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8590 results in Islam

Page 165 of 430

  • 5 - The Almohads: Empire of the Western Mediterranean

  • Allen James Fromherz, Georgia State University
  • Book:
    The Near West
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 September 2017
    Print publication:
    22 March 2016, pp 145-193

  • Summary

    The fascinating life of the Almohad admiral Ahmad Al-Siqilli (of Sicily) mirrored the close interactions between Christian and Muslim Mediterraneans in this period. The Normans under Roger II of Sicily, also known for his patronage of the geographer Al-Idrisi, had captured Al-Siqilli as a young man. Ahmad Al-Siqilli was then trained in the arts of the admiralty. After the death of Roger, Ahmad fled to Tunis and Marrakech where he joined the court of the Almohad Caliph Yusuf bin ‘Abd Al-Mu’min. The Caliph declared him commander of the fleet. Ahmad and his ships were able to fight Christian forces so effectively that his fame spread throughout the Muslim world. Even Salah Al-Din Yusuf bin Ayyub (the famed “Saladin” who drove the crusaders out of Jerusalem in 1187) sent a close member of his family to the court of the Caliph Ya‘qub Al-Mansur begging for the support of the Almohad navy. Perhaps for the sake of prudence or perhaps because Ya‘qub Al-Mansur felt he was the greater anti-crusader, the true leader of the Muslims, Saladin's envoy was sent back.

    The almost unprecedented power of the Almohads over the seas was reflected in the confidence of their architecture and art. Just as the success of the Italian city-states in the Eastern Mediterranean produced a flowering in architecture and culture, the success and confidence of the Almohads in the Western Mediterranean was expressed in their massive and austere architecture. The Almohad Giralda Mosque of Seville, whose minaret remains as the bell tower of the cathedral of Seville, outshone most mosques of the East. The Almohads often used architects and artists from throughout the Mediterranean. Many of these came from as far away as Sicily (then under Christian control). Like the admiral Ahmad Al-Siqilli, the architect of the Giralda was Abu Layth Al-Siqilli (from Sicily), showing the lasting Mediterranean influences of the architectural styles of the Almohad Empire. If finished, the enormous Hassan Mosque in Rabat, now the capital of Morocco, could have quite easily been one of the largest mosques in all of Islam, as great as Damascus, Baghdad or Mecca. Rabat itself was founded as a monumental city, a proclamation of jihad, a statement in stone and mortar to the duty to spread the universal ideal of Almohad doctrine, the ineffable unity of God.

  • 6 - Between City and Countryside: Ibn Khaldun and the Fourteenth Century

  • Allen James Fromherz, Georgia State University
  • Book:
    The Near West
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 September 2017
    Print publication:
    22 March 2016, pp 194-208

  • Summary

    In 1291, a Genoese adventurer named Benedetto Zaccaria, then working for King Sancho IV of Castile, defied all odds and defeated the much larger, but unwieldy fleet of the Berber Marinids, the Almohad successor dynasty in Morocco. Zaccaria would help create an Aragonese and Castilian fleet ready for centuries of naval war and set Christian Spain on a path to dominate waters that were once patrolled by North Africans. This was perhaps as important as the defeat on land of the Almohads by a combined Christian force at the land battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. The fall of the Almohad and post-Almohad North African fortunes reflected a crisis in late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century North Africa. Of course, much of Europe was also entering a calamitous century. Full of outbreaks of plague, the Hundred Years War, and major fiscal challenges associated with a bubble in trade, the Commercial Revolution and capitalist expansion of the previous centuries seemed to implode.

    The situation was increasingly dire for North African shipping in general. After the fall of the Almohads, according to Ibn Khaldun, “Maritime habits were forgotten … The Muslims came to be strangers to the Mediterranean.” By this time Muslim shipping was, compared to the glories of the Almohad past: in tatters. Although the office of the admiralty still existed in Hafsid Tunis in the Zayyanid court and in the Marinid realm, Maghribi shipping activity was largely reduced. The army of the Marinids seemed demoralized by the disastrous battle of Rio Salado in 1340, one of the final major attempts by Marinids to control Iberia. Ibn Khaldun always encouraged continued advances against Christian Iberia; he did not lose all hope. Foreshadowing the rise of the Ottomans, he predicted the rise of a great, new Muslim naval power, a power that would conquer all the lands of the European Christians beyond the sea according to the “books of predictions.”

    Yet the polymath, minister and historian Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) did not give up hope of a more immediate change in affairs. As an ambassador between urban rulers and the tribes of the countryside, Ibn Khaldun realized that new dynasties could arise, take power and set the stage for a new era.

  • 2 - Rome: North Africa and the Papacy

  • Allen James Fromherz, Georgia State University
  • Book:
    The Near West
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 September 2017
    Print publication:
    22 March 2016, pp 58-85

  • Summary

    For years the frightful basilisk, a dragon-like creature that could kill with his foul breath or stun with a mere look from his devilish eyes, haunted the city of Rome. The serpent roamed around the city, cruelly taking victim after victim. One day, Pope Leo IV, like a courageous lion, “halted fearlessly over the cleft from which the breath of that plague-bearing serpent emerged. Raising eyes and hands to heaven, with abundant tears he besought Christ who is God above all to put to flight by his power the dire kind of serpent from that place.” The serpent died. Although historians say the monster was probably just some particularly bad methane gas expelling from the piles of rubbish around Rome, the death of this frightful beast, the embodiment of so many calamities, added to the reputation of the Bishop of Rome: the Pope. The papacy in the first half of the ninth century desperately needed these miracles. Popes were expected to prove their holiness through prayerful and successful appeals to God. Many popes before him were lackluster at this skill and the fate of Rome seemed dire. Leo IV marked Rome's turning point in the economy of miracles. Indeed, every trial under Leo IV came with its concomitant miracle, with proof of God's renewed favor for the desperate city of Rome. One of the greatest “divine interventions” would defeat another fabled monster from the outside, “Saracens.” The so-called “Saracens” were actually Berber North African and Sicilian raiders who, according to papal accounts, sacked not only Rome but the very tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul in 846. They threatened Rome in 849 as well.

    The city the North Africans and Sicilians were attacking had long been blessed and cursed by its fame. As with Jerusalem, Rome was, and is, more important as a symbol than as a place. Inevitably, there was always tension between what Rome was as a city for itself and what it was supposed to be for the outside world. There were two great Romes: one Rome of daily experience and political power and one Rome of symbol and ideals. There was the Rome of economic decline, malaria, earthquake and flood, the Rome of constant internecine struggle between families, the papacy and outside kings.

  • 3 - Tunis: Axis of the Middle Sea

  • Allen James Fromherz, Georgia State University
  • Book:
    The Near West
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 September 2017
    Print publication:
    22 March 2016, pp 86-118

  • Summary

    Like Rome, Pisa and Genoa on the western coast of Italy, Tunis prospered in the ninth century from trade, slavery, naval-merchant exchange and raiding. Being on the coast was both an opportunity and a risk for residents of Tunis. Raