين
أربعون
nb
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rg
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5
6
مخداتوخديات
سبعون
42
Ed
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42
43
44
45
46
47
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50
مفردها طرَّاحة :فراشٌ مرب ٌع يُجلَس عليه ،عاميَّة .يُنظر البستاني ،محيط المحيط.547 ،
الخ ِّديّة هي المخدة .ينظر دوزي ،تكملة المعاجم العربية ،ج ،4ص .27ويبدو من السياق أنها نوع خاص من المخدَّات.
جمع قطرميز :بوقال ،قمقم ،برنية ،وهو وعاء ذو عنق قصير عريض الفم .يُنظر دوزي ،تكملة المعاجم العربية ،ج،8
.310
ِس َماط :قطعة من الجلد تُ َّم ُد على األرض وتوضع عليها صحون الطَّعام .يُنظر دوزي ،تكملة المراجع العربية ،ج.146 ،6
مفردها دست :القِدر النحاس ِّي ،عاميَّة .يُنظر الخفاجي ،شفاء الغليل.123 ،
ال َّزبادي جمع ُزبديَّة :وعاء من الخزف المحروق المطل ّي بالميناء يُخثَّر فيها اللبن .دوزي ،تكملة المعاجم العربية ،ج ،5
،282الحاشية رقم (.)654
الخابية :ال ّجرَّة يُجعل فيها الماء .يُنظر الزبيدي ،تاج العروس ،ج ،224 ،2البستاني ،محيط المحيط.213 ،
البُق َجة :الصرَّة من الثياب ونحوها .ينظر البستاني ،محيط المحيط .47 ،البقجة :قطعة مربعة من قماش مبطن تختلف
ألوانها ،تلفف بها المالبس لحفظها .دوزي ،تكملة المعاجم العربية ،ج.390 ،1
ْ
ْ
خان
ضخم ٍة خَضْ راء ،و ُربَّما
حاحَ .وفِي ال ُمحْ كَم :ش ْبهُ ف َّخا َر ٍة
البَرْ نِيَّةُ :إنا ٌء من َخز ٍ
ير الثّ ِ
وار ِ
كانت ِمن القَ ِ
َف َك َما فِي الصِّ ِ
الواس َع ِة األَ ْفواه .يُنظر الزبيدي ،تاج العروس ،ج .243 ،34
ِ
َس ْف َرة :ما يُبْسط تحت الخوان من جلد أو غيره .البستاني ،محيط المحيط.413 ،
353
11
12
13
14
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الذي يخص الولد كمال من المبيعات من تركة والدته رحمها هللا تعالى
عشر زبادي
أربع أطباق
زوج صناديق
نحاس
سالمي وصندوق نحاس
خمسة وتسعون
مائتان وخمسة
مائة وعشرة
51
طبق
طاستان
طشتان
بربخان
للغسيل
خمسة وثالثون خمسة وعشرون ثالثون
خمسة وستون
طبق شربة
مصفاتان
ثلث أطباق
هاون
اثنا عشر
ثمانية وعشرون أحد عشر
أربعة عشر
حلق رهن
طاسة ومنسف
وسطل
خمسة وثالثون
54
خمسة وثالثون
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25
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الذي يخص الولد خديجة من المبيعات من تركة والدتها رحمها هللا تعالى وكذلك الجدة من
المبيعات
55
قباء أحمر مع الجدة
قباء أبيض
سخانة
صادية
سكينة وفِ َ
56
سنجاب
مصري
ثالثة عشر وثلث
مائة
ستة عشر
سبعمائة وثمانون مائة وعشرون
وعشرون من أصل الثمانين
يد خديجة من أصل قميصان
دستان
الدراهم الثمانين
خمسة وخمسون ستة عشر إال ثلث أربع وعشرون
خارجا ً عن الصداق
والصداق في ذمة الزوج
ثلثمائة
ni
22
أحد
وسبعون
rs
21
وأيضا أحد
وثالثون قبلهم
ity
20
دراهم
بطنيتان
ثمانية
53
Pr
es
s
15
16
17
18ذهب خالص
ثالثة عشر مثقاالً
19الثمن مائتان
وستون
ست سقارق
وشمعدان صغير
أحد وستون
52
51والبَرْ بَخ :منفذ الماء ومجراه وهو اإلرْ دَبة والبالوعة من الخزف .ينظر البستاني ،محيط المحيط .33 ،ولكن جاء في
الوثيقة /195أ -السطر “ :8وبربخ نحاس مخرم ،... ،وزبدية نحاس أصفر وغطاء بربخ” ،وكذلك في الوثيقة /607أ-
السطر “ 6وبربخي نحاس أصفر” .أي أن البربخ نوع من األواني النحاسية.
“ 52السقرق من التركية سُو ْقره أو صوقره الحيّز بين جانبين أو بين شيئين وهم استعملوه بمعنى المغرفة يَغرف بها الس َّمانُ
العدس والر َز والفلف َل والكزبرة ،وهي ذات فجوة ولها مقبض كما يطلقونها على ضرب من أباريق الزيت ذات
والعطَّا ُر
َ
المقبض ،والمصب .وفي الالذقية يطلقون السقرق على إبريق الماء وجمعوه على السقارق” .األسدي ،موسوعة حلب،
.360واستعمال هذه الكلمة بمعنى اإلناء قديم؛ فقد جاء عند أبي شامة “ إبريق يشم ،طشت يشم ،سقرق مينا” .أبو شامة:
ق
كتاب الروضتين :ج .281–280 :2كما جاء عند ابن كثير“ :ثم خلع عليهما وأطلق لهما خمسين َسقرقا ً في كل َسق َر ٍ
خمسة آالف درهم” .ابن كثير :البداية والنهاية :ج .805 :14والسقرق في هذين النصين جاء بمعنى اإلناء.
53بَطانيَّة :جلد غنم بصوفه ،وغطاء من الصوف مبرقش أو مخطط بألوان ،ورداء مبطن لألوالد .ينظر دوزي ،تكملة
المعاجم العربية ،ج.377 ،1
54أي أنَّ هذا الحلق كان مرهونا ً عند فاطمة.
صاديَّة :سفيفة تُلَف بها البنود المضفور بها شعر المرأة ،عاميَّة .البستاني ،محيط المحيط.692 ،
55الفِ َ
56ربما يقصد قباء أحمر بلون السنجاب ،أو قباء بفرو سنجاب.
Appendix 3 List of Edited H.aram al-sharıˉ f
Documents
his appendix lists all edited Ḥaram al-sharīf documents published up
until 2021. It is based on Christian Müller’s list of editions up until 2011
found in his Kadi und seine Zeugen (576–82). Many of these editions can be
found in digital format in the Munich Arabic Papyrology Database (text only)
and the Paris Comparing Arabic Legal Documents platform (image and text,
often with emendations).1 Comparing Arabic Legal Documents has now also
started online-only editions (see below, #333). In the following list ‘em.’ stands
for ‘emendations’.
ni
ve
rs
ity
Pr
es
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T
Ed
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nb
u
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U
#001: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 189–91 (em. Diem,
28–32).
#002: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 199/200 (em. Diem,
36).
#003: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 195/6 (em. Diem,
32–4).
#004: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 197/8 (em. Diem,
34/5).
#005: Frenkel, Relationship, 107.
#006: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 183–5 (em. Diem,
25–8).
#007: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 203–5 (em. Diem,
38–40).
1
Philologisches,
Philologisches,
Philologisches,
Philologisches,
Philologisches,
Philologisches,
https://www.apd.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/apd/project1c.jsp; https://cald.irht.cnrs.fr (last accessed
30 November 2021).
354
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#008: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 181/2; Ṣāliḥīya, Min wathāʾiq, 41–7
(em. Diem, Philologisches, 23–5).
#009: Little, Five Petitions, 381–8.
#010: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 212–14 (em. Diem, Philologisches,
46–8).
#012: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 208 (em. Diem, Philologisches, 40–2).
#013: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 209–11 (em. Diem, Philologisches,
42–6).
#014: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 201/2 (em. Diem, Philologisches,
37/8).
#016: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Appendix 2.
#020: Ghawānma, Tārīkh niyābat Bayt al-Maqdis, 194; Ṣāliḥīya, Min
wathāʾiq, 48–57.
#022: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 241.
#025: Little, Five Petitions, 351–7.
#026: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 206.
#028: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 227–9.
#030: Müller, Crimes without Criminals, 146–52; Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq
maqdisīya II, 132–4.
#031: see #032 and #650.
#032: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 221.
#034: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 177–80 (em. Diem, Philologisches,
21–3).
#035: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 276 (recto only).
#036: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 237/8 (em. Diem, Philologisches,
55–7).
#039: Müller, Écrire pour établir la preuve, 86–93.
#043: Ghawānma, Tārīkh niyābat Bayt al-Maqdis, 190.
#046: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 245.
#047: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya l, 254.
#048: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 258.
#049: Richards, Primary Education, 228/29.
#052: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Appendix 2.
#059: Richards, Mamlūk Barīd, 208/9.
#060: Hagedorn, Domestic Slavery, 218/9.
356
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#061: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Chapter 7.
#067: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 168 (em. Diem, Philologisches, 63–4).
#068: Diem, Philologisches, 16.
#074: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 274 (em. Diem, Philologisches, 57–9).
#075: Müller, Crimes without Criminals, 152–5.
#082: Lutfi, Al-Quds al-Mamlûkiyya, 38.
#106: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Appendix 2.
#108: Lutfi, Six Fourteenth Century Iqrārs, 267–9 (em. Lutfi/Little, Iqrārs
from Al-Quds, 327/8).
#109: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Appendix 2.
#111: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Appendix 2.
#115: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Appendix 2.
#118: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Appendix 2.
#133: Little, Documents Related to the Estates of a Merchant, 97–111.
#163: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 267; Ṣāliḥīya, Min wathāʾiq, 84–9.
#178: Muḥammad, Ijrāʾāt jard al-mawārīth al-ḥashrīya, 83–6.
#180: see #061.
#181: Müller, Constats d’héritages, 308–10.
#182: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya l, 280 (left column only).
#183: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 107.
#184: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 109; Lutfi, Six Fourteenth Century
Iqrārs, 262–6 (em. Lutfi/Little, Iqrārs from Al-Quds, 326/7).
#186: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 92.
#188: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Appendix 2.
#192: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 105.
#197: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 42.
#198: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 89.
#199: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 87.
#200: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 78.
#201: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 90.
#202: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 97.
#203: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 169.
#205: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 113; Lutfi, Six Fourteenth Century
Iqrārs, 269–73 (em. Lutfi/Little, Iqrārs from Al-Quds, 328/9).
#206: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 103.
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#209: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 120 (recto only).
#211: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 83–5.
#214: Diem, Philologisches, 11.
#215: Little, Five Petitions, 359/363.
#220: Ṣāliḥīya, Min wathāʾiq, 98–103.
#223: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 70; cf. Richards, Qasāma in Mamlūk
Society, 282–4.
#229: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya l, 231.
#232: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 215/6 (em. Diem, Philologisches,
49–51).
#265: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 72; cf. Richards, Qasāma in Mamlūk
Society, 274–6.
#269: Lutfi, Al-Quds al-Mamlûkiyya, 48.
#272: Richards, Mamlūk Barīd, 208.
#278: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 217/8 (em. Diem, Philologisches,
51–4).
#287: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 111; Lutfi, Six Fourteenth Century
Iqrārs, 273–7 (em. Lutfi/Little, Iqrārs from Al-Quds, 329).
#288: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 135.
#289: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 116; Lutfi, Six Fourteenth Century
Iqrārs, 258–62 (em. Lutfi/Little, Iqrārs from Al-Quds, 326).
#292: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 76.
#293: Richards, Qasāma in Mamlūk Society, 259–61.
#298: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 149; Little, Six Fourteenth Century
Purchase Deeds, 325.
#301: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 37.
#302: Abdul-Rahman, Arabic Marriage Contract, 125–34.
#303: Frenkel, Relationship, 108.
#305: Little, Five Petitions, 372–9.
#307: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 165/6 (em. Diem, Philologisches,
59–62).
#309: Muḥammad, Marsūm al-Sulṭān al-Ashraf Īnāl, 165–7.
#310: Little, Five Petitions, 365–72.
#311: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya l, 187.
#312: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 101.
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#313: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Appendix 2.
#315: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 118 (recto only); Lutfi, Six
Fourteenth Century Iqrārs, 278–87 (em. Lutfi/Little, Iqrārs from Al-Quds,
329).
#316: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 147; Little, Six Fourteenth Century
Purchase Deeds, 317.
#326/1: Ṣāliḥīya, Min wathāʾiq, 58–69.
#330: ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, al-Taʿāmulāt al-qaḍāʾīya.
#331: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 59.
#332: Muḥammad, Idārat amwāl awqāf al-Ḥaram, 266–9.
#333: Müller, Document JerH_333 on endowed villages.
#334: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 22.
#335: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 270; Ṣāliḥīya, Min wathāʾiq, 90–7; see
Little, Ḥaram Documents related to the Jews, 243–57.
#336: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 280/1; Ṣāliḥīya, Min wathāʾiq,
70–6.
#346: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 99.
#348: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 259.
#355: Little, Documents Related to the Estates of a Merchant, 126–69.
#367: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 248–50.
#373: Müller, Crimes without Criminals, 157–9.
#374: Richards, Mamlūk Barīd, 208/9.
#376: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 265.
#382: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 252/3; Little, Six Fourteenth Century
Purchase Deeds, 313–17.
#395: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 263.
#412: Lutfi, Al-Quds al-Mamlûkiyya, 45.
#436: Müller, Écrire pour établir la preuve, 94–7.
#441: Müller, Écrire pour établir la preuve, 94–7.
#445: Hagedorn, Domestic Slavery, 222/3.
#458: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 115.
#459: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 95.
#460: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 46.
#461: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 44.
#467: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 40.
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#469: Lutfi, Al-Quds al-Mamlûkiyya, 50.
#487: Muḥammad, Ijrāʾāt jard al-mawārīth al-ḥashrīya, 80–2.
#488: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 68; Richards, Qasāma in Mamlūk
Society, 265–7.
#490: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 140.
#494: Ṣāliḥīya, Min wathāʾiq, 109–15.
#495: Hagedorn, Domestic Slavery, 220/1.
#501: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 273.
#503: Ṣāliḥīya, Min wathāʾiq, 104–8.
#508: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Appendix 2.
#509: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Appendix 2.
#531: Muḥammad, Ijrāʾāt jard al-mawārīth al-ḥashrīya, 99–102.
#532: see #061.
#535: Richards, Mamlūk Barīd, 208/9.
#554: Little, Ḥaram Documents related to the Jews, 233–43.
#573: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 164.
#574: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 152–4; Little, Six Fourteenth Century
Purchase Deeds, 298/309.
#577: Lutfi, Al-Quds al-Mamlûkiyya, 43.
#586: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 158.
#591: Little, Documents Related to the Estates of a Merchant, 111–26.
#593: Richards, Glimpses of Provincial Mamluk Society, 54/5.
#595: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 137.
#596: Richards, Qasāma in Mamlūk Society, 279–82.
#603: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 167.
#607: Lutfi, Al-Quds al-Mamlûkiyya, 58–60.
#609: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 51.
#613: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 142.
#616: Little, Two Petitions and Consequential Court Records, 185–7 (recto
only).
#620: Maḥāmīd, Dirāsāt fī tārīkh al-Quds al-thaqāfī, 207–9.2
#628: Müller, Crimes without Criminals, 159–61.
#635: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 33.
2
We thank Umar Jamal Muhammad Ali (Sohag University) for drawing our attention to this edition.
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#636: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 66; Ṣāliḥīya, Min wathāʾiq, 77–83;
Richards, Qasāma in Mamlūk Society, 270–3; Little, Ḥaram Documents
related to the Jews, 257–62.
#640: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 62.
#642: Müller, Crimes without Criminals, 161–6; Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq
maqdisīya I, 224.
#645: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 129.
#646: ʿAbd al-Raḥmān/Anas, ʿAqdā zawāj, 303–10.
#647: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 53–7.
#648: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 28.
#649: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 25; Little, Two Fourteenth-Century
Court Records from Jerusalem, 18–21.
#650: Little, Two Fourteenth-Century Court Records from Jerusalem, 30–5.
#653/1: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 19/20; Little, Court Record of a
Divorce Hearing, 76/7.
#653/2: Little, Court Record of a Divorce Hearing, 79.
#654: Little, Two Petitions and Consequential Court Records, 174/5.
#676: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Appendix 2.
#688: Little, Six Fourteenth Century Purchase Deeds, 321.
#691: Richards, Qasāma in Mamlūk Society, 256–9.
#694: Lutfi, Al-Quds al-Mamlûkiyya, 53.
#695: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 48.
#697: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 74; Richards, Qasāma in Mamlūk
Society, 276–9.
#699: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Appendix 2.
#703: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 63; Richards, Qasāma in Mamlūk
Society, 262–4.
#706: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya II, 127.
#710: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 260.
#712: Richards, Qasāma in Mamlūk Society, 252–6.
#719: Muḥammad, Ijrāʾāt jard al-mawārīth al-ḥashrīya, 87–91.
#720: Müller, Écrire pour établir la preuve, 94–7.
#763: Muḥammad, Idārat amwāl awqāf al-Ḥaram, 265/6.
#767j: Lutfi, Al-Quds al-Mamlûkiyya, 66.
#768: Muḥammad, Ijrāʾāt jard al-mawārīth al-ḥashrīya, 92–8.
AP P ENDIX 3
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#769a/b: Muḥammad, Idārat amwāl awqāf al-Ḥaram, 270–9.
#770th: Richards, Mamlūk Barīd, 209.
#793: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Chapter 8.
#800: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Chapter 8.
#812: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Chapter 8.
#833: Al-ʿAsalī, Wathāʾiq maqdisīya I, 235 (recto only).
#840: Lutfi, Al-Quds al-Mamlûkiyya, 40.
#843: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Appendix 2.
#847: Richards, Qasāma in Mamlūk Society, 267–8; Muḥammad, Idārat
amwāl awqāf al-Ḥaram, 270–2.
#849: Lutfi, Al-Quds al-Mamlûkiyya, 63.
#850: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Appendix 2.
#897: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Appendix 2.
#968: Aljoumani/Hirschler, Library of Burhan al-Din, Chapter 8.
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General Index
This index covers Part I and extended narrative from Part II. In all indexes the article ‘al-’,
diacritics, the letters ʿayn and hamza as well as ‘b.’ are disregarded in the alphabetical order.
rs
Ahmed, Shahab, 152
ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Aqbughā Yankī, 57, 73t
ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Ibn al-Naqīb, 155
Aleppo, 9, 12, 25, 31, 167
Alexandria, 25, 31
al-Alfīya (Ibn Mālik) see Index of Book
Titles
ʿAlī, (son of Burhān al-Dīn), 68, 69, 98, 101,
355
ʿAlī b. Qōjā al-ʿAlāʾī, 57, 73t
Apellániz, Francisco, 82
Aqṣā Mosque, 72
library, 106, 215–17
Arabic alphanumerical notation systems,
187–8
Arabic documentary numerals, 187, 188,
191–202t
Arabic Papyrology Database, 17, 354
archival notes, 100
archival practices, 3, 4, 78, 82–3, 208–9
archival notes, 100
document survival, 103–4
household, 83–4, 91–5, 102
life-cycles, 84–5
organisations, 89–90, 94
ʿarḍ documents, 120
al-ʿAsalī, Kāmil, 16
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ʿAbbasid Baghdad library, 210
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Aḥmad al-Ghazzī see
Index of Buyers
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. al-Zayn see Index of
Buyers
Abraham Ben Yijū, 30
archives, 30, 94
Abraham’s Luggage (Lambourne, Elizabeth),
8
Abū Bakr b. Ibrāhīm al-Ṣarfanī see Index of
Buyers
Abū Bakr al-Nassāj, 71, 92
Abū Isḥāq, 192, 193, 196t–202t
Abū al-Suʿūd family, 105
Abū Yazīd al-ʿAjamī, 122, 156
Abul-Hajj, Amal, 14, 15, 16, 112
acknowledgement deeds, 100, 101, 102
Acquired Persian Documents, Delhi, 14
Adab al-dunyā wa-al-dīn (al-Māwardī) see
Index of Book Titles
Ādūjī b. Yāzilī family, 86
Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Maqdisī see
Index of Authors
Aḥmad b. Muḥammad Shihāb al-Dīn (Ibn
al-) Muthbit see Index of Buyers
Aḥmad Ibn al-Raṣṣāṣ see Index of Authors
Sharḥ al-Alfīya see Index of Book Titles
ity
Pr
es
s
Entries followed by f indicate pages with a figure
Entries followed by m indicate pages with a map
Entries followed by t indicate pages with a table
Entries followed by n refer to footnote(s) on the page indicated
382
general index
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Badr al-Dīn, 216
Badr al-Dīn Ibn Makkī, 154, 158
Barakat, Bashir, 61, 134
Tārīkh al-maktabāt al-ʿarabīya, 218
Barqūq (sultan), 75
Barqūqid period, 63
Bauer, Thomas, 6
Bavarian priests, 8
Behrens-Abouseif, Doris, 139, 166, 172
Bertrand, Paul, 290
bibliothèques arabes publiques et
semipubliques, Les (Eche, Youssef
[Yūsuf al-ʿĪsh]), 11–12
Bilād al-Shām, 1, 2, 9
libraries, 133, 140, 203–4
Black Death, the, 186–7, 207
book collections, 2, 5, 109
Bavarian priests’, 8
Ibrāhīm ibn Jamāʿa, 162
see also Burhān al-Dīn, library of; libraries
book culture, 132
book endowment, 61
book lists, 110–11, 127–8, 130–1
book markets, 167
book ownership, 3, 77, 79, 133–4, 186,
204–5
Bavarian priests, 8
383
economy of, 166, 175–87
Jerusalem, 182–4
Jewish, 182
non-elite, 13
social status, 138–9, 182–4
see also libraries
book prices, 165–6, 170–1
Black Death, the, 186–7
cheap books, 181
cultural factors, 171–2, 174–5
Damascus, 173–4
data set size, 170–1, 173, 175
data sources, 172–3, 175
materiality, 171, 174–5
meaning of, 166, 171–5
Muḥyī al-Dīn Yaḥyā b. Ḥusayn al-Turkī,
library of, 184–6
reading, 166, 187–202t
scholarship, 170–1
see also book prices, estate of Burhān
al-Dīn
book prices, estate of Burhān al-Dīn, 143,
145, 146, 147, 148
average, 157, 176
cultural factors, 174–5
data set size, 175
data sources, 175
distribution, 176t
importance of, 165
materiality, 171, 174
range of, 175–6
representative nature of, 176–7
salary comparison, 180–1
small-scale buyers, 157
social status and, 177–8, 180
wealthy buyers, 157–8
book trading, 167, 168
book trajectories, 159–63
British Libraries, 7, 8
Browsing through the Sultan’s Bookshelves
(D’Hulster, Kristof), 12
Budayrīya library, 10, 215, 217
al-Bukhārī see Index of Authors
al-Ṣaḥīḥ see Index of Book Titles
bureaucracy, 108, 207
Bürer, Mathias, 8
Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm al-ʿArrābī, 157
ve
Ashrafīya library, Damascus, 2, 133, 141,
149, 203–6
chronological distribution, 150
ḥadīth titles, 143
Koran-linked titles, 142
monolingualism, 152
poetry and adab titles, 148
political titles, 149
popular authors, 151
regional profile, 151–2
theology titles, 149
al-Asyūṭī, 120, 168
Jawāhir al-ʿuqūd, 168, 191
auctions, 97, 167–8, 169–70; see also estate
sales
author libraries, 204
ʿAwārif al-maʿārif (al-Suhrawardī) see Index
of Book Titles
Awḥadīya Mausoleum, 37t, 41, 72
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joining Ḥaram al-sharīf document corpus,
102–8
numerical profile, 28–30
payment lists, 114–15
see also Burhān al-Dīn estate archives;
Appendix 1; Appendix 2
Burhān al-Dīn, employment, 5, 23–4, 28, 34,
35–48, 49, 50–1, 54, 55–60, 91
at Awḥadīya Mausoleum, 37t, 41, 59
endowments, positions in, 36–48
at the Ḥaram al-sharīf, 37t, 42, 43–4, 59,
73t
as legal proxy, 58
at Manṣūrī Ribāṭ, 36, 37t, 39, 73t
as muḥaddith, 58
as multiple part-time reciter, 34, 35, 36, 47,
61
personal stipends, 49, 50–1, 54, 55–8,
59–61, 73t, 91, 209
as primary school teacher, 37t, 44–5, 59,
73t
as reciter, 32, 37, 39, 40–1, 42, 43–7, 49,
50–1, 54, 55, 140
at Ṣalāḥīya Khānqāh, 37t, 45–7, 59
salary/wealth, 41–2, 43–4, 45, 56, 57,
72–6, 181
sub-contracting, 42, 43, 60
as ṣūfī, 46–7
at Ṭāz Mausoleum, 37t, 40–1, 59, 60, 73t,
91
Burhān al-Dīn, estate archives, 1–2, 19, 28,
87, 88, 104, 168–9
accounts and lists, 125–6, 156–7, 169,
287–324
archival sites, 88–95
documentary network, 287–324
estate inventory, 103
estate payments list, 287, 290, 291t,
292–3, 294–300
estate receivables list, 287, 290, 291t–2,
301–7
estate sale accounts, 169–70, 287, 290 ,
291t, 292–3, 294, 308–13, 314–23, 324
formation of, 95–102
ghost document, 290–1t
joining Ḥaram al-sharīf document corpus,
102–8
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ni
Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm al-Nāṣirī, 1
accommodation, 39, 70–1, 74, 91, 92–3,
153
agency, 54, 209
biography, lack of, 30, 31
children, 68–70, 98
clothing, 138
death and funeral, 1, 75
descriptions of, 55
document preservation, 206
estate of, 75–6, 95–6, 97–8, 119, 130t,
153–4, 156–9, 168–70
family tree, 69f
food, 74, 108
health, 60
household expenses, 180
household objects, 120–1
household objects, estate auction of, 156,
177
household objects, sale of, 66–7, 111, 120
literacy, 79–80
maintenance payments, 28, 67, 68–9, 70,
98, 100–1, 102, 126
marriages/divorces, 64–8, 91
neighbourhood, 71–2
personal archives, 91–3, 94–5, 100
personal life, 64–76
prominence of, 30–1
property ownership, 71–2, 91, 92, 153
salary/wealth, 41–2, 43–4, 45, 56, 57,
72–6, 181
as scholar, 32, 34, 58
social environment, 23–4, 28, 29, 31, 34,
47–8, 50–64
social status, 34, 132, 138, 139
ṣūfīsm, 146
ʿulamāʾ, as member of, 32
see also Burhān al-Dīn documentary
corpus; Burhān al-Dīn, employment;
Burhān al-Dīn estate archives; Burhān
al-Dīn, library of
Burhān al-Dīn, documentary corpus, 14–15,
16, 27–30, 88, 206
accounts, 114–15
archival practices, 79
Burhān al-Dīn, sub-corpus, 87, 88
importance, 61
rs
|
ve
384
general index
385
Burhān al-Dīn, sub-corpus, 87, 88
Burhān al-Dīn al-Qalqashandī, 128, 129, 155,
161, 184
book list, 128–9
ve
rs
ity
Pr
es
s
Cairo, 25, 31, 75, 167, 173
Arabic documentary numerals, 193
cheap books, 181–2
Fatimid Cairo library, 210
food prices, 179–80
Cairo Sultanate, 6
court library, 12
political history, 83
CALD (Comparing Arabic Legal
Documents), 17, 354
Catalogue (Little, Donald), 188
ceramics, 63
Chamberlain, Michael, 50, 82
Chatterjee, Nandini, 14, 83–4
Negotiating Mughal Law, 8
Christ, Georg, 307
Civilian Elite of Cairo (Petry, Carl), 32
Clermont-Ganneau, Charles, 105
clothing, 2
codes, 195
coinage, 123–4, 191, 192, 193
Comparing Arabic Legal Documents
(CALD), 17, 354
Coptic numerals, 193–4
Creswell, K. A. C.
Early Muslim Architecture, 15
Ed
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nb
u
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h
U
ni
maintenance payments, 28, 67, 68–9, 70,
98, 100–1, 102, 126
naming/matching individuals, 288
organisation of, 101–2
pragmatic literacy, 107
see also sale booklet of the estate of Burhān
al-Dīn; Appendix 1
Burhān al-Dīn, library of, 2, 4, 19, 76–7,
121–2, 132–3, 142t
adab titles, 142t, 148
age, 9, 10–11
auction of, 153–5, 156–9, 168–70
authors by popularity, 151t
book storage, 139, 140
buyers, 129, 153–5, 156–9
chronological distribution, 150t
codices, 129, 136–7
devotional titles, 142t, 148
fiqh/uṣūl al-fiqh titles, 142t, 145
grammar titles, 142t, 147
Haarmann, Ulrich, 18
ḥadīth titles, 142t, 143–5, 174
history titles, 142t, 146
Koran-linked titles, 142–3, 174
languages represented, 152
materiality, 208
poetry titles, 142t, 148
political titles, 149
post-death trajectory, 133, 136, 153–63
preservation, 11
as prestige library, 138–41, 153, 163
profiling and situating, 7–14
purpose, 137–40
regional profile, 151–2
sermons/paraenesis titles, 142t, 147
size, 7–9, 133–7
ṣūfīsm titles, 142t, 146–7
thematic categories, 141–53
theology titles, 149
uniqueness of, 135, 136
value, 181
vanished books of, 214–18
as working library, 143, 163
see also book prices, estate of Burhān
al-Dīn; Burhān al-Dīn documentary
corpus; sale booklet of the estate of
Burhān al-Dīn
|
daftar format, 112–13, 116
Damascus, 9, 25, 31, 144, 152, 155, 167,
173–4
food prices, 178–9
Dār al-wathāʾiq, Cairo, 80
Dennis, Joseph, 110
School Library Book Lists in Ming and
Qing Local Gazetteers, 110
D’Hulster, Kristof, 12
Browsing through the Sultan’s Bookshelves,
12
Diem, Werner, 188
Dirāsāt fī al-kutub wa-al-maktabāt
al-islāmīya ( ʿAbd al-Laṭīf Ibrāhīm),
11
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
Pr
es
s
Geniza, Cairo, 10, 62, 80, 82, 83, 94, 181–2,
193–4
Ghars al-Dīn Khalīl b. Makkī, 169
al-Ghazālī see Index of Authors
Iḥyāʾ ulūm al-dīn see Index of Book
Titles
Ghosh, Amitav
In an Antique Land, 203
Greek/Coptic/Rūmī/ḥurūf al-zimām
numerals, 193–4
Gruendler, Beatrice, 138
Rise of the Arabic Book, 3
guardianships, 70, 100
Ed
i
nb
u
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Early Muslim Architecture (Creswell,
K. A. C.), 15
Eche, Youssef (Yūsuf al-ʿĪsh), 11
bibliothèques arabes publiques et
semipubliques, Les, 11–12
El-Leithy, Tamer, 4, 193
endowed libraries, 204, 210
endowments, 25–7, 36–48, 51, 162
Barqūq (sultan), 75
books, 61
imitation, 63–4
libraries, 61, 204
politics, 63
Establet, Colette, 150, 173–4
estate archives, 209
Muḥyī al-Dīn Yaḥyā b. Ḥusayn al-Turkī,
135, 140, 149, 176–7, 182, 184–6
see also Burhān al-Dīn estate archives
estate auctions, 97, 167–8, 169–70; see also
estate sales
estate inventories, 13–14, 85, 87, 97, 119 ,
174, 182–3
estate management, 95–7, 120; see also
trustees
estate sales, 119–20, 167–8, 169; see also
estate auctions
Eychenne, Mathieu, 50
66, 67, 71, 91, 92, 352–3
Fāṭima bt. ʿAbd Allāh b. Fahd al-Khalīlī (wife
of Burhān al-Dīn), 65, 67, 68, 88, 91,
338, 350
Fāṭima bt. ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn ʿAlī, 351
Fatimid archive, 83
Fatimid Cairo library, 210
food prices, 178–80
French libraries, 7
Frenkel, Miriam, 181
Futūḥ Miṣr see Index of Book Titles
Futūḥ al-Shām see Index of Book Titles
al-Futūḥāt Ibn (al-ʿArabī) see Index of Book
Titles
ity
divorce, 67–8
Dīwān (al-Mutanabbī) see Index of Book
Titles
dīwānī numerals, 191–2
documentary networks, 290
documents
preservation, 103–4, 105–6, 206–7,
209
use, 3
rs
|
ve
386
Faḍāʾil al-a ʾimma see Index of Book
Titles
Fakhr al-Dīn Īyās, primary school of, 44,
73t, 99
archives, 89–90
literacy, 107–8
Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī see Index of Authors
al-Faṣīḥ (Thaʿlab) see Index of Book Titles
Fāṭima 1 (wife of Burhān al-Dīn), 64, 65,
Haarmann, Ulrich, 18, 111, 146, 188
Burhān al-Dīn, sale booklet, 112, 118, 156,
188–9
Library of a Fourteenth Century Jerusalem
Scholar, The, 18
Hacker, Joseph, 182
ḥadīth commentary, 144
ḥadīth transmission, 144, 172
al-Ḥamawī, estate of, 87, 88, 94, 96, 98,
101–2, 103, 104, 107, 119, 168
Ḥaram al-sharīf, 42, 51, 72, 99
archives, 89, 90
Ḥaram al-sharīf document corpus, 4, 14–18,
80–1
administration endowment sub-corpus,
86, 88, 102–3, 105, 107, 108
Ādūjī family sub-corpus, 86, 88, 105–6,
107
general index
U
h
rg
nb
u
Ed
i
387
al-Ḥuṣrī
Zahr al-ādāb see Index of Book Titles
ve
rs
ity
Pr
es
s
Iberian libraries, 8, 182
Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, 133–4; see also Ibn ʿAbd
al-Hādī, library of
Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, library of, Damascus, 2,
133–4, 137, 140, 149, 153, 203–6
book lists, 128, 141
book prices, 172, 181
book trajectories, 162
ḥadīth titles, 143, 144, 145, 172, 204
Koran-linked titles, 142
life cycle, 155
materiality, 208
monolingualism, 152
poetry and adab titles, 148
popular authors, 151
regional profile, 151–2
theology titles, 149
Ibn al-ʿArabī see Index of Authors
al-Futūḥāt see Index of Book Titles
(Ibn) ʿAshā see Muḥammad (Ibn) ʿAshā
(Ibn) al-Bawwāb, 288
Ibn Ḥajar
Muʿjam, 84
Ibn al-Jawzī, 147, 151t, 175
al-Tabṣira see Index of Book Titles
Ibn Jinnī
al-Lumaʿ see Index of Book Titles
Ibn Mālik see Index of Authors
al-Alfīya see Index of Book Titles
Ibn al-Muhandis, 154, 155, 158, 159, 161,
163, 215–16, 217
Ibn al-Muthbit, 288
Ibn Nubāta al-Miṣrī see Index of Authors
Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ al-Shahrazūrī see Index of
Authors
Ibn Shaddād Bahāʾ al-Dīn see Index of
Authors
al-Nawādir al-sulṭānīya see Index of Book
Titles
Ibn Sharwīn see Index of Buyers
Ibn Ṭawq
journal of, 33, 34, 94, 189–90, 192, 195,
196t–202t
numerals, reading, 189–90
ni
archival practices, 79, 80–8
book collections mentioned, 135–6,
184–6
book ownership in, 182–4
Burhān al-Dīn al-Qalqashandī book list,
128–9
Burhān al-Dīn sub-corpus, 87, 88
classmarks, 15
damage/loss, 15, 92
databases, 17, 354
document survival, 103–4
edited, printed editions, 17, 332–53,
354–61
estate inventories, 182–3
Haarmann, Ulrich, 18
al-Ḥamawī sub-corpus, 87, 88, 94, 96,
98, 101–2, 103, 104, 105, 107, 168,
169
Ḥaram al-sharīf plus corpus, 16–17, 105
history of, 104–6
household archives, 94
living expenses, 178–9
materials, 92, 93
photographs, 15
reading numerals in, 166, 187–202t
salary comparisons, 74
Sharaf al-Dīn investigation sub-corpus, 81,
85, 88, 104, 105, 107
strings, 112
studies of, 118
Sultanic decree sub-corpus, 86, 88, 102–3,
105, 107
tied documents, 112
al-Yaghmūrī household sub-corpus, 87,
88, 107
see also Burhān al-Dīn documentary
corpus; Appendix 3
al-Ḥarīrī see Index of Authors
Maqāmāt see Index of Book Titles
Hilāl al-Ṣābiʾ, 191–2
Holy Roman Empire, libraries of, 7
households, 2, 4, 208
archives, 83–4, 91–5, 102
competition between, 62, 63, 83
ḥurūf al-zimām numerals, 193–4
Ḥusayn al-Ḥalabī see Index of Buyers
Ḥusayn al-Najjār, 71
|
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
Ibn al-Wardī see Index of Authors
Ibrāhīm, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, 11
Dirāsāt fī al-kutub wa-al-maktabāt
al-islāmīya, 11
Ibrāhīm ibn Jamāʿa, 136, 161–2, 218
Ibrāhīm b. ʿUmar Ṣārim al-Dīn, 57, 73t
Iḥyāʾ ulūm al-dīn (al-Ghazālī) see Index of
Book Titles
In an Antique Land (Ghosh, Amitav), 203
inheritance, 95, 97, 120
institution, use of term, 5
inventories, 13–14, 85, 87, 97, 119, 174,
182–3
Isʿāf al-Nashāshībī Library, Jerusalem, 215,
217
Islamic Museum, Jerusalem, 2, 14, 105, 106
Kadi und seine Zeugen, Der (Müller,
Christian), 18, 354
Khadīja (daughter of Burhān al-Dīn), 66, 68
Khālidīya library, 10, 215, 217
Khalīl b. Kaykaldī see Index of Authors
khānqāhs, 5
khizāna, 139
knowledge economy, 207
Krimsti, Feras, 12
Ed
i
nb
u
rg
h
U
es
s
Pr
ni
ve
al-Jāḥiẓ, 151
al-Jamʿ bayna al-saḥīḥayn see Index of Book
Titles
Jamāl al-Dīn Maḥmūd al-Ustādār, 12, 81, 85,
136, 154, 162, 218
James I (king), 193
Jawāhir al-ʿuqūd (al-Asyūṭī), 168, 191
Jefferson, Rebecca, 82
Jerusalem, 24–7, 31
book ownership, 182–4
book trajectories in, 159–60m, 161
bureaucracy, 108, 207
citadel (‘Tower of David’), 105
document preservation, history of, 105–6
economy of book ownership, 166, 175–87
economy, 61
endowments in, 25–7, 36–48, 61, 90
estate management, 96–7
household archives, 94
libraries, 9–10, 134–6, 182–4, 215–17
literacy, 79, 107–8, 109, 161, 165, 204–8
living expenses, 178–9
property rentals, 74
religious significance, 25
salaries/wealth in, 74, 76
scholars, 26–7, 152
size, 72
society, 32–4, 61, 76
Ṭāz Mausoleum, 26
Jewish libraries, 182
Lambourne, Elizabeth
Abraham’s Luggage, 8
libraries, 2, 5, 208
Abū al-Suʿūd family, 105
Aleppo, 12
analysis, 126
Aqṣā Mosque, 106, 215–17
author, 204
Bavrian priests’, 8
Bilād al-Shām, 133, 140, 203–4
book endowments, 61
book storage, 139–40
book trajectories, 155
British, 7, 8
Budayrīya library, 10, 215, 217
Cairo, 12, 173, 210
catalogues, 110–11
chronological distribution of works,
150t–1
document-based archaeology, 11–13
endowed, 204, 210
estate inventories, 13
Fatimid Cairo, 210
French, 7
history of, 210
Holy Roman Empire, 7
Iberian, 8, 182
Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, 2, 137, 141
Ibrāhīm ibn Jamāʿa, 136
Isʿāf al-Nashāshībī Library, 215, 217
Jamāl al-Dīn Maḥmūd al-Ustādār, 12
Jerusalem, 9–10, 134–6, 182–4, 215–17
Jewish, 182
Khālidīya, 10, 215, 217
Koran-linked titles, 142
Louvre royal, 7, 11n
monolingualism, 152
ity
|
rs
388
general index
U
h
rg
nb
u
Ed
i
madrasas, 5
Maḥmūd Kamāl (son of Burhān al-Dīn), 65,
66, 68, 69, 70, 98, 100, 126, 337
389
ve
rs
ity
Pr
es
s
Maḥmūd al-Subāʿī (son of Burhān al-Dīn),
68–9, 98, 100, 101, 339
maintenance payments, 95, 98
al-Makkī
Qūt al-qulūb see Index of Book Titles
Mālik b. Anas see Index of Authors
Muwaṭṭaʾ see Index of Book Titles
al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Baybars, 86
al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Jaqmaq, 86
al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Khushqadam, 86
Mamluk, use of term, 5–6, 7
Mamluk period, 6
Mamluk Studies, 5–6, 62, 207
Manāqib ʿUmar see Index of Book Titles
Manstetten, Paula, 5
Manṣūrī Ribāṭ, 25, 36, 37t
manuscript notes, 217–18
Maqāmāt (al-Ḥarīrī) see Index of Book Titles
al-Maqarr al-Nāṣirī, 288
al-Maqrīzī, 84
marsūm documents, 52
Maryam al-Rūmīya, 71, 72, 92
Maryam bt. ʿUmar (wife of Burhān al-Dīn),
64, 65, 67, 91, 349
materiality, 207–8
mausolea, 5
al-Māwardī see Index of Authors
Adab al-dunyā wa-al-dīn see Index of
Book Titles
medieval, use of term, 6–7
Merits of Jerusalem (Faḍāʾil al-Quds), 146
micro-history, 8–9, 13, 203
Mills, Simon, 12
Molitoris, Johannes, 8
money-changers, 123–4
Mufaṣṣal fī al-naḥw (al-Zamakhsharī) see
Index of Book Titles
Muḥammad, Prophet, 146
Muḥammad (son of Burhān al-Dīn), 68, 69,
98, 101, 335
Muḥammad b. Ḥusayn b. ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, 184
Muḥammad al-Ḥusbānī, 101
Muḥammad (Ibn) ʿAshā see Index of Buyers
Muḥammad b. Muḥammad, 128, 184
Muḥammad b. Muḥammad al-Nassāj, 184
Muḥammad al-Nāṣirī, 154, 158
Muḥammad al-Qaṣṣāb, 72
ni
Muḥyī al-Dīn Yaḥyā b. Ḥusayn al-Turkī,
135
National Library of Israel, 215, 217
prestige, 132, 138–40, 204
Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī, 12
regional profiles, 152
Rifāʿīya, 11
San Lorenzo de El Escorial, 12n
scholarly, 137
size, 7–8
studying, 208, 209–10
terminology, 126
thematic categories, 141–53
Umayyad Cordoba, 210
Uzbakīya Library, 215
ʿAbbasid Baghdad, 210
see also Ashrafīya library; Burhān al-Dīn,
library of; Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, library of
Library of a Fourteenth Century Jerusalem
Scholar, The (Haarmann, Ulrich), 18
Liebrenz, Boris, 84, 192
Lisān al-ʿarab, 170
literacy, 2, 3, 5, 107–8, 165, 204–8; see also
pragmatic literacy
Little, Donald, 14, 15, 16, 23, 27, 46
Catalogue, 188
Ḥaram al-sharīf document corpus, 81, 118
marsūm documents, 52
Mufradāt, 112
numerals, reading, 187, 188, 189, 190
sale booklet of the estate of Burhān al-Dīn,
112
siyāqa script, 187, 188, 190, 196t–202t
tied documents, 112
yaqūlu documents, 53
living expenses, 178–80
Livingston, Daisy, 83, 84
Lost Archive (Rustow, Marina), 3
Louvre royal library, 7
al-Lumaʿ (Ibn Jinnī) see Index of Book Titles
Lutfi, Huda, 188
Luz, Nimrod, 72
Lyons, Martin, 15, 16
|
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
Neumann, Christoph, 173
Nihāyat al-arab (al-Nuwayrī), 191
Northrup, Linda, 14, 15, 16, 112
notary witnesses, 33
numerals, reading, 166, 187–202t
al-Nuwayrī
Nihāyat al-arab, 191
Olszowy-Schlanger, Judith, 181
Onimus, Clément, 63
organisations, use of term, 5
Ottoman court registers, 173
ownership notes, 217–18
Pr
es
s
paper, 92
parchment, 92
Pascual, Jean-Paul, 150, 173–4
patronage, 3, 5, 49–50, 53, 62, 209
artistic, 63
personal stipends, 49, 50–6, 63–4, 77,
209
see also endowments
payment orders, 43–4
personal stipends, 49, 50–6, 63–4, 77, 209
Petry, Carl
Civilian Elite of Cairo, 32
Pfeffel, Ulrich, 8
politics, 62–4
popular preachers, 34
post-canonical ḥadīth transmission, 144
pragmatic literacy, 2–3, 19, 79–80, 107–8,
109, 206–7
documentary networks, 290
household archives, 94
prestige libraries, 132, 138–40, 204
Burhān al-Dīn, 138–40
nb
u
rg
h
U
ni
ve
Muḥammad al-Ṣafadī, 42, 91, 347
Muḥammad al-Sakākīnī see Index of Buyers
Muḥammad b. al-Walīd al-Ṭurṭūshī
Sirāj al-mulūk see Index of Book Titles
Muḥammad b. Yūnus, 178
Muḥammad al-Zaydī see Index of Buyers
al-Muḥāsibī
al-Riʿāya li-ḥuqūq Allāh see Index of Book
Titles
Muḥibb al-Dīn, 162
Muḥyī al-Dīn Yaḥyā b. Ḥusayn al-Turkī,
135, 140, 149, 176–7, 182, 184–6
Muʿjam (Ibn Ḥajar), 84
Müller, Christian, 16, 17–18, 23, 27, 29, 33,
42
Ḥaram al-sharīf document corpus, 81, 11
Kadi und seine Zeugen, Der, 18, 354
marsūm documents, 52
numerals, reading, 188
sale booklet of the estate of Burhān al-Dīn,
112
trustees, 95, 101
yaqūlu documents, 53
multiple part-time reciters, 34–5
al-Mutanabbī see Index of Authors
Dīwān see Index of Book Titles
Muwaṭṭaʾ (Mālik b. Anas) see Index of Book
Titles
ity
|
rs
390
Ed
i
Nafīsa, 87
Nahray b. Nissīm archives, 94
Nakamachi, Nobutaka, 32
Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ghazāwī, 123
Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ghazzī, 154, 158, 159
Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ḥamawī, 76, 87, 324, 333
Nāṣir al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Bahādar, 216,
288
al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn (sultan),
26, 86, 193
National Library of Israel, 215, 217
al-Nawādir al-sulṭānīya (Ibn Shaddād) see
Index of Book Titles
al-Nawawī see Index of Authors
Rawḍat al-ṭālibīn wa-ʿumdat al-muftīn,
129–30, 145, 163, 176, 180, 215, 216
Negotiating Mughal Law (Chatterjee,
Nandini), 8
al-Qāḍī Iyāḍ b. Mūsā al-Yaḥṣubī see Index of
Authors
al-Shifāʾ bi-taʿrīf ḥuqūq al-Muṣṭafā see
Index of Book Titles
al-Qalqashandī
Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā, 191
Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (sultan), 12
Qubbat al-khazna, 67, 80, 204
al-Qushayrī see Index of Authors
Risālat see Index of Book Titles
general index
Ed
i
nb
u
rg
h
U
es
s
Pr
ity
ni
Sabra, Adam, 179–80
al-Ṣafadī, Muḥammad, 42, 91
al-Ṣaḥīḥ (al-Bukhārī) see Index of Book
Titles
Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, 146, 216
Ṣalāḥīya Khānqāh, 37t, 45, 72, 74
Salāma b. Abī Bakr al-Fāriqānī, 56, 59, 73t
Salameh, Khader, 16–17
sale booklet of the estate of Burhān al-Dīn, 2,
19, 28, 106, 110–11, 291t, 292
accounting, 123–4, 125
accounts sheet, 118
analysis, 213–69
annotated list, 218–69
archival genealogy, 89
archival practices, 78–9
archival sites, 88–95
auction community, 153–5, 156–9
book counting, 126–30t
book identification, 214–18
book list, 121–2, 124–5
buyers list, 122, 123, 124
codicological units (of books), 128,
129–30
completeness, 118
rs
Rawḍat al-ṭālibīn wa-ʿumdat al-muftīn
(al-Nawawī), 129–30, 145, 163, 176,
180, 215, 216
recitation, 37, 51
mīʿād sessions, 37–9
multiple part-time reciters, 34–5
Ṣalāḥīya Khānqāh, 45
Reier, Benedikt, 12, 85
al-Riʿāya li-ḥuqūq Allāh (al-Muḥāsibī) see
Index of Book Titles
Richards, Donald, 16, 41, 188
Rifāʿīya library, 11
Risālat (al-Qushayrī) see Index of Book Titles
Rise of the Arabic Book (Gruendler, Beatrice),
3
Romanov, Maxim, 152
Rūmī numerals, 193–4
Rustow, Marina, 3, 62, 83
391
construction, 115–17
daftar format, 112–13, 116
debtors’ list, 117, 293
documentary context, 118–26
documentary practices, 78, 111–18
edition of, 270–86
household objects, 120–1
ink, 115
lots (of books), 127–8
materiality, 112–13
notation system, 166
page organisation, 113–14, 122
payment details, 123
post-auction trajectory of books, 158
preservation, 115
purpose, 118–26, 130
scribe, 96, 100, 122–3, 129, 213
sheet-numbering, 117
strikethroughs, 292, 293
strings, 112
symbols, 117
tied documents, 112
titles (of books), 127–8
uniqueness of, 78, 135
variety of objects, 169
see also book prices, estate of Burhān
al-Dīn
San Lorenzo de El Escorial library, 12n
al-Ṣarfanī, 154, 158
Sarī al-Dīn, 27, 33, 35, 81, 85
Ṣārim al-Dīn Ibrāhīm al-Nāṣirī, 325, 351
al-Sayfī Bulūṭ, 154, 155, 158, 218
Schenda, Rudolf, 13–14
scholarly libraries, 137
scholars, 32–4, 35, 48
School Library Book Lists in Ming and Qing
Local Gazetteers (Dennis, Joseph), 110
secret codes, 195
Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Adhraʿī, 95–6,
97, 98–101, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124,
213, 290, 291, 333
Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Karakī, 156
Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Ṣayrafī, 95–6,
99, 100, 290, 292–3
Shams al-Dīn al-Tūnisī see Index of Buyers
Sharaf al-Dīn ʿĪsā b. Ghānim, 81, 85, 88, 104,
135
ve
Qūt al-qulūb (al-Makkī) see Index of Book
Titles
|
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
Summary, The, 158
Syria, 179
Pr
es
s
al-Ṭabarī, 151
al-Tabṣira (Ibn al-Jawzī) see Index of Book
Titles
Taghrī W-r-m-sh see Index of Buyers
Tajrīd al-ṣiḥāḥ see Index of Book Titles
Tārīkh maʿālim al-masjid al-Aqṣā
(al-Uzbaki, Yusuf), 218
Tārīkh al-maktabāt al-ʿarabīya (Barakat,
Bashir), 219
Ṭāz, Sayf al-Dīn, 26
Ṭāz Mausoleum, 26, 37t, 40, 72
teachers, 35, 44
al-Thaʿālibī see Index of Authors
al-Faṣīḥ see Index of Book Titles
tied documents, 112
trustees, 95–100, 101
ʿulamāʾ, the, 32–3
al-ʿUlaymī, Mujīr al-Dīn, 31, 90
al-Uns al-jalīl, 31, 167
ʿUmar Zajjāj see Index of Buyers
Umayyad Cordoba library, 210
Umm Muḥammad (mother of Fāṭima bt.
ʿAbd Allāh b. Fahd al-Khalīlī), 69,
100
al-Uns al-jalīl (al-ʿUlaymī, Mujīr al-Dīn),
31, 167
al-Uzbaki, Yusuf
Tārīkh maʿālim al-masjid al-Aqṣā, 218
Uzbakīya Library, Jerusalem, 215
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Sharḥ al-Alfīya (Aḥmad Ibn al-Raṣṣāṣ) see
Index of Book Titles
al-Sharīf al-Dallāl, 301, 314
al-Shāṭibīya (Abū al-Qāsim b. Firruh
al-Shāṭibī) see Index of Book Titles
Shatzmiller, Maya, 166, 171
al-Shifāʾ bi-taʿrīf ḥuqūq al-Muṣṭafā (al-Qāḍī
Iyāḍ b. Mūsā al-Yaḥṣubī) see Index of
Book Titles
Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Aḥmad Ibn
al-Bawwāb, 288, 337, 341, 342, 348
Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Aḥmad b. ʿĪsā, 70,
100
Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Kutubī, 156
Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Miṣrī, 156
Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Sayf al-Dīn, 58
Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Shādī, 56, 73t,
346
Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Yaghmūrī, 87
Shihāb al-Dīn Ḥaydar, 55, 57, 73t
Shihāb al-Dīn al-Muʾadhdhin, 288
Shihāb al-Dīn Muthbit, 288
Shīrīn bt. ʿAbd Allāh (wife of Burhān
al-Dīn), 1, 65, 66–7, 88, 97, 99,
100
household objects, purchase of, 66–7,
111, 120
maintenance payments, 344, 345
personal archive, 93, 94, 100
Sirāj al-mulūk (Muḥammad b. al-Walīd
al-Ṭurṭūshī) see Index of Book Titles
siyāqa numerals, 190–1, 195
siyāqa script, 187, 188, 190–1, 196t–202t
social elite, 33, 63–4
social practices, 3
social status, 138–9, 177–8, 180, 182–4
society, 32–4, 61–4, 166, 207
statehood, 3–4, 208
stipends, 49, 50–6, 63–4, 77, 209
strikethroughs, 292, 293
strings, 113
sub-contracting, 35, 42–3
Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā (al-Qalqashandī), 191
ṣūfīsm, 47
al-Suhrawardī see Index of Authors
ʿAwārif al-maʿārif see Index of Book
Titles
ity
|
rs
392
van Steenbergen, Jo, 4, 6, 62, 83
Walker, Bethany, 63
weighted coinage, 123–4
Wizārat al-awqāf collection, Cairo, 80
writing, 2–3, 204, 206–7
Arabic alphanumerical notation systems,
187–8
Arabic documentary numerals, 187, 188,
191–202t
dīwānī numerals, 191–2, 195
Greek/Coptic/Rūmī/ḥurūf al-zimām
numerals, 193–4
general index
|
393
yaqūlu documents, 53
numerals, reading, 187–202t
secret codes, 195
siyāqa numerals, 190–1
siyāqa script, 187, 188, 190–1,
196t–202t
Wynter-Stoner, Kyle, 12, 136, 162
Zahr al-ādāb (al-Ḥuṣrī) see Index of Book
Titles
al-Zamakhsharī see Index of Authors
Mufaṣṣal fī al-naḥw see Index of Book
Titles
Zayn al-Dīn, 333
Ed
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es
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Yalbughā b. ʿAbd Allāh, 184
Index of Authors in Burhān al-Dīn’s Library
This index does not reflect the varying degrees of certainty for identifying an author (this is
reflected in the entries in Chapter 7).
ve
rs
al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, 87
Ḥamd Ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, 66
al-Ḥarīrī, 26, 194, 267, 151t
Ḥārith al-Muḥāsibī, 40
al-Ḥumaydī Muḥammad, 24
al-Ḥusayn al-Ḥalīmī, 173
Ḥusayn al-Hamadānī, 23
al-Ḥusayn Ibn Khamīs, 159
al-Ḥuṣrī al-Qayrawānī, 51
Ed
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ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Maqdisī, 57
ʿAbd al-Karīm b. ʿAbd al-Nūr al-Ḥalabī,
42
ʿAbd al-Raḥīm b. Muḥammad al-Shāfiʿī,
258b
Abū al-Layth al-Samarqandī, 117
Abū Nuʿaym al-Iṣfahānī, 81
Aḥmad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Ṭabarī, 242
Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Maqdisī, 100,
152
Aḥmad al-Fayyūmī, 92
Aḥmad Ibn al-Raṣṣāṣ, 113, 228, 152
ʿAlī b. ʿAbd al-Ghanī, 181a
ʿAlī al-Qayrawānī, 187b
ity
Pr
es
s
Numbers in bold refer to the entry number in Chapter 7 (book 1 …);
other numbers refer to page numbers
Entries followed by t indicate pages with a table
Entries followed by n refer to footnote(s) on the page indicated
al-Baghawī, 105
al-Bukhārī, 1, 46, 47, 78, 130, 145
al-Dīrīnī, 184
Faḍl Allāh al-Kirmānī, 56
Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, 52, 53, 115a, 115b,
246, 151t
al-Fārisī Abū ʿAlī, 27
al-Ghazālī, 102, 109, 142b, 146, 193, 221,
241, 262, 265b, 151t
Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam, 239
Ibn al-ʿArabī, 70, 161
Ibn Fāris, 80, 141
Ibn Fūrak, 55
Ibn al-Ḥājib ʿUthmān, 39
Ibn Isḥāq/Ibn Hishām, 80, 141, 211, 240a
Ibn Jinnī, 189
Ibn al-Kharrāṭ al-Ishbīlī, 5
Ibn Mālik, 181b
Ibn al-Mubārak, 116
Ibn Muʿṭī al-Zawāwī, 82
Ibn Nubāta ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, 58
Ibn Nubāta ʿAbd al-Raḥīm, 28
Ibn Nubāta al-Miṣrī, 58, 148
Ibn Qayyim al-Jawzīya, 201b
Ibn Qutayba, 55
Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ al-Shahrazūrī, 224, 144–5
394
a u t ho rs in burh ān al -dīn’s li b r a r y
Ed
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al-Wāḥidī, 102
al-Yāfiʿī ʿAbd Allāh, 203
Yaḥyā al-Qurṭubī, 160
Yaḥyā al-Ṣarṣarī, 10
ve
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al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, 4, 64, 163, 169, 230, 237
al-Qazwīnī Ibrāhīm, 62
al-Quḍāʿī Muḥammad, 186
al-Qudūrī Aḥmad, 16, 204
al-Ṭaḥāwī Aḥmad, 31
al-Thaʿālibī, 133
Thaʿlab, 68, 98b, 112, 166, 147
al-Tirmidhī, 200a
al-Ṭurṭūshī Muḥammad, 119, 153, 185n
rs
Naṣīr al-Dīn Kirmānī, 178
al-Nawawī, 7, 11, 43, 142a, 197, 231, 129,
151t, 215
al-Ṣaghānī al-Ḥasan, 163
Sahl b. Hārūn, 196b
al-Shāṭibī, 29, 67
al-Shīrāzī Ibrāhīm, 63, 265a
Sibṭ Ibn al-Jawzī, 45, 57, 72, 75, 120, 134,
208, 212, 216, 220, 185n
al-Suhrawardī, 104, 106
es
s
Mālik b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Māliqī, 143
Mālik b. Anas, 93, 225
al-Māwardī, 25, 41
Muḥammad b. Abī Bakr al-Khubayṣī, 256
Muḥammad b. Abī al-Qāsim Fakhr al-Dīn, 6
Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Makkī, 245
Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Shāfiʿī, 206
Muḥammad b. Yaḥyā, 88
Muslim al-Nīsābūrī, 151, 229, 235
al-Mutanabbī, 132, 133
al-Rāfiʿī ʿAbd al-Karīm, 44, 122a
Razīn b. Muʿāwiya al-ʿAbdarī, 50, 121, 122b
Pr
al-Kalābādhī, 34
Khalīl b. Kaykaldī, 38, 152
395
al-Qushayrī ʿAbd al-Karīm, 8, 195, 185n
ity
Ibn Shaddād Bahāʾ al-Dīn, 48, 49, 146, 216
Ibn al-Wardī ʿUmar, 71, 148
Ismāʿīl b. Muḥammad al-Iṣfahānī, 111
|
al-Zamakhsharī, 2, 156, 176
Index of Book Titles in Burhān al-Dīn’s
Library
es
s
On the problematic nature of ‘titles’ see our remarks in Chapter 5
(The Profile of a Prestige Library, p.141ff.).
Ed
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al-Badr al-munīr fī al-taʿbīr, 100, 152n
al-Baghawī, 222
al-Buldān, 250
al-Dalāʾil, 77
Dalāʾil al-aḥkām, 48
ve
Dīwān, 94
Dīwān Ibn Nubāta, 58, 97
Dīwān al-khuṭab, 6
Dīwān al-Mutanabbī, 132, 133, 148
Dīwān shiʿr, 17, 219
Dīwān al-Wardī, 71
Duʿāʾ, 22a
al-Durra al-fākhira fī kashf ʿulūm al-ākhira,
146
al-Durra al-farīda, 23
ni
U
al-Adab, 99b
Adab al-dunyā wa-al-dīn, 25, 41, 149
al-Adhkār, 11, 231
al-Aḥkām, 76
Akhbār Faṣīḥ al-kalām, 89
Akhbār Makka, 205
al-Akhbār fī fawāʾid al-akhyār, 34
al-Akhṭār wa-al-miḥan, 138
al-Alfīya, 181b, 147, 159
al-Amālī, 213, 125n
ʿAqāʾid al-Ghazālī, 221
al-Arbaʿīn al-Wadʿānīya, 252, 144n
Asās al-balāgha, 2
Asrār al-tanzīl, 246
Athar al-safar, 84
ʿAwārif al-maʿārif, 104, 106, 147, 175
al-Azharī, 175a
al-ʿAzīzī, 152, 270b
rs
ity
Pr
Numbers in bold refer to the entry number in Chapter 7 (book 1 …);
other numbers refer to page numbers
Entries followed by n refer to footnote(s) on the page indicated
Entries followed by t indicate a page with a table
Faḍāʾil al-aʾimma, 12, 146
Faḍāʾil al-aʿmāl, 215
Faḍāʾil al-Quds, 13
al-Faṣīḥ, 68, 98b, 166, 147
al-Fatḥ, 137
Futūḥ Miṣr, 239, 146
Futūḥ al-Shām, 248, 146
al-Futūḥāt, 161, 146
Gharīb al-Qurʾān, 65
al-Ghunya, 237
al-Ḥadīth, 101
Ḥawāshī al-Alfīya, 253
396
b o o k titl es in burh ān al -dīn’s li b r a r y
al-Ḥuṣrīya, 181a
al-Īḍāḥ, 27
al-Ifṣāḥ, 30a, 86
al-Ihtimām, 42
al-Iḥyāʾ, 262, 186
al-Irshād, 9b, 254
al-Ishārāt, 200b
Istidʿāʾ, 37
Pr
ity
rs
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ni
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Kanz al-abrār, 70
Karrāsayn, 191
Kashf al-ʿaqāʾiq wa-al-ḥaqāʾiq, 264
Kashf ʿulūm al-ākhira, 146
al-Kashshāf, 156
Khatma, 139
al-Khuṭab, 28
Khuṭab Ibn al-Jawzī, 120, 220
Kitāb, 147, 125n, 174n
Kitāb fī al-ʿarūḍ, 174
Kitāb al-Fuṣūl, 82, 219
Kitāb Ḥikāyāt al-ṣāliḥīn, 203
Kitāb al-Ishārāt, 196a
Kitāb kharm, 164, 125n, 174n
Kitāb al-taʿabbud, 99a
Kitāb ṭibb, 90, 140, 125n
Kutub, 96
Kutub kharm, 95, 165, 218, 125n, 127n,
174n
Laṭāʾif al-ishārāt, 8
al-Lumaʿ, 189, 122n, 147
al-Madkhal, 69
al-Mahdawī, 266
al-Maḥṣūl, 115b
Majmaʿ al-baḥrayn, 232
Majmūʿ, 22b, 83, 98a, 155, 171, 255, 125n
Majmūʿ fī al-ḥadīth, 177, 125n
Majmūʿ kabīr, 154, 125n
397
Majmūʿ lugha, 79, 125n
Majmūʿ turkī, 179, 125n, 152
Manāfiʿ al-Qurʾān, 202
Manāqib al-abrār, 159
Manāqib al-aḥbab, 206
Manāqib ʿUmar, 57, 146
Manāsik, 240b
Manṭiq, 162, 125n
al-Maqāmāt, 26, 194, 267, 140, 148, 175
al-Maṣābīḥ, 105
Maṣābīḥ al-sunna, 222
Masāʾil al-khilāf, 259
al-Masāʾil al-maknūna, 87
al-Mashāriq, 163, 125n
Mashāriq al-anwār, 64
Maṭlaʿ al-Nayyirayn, 168
Mawāʿiẓ, 91
Mawālid, 59, 61, 243
al-Miftāḥ li-ahl al-Dīn wa-al-ṣalāh, 54
Mirʾāt al-zamān fī tārīkh al-aʿyān, 45
al-Mudhish, 212, 125n, 185t
al-Mufaṣṣal fī al-naḥw, 176, 147, 159
al-Muhadhdhab, 63, 172, 265a
al-Muḥarrar, 44, 122a
Muḥyī al-qulūb, 158
al-Mujālasāt, 112
al-Mukhtār, 234
Mukhtār ʿuyūn al-ḥikāyāt, 208
Mukhtaṣar Ibn al-Ḥājib, 39
Mukhtaṣar Muslim, 229
Mukhtaṣar al-Qudūrī, 16
Mulakhkhaṣ al-Rāzī, 53
Muʾnis al-nafs, 269
al-Muntakhab, 115a
al-Muntaqā, 15
al-Musalsalāt, 110, 144n
Muṣḥaf, 18, 19, 21, 35, 108, 125, 131,
145, 167, 180, 182, 190, 207, 273, 143,
171
Mushkil al-ṣaḥīḥayn, 38, 152n
Mushkil al-ḥadīth, 55
al-Mustajād, 193
al-Muwaṭṭaʾ, 93, 225, 145
es
s
al-Jamʿ bayna al-ṣaḥīḥayn, 24, 236, 186
Jawāhir al-kalām, 185
Jawāhir al-Qurʾān, 109
Jawāmiʿ al-fiqar wa-lawāmiʿ al-fikar, 56
al-Jihād, 9a
Juzʾ fī al-tārīkh, 183
|
al-Najm, 209
Nasāʾim al-asḥār, 178, 152
al-Nāsikh wa-al-mansūkh, 36
398
|
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
Sharḥ al-Tanbīh, 197
Sharḥayn al-Ḥājibīya, 114
al-Sharīshī, 107
al-Shāṭibīya, 29, 67, 175, 180
Shiʿār al-dīn, 66
al-Shifāʾ bi-taʿrīf ḥuqūq al-Muṣṭafā, 4, 169,
230, 148
al-Shihāb, 186
Shuʿab al-īmān, 173
Ṣifat al-janna wa-al-nār, 81
al-Sīra, 80, 141, 211, 240a
Sirāj al-mulūk, 119, 153, 149, 185t
Sīrat al-Iskandarī, 103
Sirr al-arwāḥ, 269
Siyar al-salaf, 111
Subul al-khayrāt, 160
al-Nawādir al-sulṭānīya, 49, 146, 215–17
ve
rs
ity
Pr
al-Ṭabaqāt, 73
Ṭabaqāt al-qurrāʾ, 271, 127n
al-Tabṣira, 75, 134, 223, 147
al-Tadhkira, 32, 135
al-Tafsīr, 149, 244
Ṭahārat al-qulūb wa-al-khuḍūʿ li-ʿallām
al-ghuyūb, 184
al-Tahdhīb, 142a, 251
Taḥrīr al-tanbīh, 242
al-Taʿjīz, 258b
Tajrīd, 122b, 258a, 174
Tajrīd al-ṣiḥāḥ, 50, 121, 174
al-Talfīq, 201a
al-Taʿlīq, 88
Tanbīh, 33, 170
Tanbīh al-ghāfilīn, 117
al-Tanzīl, 249
Tārīkh, 74
Tārīkh Baghdād, 247
Tārīkh Miṣr, 217
al-Taysīr, 175b
Thamarat al-ikhlāṣ, 157
ni
Rabʿa sharīfa, 14
Rāḥat al-qulūb, 85, 152
al-Raqāʾiq, 5
Rawḍ al-rayaḥīn fī ḥikāyat al-ṣāliḥīn,
203
al-Rawḍa, 43, 129
al-Rawḍāt, 257
Rawḍat al-khāṭir, 214
al-Riʿāya li-ḥuqūq Allāh, 40, 146
al-Risāla al-Fayyūmīya, 92
al-Risāla al-Ḥalabīya fī al-ṭarīqa
al-Muḥammadīya, 201b
al-Risāla al-Qushayrī, 195, 146, 147, 177,
185t
Riyāḍ al-ṣāliḥīn, 7, 215
es
s
Qirāʾat Warsh, 188
Qiṣṣat Yūsuf, 238
Qudūrī, 204
al-Qurʾān, 20, 123, 124, 126, 128, 129,
130, 148, 143, 171
Qūt al-qulūb, 245, 146
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Safīna, 187a
al-Ṣafwa, 136, 125n
Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, 1, 46, 47, 78, 130, 176,
180
Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, 151, 235
al-Ṣarṣarī, 10
Shajarat al-ʿaql, 196b
Shamāʾil al-Nabī, 200a
Shams al-maṭālib, 60
Sharḥ al-Alfīya, 113, 199, 227, 228, 147,
152n
Sharḥ al-Āthār, 31
Sharḥ al-ḥurūf al-jāmiʿ bayna al-ʿārif wa-almaʿrūf, 62
Sharḥ al-Iṣfahānī, 30b
Sharḥ al-Ishārāt, 52
Sharḥ al-Khubayṣī, 256
Sharḥ al-Mufaṣṣal, 226, 147
Sharḥ Mukhtaṣar al-Iṣfahānī, 3
Sharḥ Muslim, 150, 268
Sharḥ al-sunna, 222, 272
al-Ulūf wa-al-arwāḥ, 118
ʿUlūm al-ḥadīth, 224, 144
al-ʿUmda, 260, 263
Uns al-nufūs, 72
Uṣūl al-Dīn, 233
ʿUyūn al-akhbār, 210
b o o k titl es in burh ān al -dīn’s li b r a r y
|
Yāqūtat al-mawāʿiẓ, 216
Yatīmat al-Dahr, 133
al-Wajīz, 241
al-Wajīz fī al-fiqh, 192
al-Waqf, 261
al-Waqf wa-al-ibtidāʾ, 198
al-Wasīla, 270a
al-Wasīṭ, 102, 127, 142b, 265b, 124
al-Witrīya, 143
Ed
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ity
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es
s
Zād al-musāfir, 144
Zahr al-ādāb, 51, 148
Zahr al-ḥadāʾiq, 187b
al-Zuhd wa-al-raqāʾiq, 116
399
Index of Buyers in the Auction of
Burhān al-Dīn’s Estate
es
s
This index does not reflect the varying degrees of certainty for identifying a buyer
(this is reflected in the entries in Chapter 7).
rs
Aḥmad b. Muḥammad Shihāb al-Dīn
al-Miṣrī, 68, 156, 288, 295, 303, 319
Aḥmad b. Muḥammad Shihāb al-Dīn Ibn alMuhandis, 11, 124n, 154, 155, 158, 151,
177, 216, 296, 302, 308, 317
Aḥmad b. Muḥammad Shihāb al-Dīn (Ibn
al-) Muthbit, 78, 288, 297, 304, 308, 315,
317
Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. ʿUthmān Shams
al-Dīn al-Khalīlī, 12, 295, 302, 319
Aḥmad al-Qaramānī, 77, 292n, 298, 303,
309, 318
Aḥmad al-Saqqā, 81, 305, 316
Aḥmad Shihāb al-Dīn al-Kutubī, 29, 156,
296, 304, 319
ʿAlī al-Bawwāb, 82, 305, 316
ʿAlī Ibn al-Ḥamawī, 48, 297, 302, 309,
317
ʿAlī Ibn al-Naqīb ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al-Ḥanafī, 6,
155, 177n, 227, 235, 297, 302, 308, 317
ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm al-Shāfiʿī al-Rabbāwīya, 36,
296, 304, 316, 319
ʿAlī al-Qalyūbī, 54, 177n, 296, 303, 310, 315,
318
ʿAlī b. Raslān, 25, 298, 304, 310, 318
ʿAlī b. ʿUthmān ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al-Ḥawārī
al-Shāfiʿī, 59, 295, 303, 315, 319
Ed
i
nb
u
rg
h
U
ni
ve
ʿAbd Allāh al-Firyābī, 53, 177n, 302, 309,
318
ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm al-Ṣāʾigh, 83, 296, 305, 319
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Aḥmad al-Ghazzī, 65,
157, 178, 303, 310
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAlī Ibn al-Naqīb Zayn
al-Dīn al-Ḥanafī, 44, 52n, 124n, 302, 310,
315
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Iskandarī, 38, 304, 316
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Qarawī al-Maghribī, 66,
297, 303, 308, 315, 317
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿUmar al-Qibābī
al-Maqdisī al-Ḥanbalī, 49, 302, 310, 315
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. al-Zayn, 22, 178, 304,
316
Abū Bakr b. Ibrāhīm al-Ṣarfanī al-Shāfiʿī, 4,
124, 154, 158, 177, 302, 314, 335, 339
Abū Bakr b. ʿUthmān Taqī al-Dīn
al-Ḥawrānī al-Ḥanafī, 63, 296, 303, 319
Abū Yazīd al-ʿAjamī, 80, 122, 156, 305
Aḥmad b. Aḥmad Shihāb al-Dīn, 24, 124,
289, 297, 304, 309, 318, 337, 341, 342,
348
Aḥmad b. ʿAlī Ibn al-Naqīb Shihāb al-Dīn,
45, 298, 302, 310, 315, 318
Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm b. Shīdha Shihāb al-Dīn,
23, 304, 310, 316
ity
Pr
Numbers in bold refer to the entry number in Chapter 7 (buyer 1 …);
other numbers refer to page numbers
Entries followed by n refer to footnote(s) on the page indicated
400
b u y er s in a uction of Burh ān al -D ī n ’ s e s t a t e
Ed
i
nb
u
rg
h
U
es
s
Pr
ity
ni
Ibn Sharwīn, 86, 156, 305
Ibrāhīm b. Aḥmad Burhān al-Dīn al-Maqdisī
al-Shāfiʿī Ibn Abī Maḥmūd, 18, 297, 304,
308, 317
Ibrāhīm Burhān al-Dīn al-ʿAjamī, 56, 296,
303, 308, 317
Ibrāhīm Burhān al-Dīn al-Ḥawrānī, 35, 296,
304, 319
Ibrāhīm al-Ḥarjāwī, 72, 297, 301n, 303n,
309, 317
Ibrāhīm b. al-Ḥasan Burhān al-Dīn al-Shāfiʿī
al-ʿArrābī, 33, 157, 304
Ibrāhīm b. Ismāʿīl Burhān al-Dīn
al-Qalqashandī, 8, 124n, 129, 161, 296,
302, 315, 319
ʿĪsā b. Aḥmad Sharaf al-Dīn al-ʿAjlūnī, 67,
298, 303, 309, 318
Ismāʿīl wakīl al-zawja, 47, 97n, 296, 302
Īyās Fakhr al-Dīn, 41, 44, 295, 297, 302, 309,
317, 318
Maḥmūd b. Ibrāhīm Jamāl al-Dīn Kamāl, 20,
70, 115n, 126, 304, 316
Maḥmūd b. Khalīl Ibn al-Sarāʾī Zayn al-Dīn,
58, 114n, 298, 303, 310, 318, 333
Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh Shams al-Dīn
al-Dayrī, 9, 302, 310, 315
Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Najm
al-Dīn, 1, 177n, 218–20, 302, 314
Muḥammad al-Andalusī, 15, 304, 316
Muḥammad (Ibn) ʿAshā, 70, 96, 100, 123,
129, 213, 291, 296, 303, 316, 319
Muḥammad b. Bahādar Nāṣir al-Dīn
al-Karakī, 2, 154, 158, 177n, 216, 288,
302, 314, 319
Muḥammad al-Iskandarī, 79, 304, 316
Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl Shams al-Dīn
al-Qalqashandī, 7, 155, 226, 296, 302,
315, 319
Muḥammad b. Muḥammad Nāṣir al-Dīn
al-Ghazzī, 57, 123, 154, 158, 159, 295,
303, 318
Muḥammad b. Naṣr Allāh Shams al-Dīn
al-Shāfiʿī al-Karakī, 28, 156, 292n, 304,
316
Muḥammad b. Saʿīd al-Anṣārī al-Zawārī
al-Shāfiʿī, 55, 297, 303, 309, 317
Muḥammad al-Sakākīnī, 39, 154, 304, 316
Muḥammad Shuqayr, 84, 296, 305, 309, 319
Muḥammad b. Yūnus, 87, 178, 305, 310,
316
Muqbil b. ʿAbd Allāh Zayn al-Dīn al-Shihābī
al-Yaghmūrī, 64, 297, 303, 309, 317
rs
Ḥamdān Sharaf al-Dīn al-Zarʿī/al-Zarī, 76,
177n, 298, 303, 309, 316, 318
Ḥasan b. Mūsā Badr al-Dīn Ibn Makkī, 14,
154, 158, 296, 302, 315, 319
Ḥusayn Badr al-Dīn al-Mālikī, 75, 292n, 298,
303, 310, 316
Ḥusayn al-Ḥalabī, 40, 156, 296, 304, 319
401
ve
Badr al-Dīn Ibn Qāsim, 69, 301n, 303n
Bulāṭ/Bulūṭ Sayf al-Dīn, 3, 154, 155, 158,
177n, 218, 226, 296, 302, 314, 319
Burhān al-Dīn b. Qāsim, 10, 124n, 177, 296,
302, 315, 319
Burhān al-Dīn al-Ṣallatī, 16, 297, 304, 309,
316, 317
|
Jamāl al-Dīn al-Dayrī, 71, 303
Junayd al-Kaylānī, 43, 297, 302, 309, 318
Khalīl b. al-Duwayk Ghars al-Dīn, 34, 304,
316
Khalīl al-Ḥadīthī, 60, 297, 303, 308, 315, 317
Khalīl b. ʿĪsā al-ʿAjamī al-Bāyartī al-Ḥanafī, 5,
114n, 177, 302, 315
Khalīl b. Makkī Ghars al-Dīn Ibn ʿAskar, 13,
169, 177n, 295, 302, 315, 318
al-Nāṣirī al-Dallāl, 31, 304, 310, 316
Qāsim al-ʿAjamī, 52, 297, 302, 317
Shams al-Dīn al-Azharī, 50, 297, 302, 308,
317
Shams al-Dīn Ibn al-Quṭb, 19, 297, 304,
308, 317
Shams al-Dīn al-Khaṭīb, 21, 304, 310, 316
Shams al-Dīn (Ibn) al-Muqriʾ, 62, 297, 303,
309, 318
Shams al-Dīn al-Muwaqqiʿ, 27, 304
Shams al-Dīn al-Ramlī, 74, 303
Shams al-Dīn al-Tūnisī, 30, 157, 178, 304
402
|
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
ʿUmar al-Zajjāj, 17, 154, 178, 297, 304, 309,
318
al-Sharīf al-Maghribī, 51, 302, 309, 315
Shihāb al-Dīn Saḥlūl, 32, 304, 316
Shihāb al-Dīn al-Sarāʾī, 42, 297, 302, 309,
318
Taghrī W-r-m-sh, 73, 157, 303, 316, 319
Ed
i
nb
u
rg
h
U
ni
ve
rs
ity
Pr
es
s
ʿUmar b. Ghānim/al-Ghānimī, 61, 296, 303,
319
Yūsuf b. Dhā al-Nūn, 46, 302, 315
Yūsuf al-Jītī, 37, 297, 304, 309, 318
Yūsuf al-Miṣrī al-Dallāl al-Ḍarīr, 85, 305,
316
Yūsuf (Ibn) al-Naqīb Jamāl al-Dīn 26,
304
Index of Subjects in Burhān al-Dīn’s Library
ve
rs
ity
Pr
study of, 8, 36, 109, 149, 249
Koran (text)
khatma, 139
muṣḥaf, 18/9, 21, 35, 108, 125, 131, 145,
167, 180, 182, 190, 207, 273
qurʾān, 20, 123/4, 126, 128–30, 148
rabʿa, 14
lettrism, 62
lexicography, 65, 68, 79, 89, 98b
logic, 53, 162
medicine, 90, 140
oneiromancy, 100
philosophy, 52
poetry, 3, 17, 30b, 58, 71, 94, 97, 132/3, 174,
219
political thought, 25, 41, 119, 153
prayer, 22a
prophethood, 77
prophet Muḥammad, 4, 10, 59, 61, 143,
169, 200a, 230, 243
qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ, 238
see also biography of the Prophet under
history
rhetoric, 2
rituals, 240b
sermons/paraenesis, 6, 28, 33, 75, 91, 117,
120, 134, 160, 170, 187b, 212, 216,
220
sufism, 11, 34, 40, 85, 87, 104, 106, 159, 161,
184, 195, 203, 231, 245, 262
theology, 66, 81, 146, 173, 233
Ed
i
nb
u
rg
h
U
ni
adab, 3, 26, 30b, 51, 152, 187a, 193/4, 196b,
210, 267, 270b
asceticism, 5, 116
creed, 221
ethics, 7
fiqh, 259
ḥanafī, 16, 31, 204
mālikī, 39
shāfiʿī, 42–4, 63, 92, 122a, 142a/b, 172,
192, 197, 241/2, 258b, 265a/b
uṣūl al-fiqh, 115a/b
grammar, 27, 82, 113/4, 166, 176, 181b, 199,
226–8, 253, 256
ḥadīth, 24, 31, 38, 42, 48, 50, 55, 64, 70, 101,
105, 110/1, 121, 122b, 177, 186, 222,
224, 236, 237?, 252
commentary, 150, 268
merits, 215
al-Muwaṭṭaʾ, 93, 225
Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, 1, 46/7, 78
Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, 151, 229, 235
study of, 163, 206
history, 45, 56, 74, 183, 205, 217, 239, 247/8
biography, 49, 73, 111, 178, 271
biography of the Prophet, 80, 141, 211,
240a
merits, 12, 13, 57
ijāza, 37
Koran exegesis, 156, 244, 246
lexicography, 65
recitation, 23, 29, 67, 181a, 188, 198, 261
es
s
See Chapter 5 (The Profile of a Prestige Library, p. 141ff.) on the problems of ascribing
thematic categories to the sale booklet’s titles. This is in numerous cases not possible at all
and in many cases a very inexact science. The numbers in this index refer to the book
numbers in Chapter 7 (book 1…).
403
Index of Objects Other than Books in
Burhān al-Dīn’s Estate
ve
rs
ity
Pr
lafḥa, 53, 138n
liḥāf, 24
mallūṭa, 52, 138n
mandīl, 62a
maqālim, 37a, 80n
marāwiḥ, 15, 121n
mashṭ, 46c
mighrafa, 84c
mikhadda, 26
miqaṣṣ, 84a, 80n
miṣfā, 58a
miṭraqa, 66, 84b
mīzān, 83
miʾzar, 57, 138n
mudawwara jild, 67, 80n
mūs, 80b
naṭʿ, 63
qabʿ, 71, 76n, 138n
qabqāb, 16, 39
qamīṣ, 51, 60, 138n
qushsha, 10, 59, 79, 82
raff, 55
rakwa, 8
sajjāda, 76
ṣandūq, 3, 4, 6, 78, 121n, 140, 158
saqraq nuḥās, 45, 47, 73, 74
saṭl, 48a
sayf, 28, 121n
shadd, 62b
shamʿad, 48b
sībā, 2
Ed
i
nb
u
rg
h
U
ni
aqlām, 21, 80n
bayt kutub, 37b
bayt mashṭ, 68a
bisāṭ (busuṭ), 18, 22, 61, 64, 65, 69, 138n
bisāṭ rūmī, 13, 121n
bisāṭ ṣaghīr, 25
dast, 44b
dawāt, 31, 68b, 80n
dawāt khashab, 33, 80n
fanār, 35a
farjīya bayḍāʾ, 11, 70, 76n, 138n
farjīya zarqā, 36, 56, 75n, 121n, 138n
farjīya sūdā, 77, 75n, 121n, 138n
ḥajar, 46b, 121n
ḥawāla, 107, 257
hāwan, 81
haykal, 17, 30
ḥulla sābigha, 34, 138n
ikhwān, 1
jaʿba, 35b
jubba bayḍāʾ, 12, 76n, 138n
jubba ṭirḥ, 38, 138n
kāmilīya, 9, 76n, 138n
khizāna, 19, 139
khizānat khashab, 43, 139
khūja, 50
kisāʾ ṣaʿīdī, 29, 138n
kisāʾ ṣūf, 40, 76n, 138n
kumājāt, 49
kursī khashab, 27, 54, 75
labbād, 42
es
s
Numbers in bold refer to the entry number in Chapter 7 (obj1…);
other numbers refer to page numbers
Entries followed by n refer to footnote(s) on the page indicated
404
o b j ec ts in Burhān al -Dīn’s e s t a t e
|
405
tannūr, 17
ṭāqiya, 53, 138n
ṭarrāḥa, 14
ṭāsa, 58b
ṭāsa ṣughrā, 44a
ʿubwatayn zajjāj, 41
ʿubwatayn bi-bayt nuḥās, 86, 121n
ʿukkāz ḥadīd, 7, 60
Ed
i
nb
u
rg
h
U
ni
ve
rs
ity
Pr
es
s
sikkīn (sakākīn), 37c, 80a, 80n, 127n
sikkīn ḥadīd, 85
sikr bāb, 72
silsila, 46a
sudda, 23
ṣuḥūn, 5
takht, 32
tanjīr, 20
Index of Haram al-sharīf Documents
˙
ve
rs
ity
Pr
#052, 29n, 68n, 96n, 98, 101, 119n, 224,
326, 328, 332, ed.335–6, 355, pl.III.2a,
pl.III.2b
#057, 16n
#061 (sale booklet), 15n, 16n, 28, 96n, 112,
113n, 114, 115, 116, 117, 124n, 155n,
ed.270–86, 291t, 293, 301, 302n, 314,
315n, 324n, 326, 328, 355, pl.I.1–I.2,
pl.I.7, pl.I.10, pl.I.11–I.14; see also #180
and #532
#077, 117n
#087, 183t
#099, 16n
#100, 135n
#106, 68n, 70n, 96n, 98, 100n, 126n, 242,
243, 289, 324n, 326, 328, 332, ed.337,
356, pl.III.3a, pl.III.3b
#108, 68n, 96n, 100n, 101n, 224, 324n, 326,
328, 356
#109, 71n, 91n, 326, 328, 332, ed.338, 356,
pl.III.4
#111, 29n, 68n, 69n, 96n, 98, 101, 119n, 224,
326, 328, 332, ed.339–40, 356, pl.III.5a,
pl.III.5b
#115, 68n, 70n, 96n, 100n, 101n, 242, 243,
289, 324n, 326, 328, 332, ed.341, 356,
pl.III.6a, pl.III.6b
#118, 68n, 70n, 96n, 100n, 101n, 224, 242,
243, 289, 324n, 326, 328, 332, ed.342–3,
356, pl.III.7a, pl.III.7b
Ed
i
nb
u
rg
h
U
ni
#001, 86n, 354
#002, 39n, 50n, 51n, 52n, 53n, 56n, 57n,
91n, 144n, 146n, 325, 326, 354
#003, 45n, 59n, 73n, 91n, 248, 326, 354
#004, 50n, 52n, 53n, 55n, 56n, 57n, 59n,
60n, 73n, 91n, 326, 354
#005, 40n, 41n, 55n, 60n, 91n, 325n, 326,
327, 354
#007, 29n, 40n, 41n, 51n, 54n, 60n, 73n,
91n, 103n, 325n, 326, 327, 354
#008, 52, 86n, 355
#009, 29n, 32, 43n, 54n, 59n, 73n, 91n,
103n, 326, 327, 355
#010, 29n, 39n, 51n, 54n, 91n, 103n, 326,
327, 355
#012, 50n, 52n, 53n, 56n, 57n, 91n, 326,
327, 355
#013, 29n, 36n, 51n, 54n, 91n, 103n, 108n,
180n, 326, 327, 355
#014, 40n, 41n, 60n, 91n, 325n, 326, 327,
355
#016, 29n, 96n, 100n, 101n, 326, 327,
ed.333–4, 355, pl.III.1a, pl.III.1b
#025, 103n, 355
#026, 38n, 50n, 53n, 57n, 91n, 144n, 146n,
326, 328, 355
#034, 52, 86n, 355
#039, 23n, 29n, 66n, 71n, 72n, 91n, 92n,
179n, 326, 328, 355
#049, 44n, 89n, 108n, 248, 326, 328, 355
es
s
Entries preceded by ed. refer to pages that provide editions of the documents
Entries followed by n refer to footnote(s) on the page indicated
Entries preceded by pl. indicate plate numbers not page numbers
Entries followed by t indicate a page with a table
406
H a ram al -sh arīf Docum e n t s
˙
U
h
rg
nb
u
Ed
i
407
ve
rs
ity
Pr
es
s
#480, 114n
#490, 58n, 59n, 91n, 326, 330, 359
#494, 17n, 183t, 359
#507, 15n, 113n, pl.I.8a
#508, 50n, 53n, 56n, 59n, 60n, 73n, 91n,
103n, 326, 330, 332, ed.346, 359, pl.III.10
#509, 42n, 46n, 60n, 91n, 326, 330, 332,
ed.347, 359, pl.III.11
#532 (sale booklet), 16n, 27, 28, 96n, 97n,
107n, 112, 113n, 114, 115, 116n, 117,
123n, 124n, ed.270–86, 291t, 293,
301, 302n, 304n, 314, 315n, 316n, 324,
326, 328, 330, 359, pl.I.5–I.6, pl.I.9,
pl.I.11–I.14, pl.I.15b–I.16; see also #061
and #180
#540, 135n
#570, 183nt
#583, 194n
#591, 169n, 359
#595, 183t, 359
#603, 50n, 53n, 56n, 91n, 103n, 326, 330,
359
#619, 91n, 326, 330
#622, 65n, 67n, 68n, 70n, 93n, 97n, 111n,
120n, 179n, 325n, 326, 330
#643, 135n
#652, 128–9, 130, 147n, 161, 183t, 226
#665, 44n, 59n, 89n, 325n, 326, 330
#666, 44n, 89n, 108n, 325n, 326, 330
#667, 324–5
#668, 44n, 89n, 325n, 326, 330
#676, 23n, 67n, 70n, 96n, 324n, 326, 330,
332, ed.348, 360, pl.III.12
#699, 46n, 47n, 65n, 91n, 103n, 326, 330,
332 ed.349, 360, pl.III.13
#706, 17n, 135–6, 360
#717, 220
#719, 135n, 360
#741, 97n, 267, 289
#768, 135n, 147n, 149n, 176n, 183t, 184n,
185t, 222, 360
#770, 122n, 360
#772, 183t, 239, 245, 264
#773, 117n
#774, 15n, 46n, 74n, 113n, 117n, pl.I.8b
#775, 117n
#776, 183t
ni
#146, 97n, 183t, 184, 294n
#175, 95n, 311
#176, 114n
#177, 114n
#178, 135n, 140n, 149n, 183t, 186n, 356
#179, 114n
#180 (sale booklet), 16n, 27, 28, 70n, 96n,
112, 113n, 115, 116, 117, ed.270–86,
291t, 293, 301, 304n, 314, 316n, 324, 326,
328, 356, pl.I.3–I.4, pl.I.11–I.15a: see also
#061 and #532
#183, 68n, 96n, 100n, 101n, 324, 326, 328,
356
#188, 68n, 96n, 100n, 324n, 326, 329, 332,
ed.344, 356, pl.III.8a, pl.III.8b
#192, 68n, 96n, 100n, 324n, 326, 329, 356
#203, 41n, 52n, 59n, 73n, 91n, 326, 329, 356
#206, 17n, 135n, 356
#210, 135n
#214, 52n, 325, 357
#215, 103n, 357
#227, 183nt
#284, 183t
#289, 46n, 47n, 59n, 65n, 68n, 73n, 91n,
103n, 188n, 326, 329, 357
#303, 40n, 55n, 59n, 60n, 73n, 91n, 325n,
326, 329, 357
#305, 29n, 43n, 54n, 59n, 73n, 91n, 103n,
326, 329, 357
#306, 117n
#308, 86n
#310, 29n, 40n, 54n, 60n, 91n, 103n, 325n,
326, 329, 357
#313, 23n, 67n, 68n, 96n, 101n, 324n, 326,
329, 332, ed.345, 357, pl.III.9
#315, 17n, 135n, 358
#336, 46n, 47n, 72n, 91n, 326, 329, 358
#355, 65n, 358
#358, 135
#369, 28n, 71n, 91n, 92n, 326, 329
#380, 239
#382, 66n, 67n, 93n, 97n, 120n, 326, 329,
358
#400, 75n
#429, 135n
#448, 183t
#458, 68n, 69n, 91n, 326, 330, 358
|
owning book s and p re s e r vi n g d ocum e n t s
Pr
es
s
#812, 96n, 115, 118, 120n, 123, 124n, 125,
126, 213, 220, 222, 224, 225, 226, 228,
229, 236, 237, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243,
244, 245, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 253,
254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261,
262, 263, 264, 266, 267, 268, 287, 288,
289, 290, 291t, 292–3, 294–8, ed.299–
300, 308–10, 314, 317–19, 324n, 326,
331, 361, pl.II.1–II.2
#816, 76n
#835, 44n, 89n, 325n, 326, 331
#836, 113n, pl.I.8c
#843, 58n, 71n, 91n, 93n, 326, 331, 332,
ed.350, 361, pl.III.14
#850, 71n, 91n, 93n, 326, 331, 332, ed.351,
361, pl.III.15
#897, 16n, 28n, 65n, 66n, 68n, 91n, 93n,
324, 326, 331, 332, ed.352–3, 361,
pl.III.16
#939, 147n, 183t
#968, 16n, 28n, 115, 117, 125, 213, 219,
220, 222, 223, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229,
236, 237, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244,
245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 253,
254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261,
262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269,
287, 288, 289, 290, 291t–2, 293, 301–5,
ed.306–7, 309n, 314, 316, 324, 326, 328,
331, 361, pl.II.3
Ed
i
nb
u
rg
h
U
ni
ve
#777, 114n
#778, 114n
#780, 114n
#785, 113n
#786, 114n
#787, 113n
#788, 74n, 113n
#790, 74n, 113n
#792, 94
#793, 75n, 96n, 115, 117n, 118, 124n, 126,
169, 213, 219, 220, 222, 223, 224, 225,
226, 227, 228, 229, 236, 237, 239, 240,
241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248,
249, 250, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258,
259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266,
267, 268, 269, 287, 289, 290, 291t, 292–3,
294, 295n, 297n, 301, 303, 308, 311n,
314 –20, ed.321–3, 324, 326, 330, 360,
pl.II.6–II.7
#800, 66n, 70n, 75n, 95n, 96n, 98, 99n, 115,
126, 153n, 154n, 169, 170n, 224, 225,
227, 229, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 246,
247, 248, 249, 250, 253, 254, 255, 256,
257, 258, 260, 261, 262, 264, 266, 267,
268, 269, 287, 288, 289, 291t, 294–5, 301,
308–11, ed.312–13, 320n, 324n, 326, 331,
361, pl.II.4–II.5
#803, 178n
#809, 179n
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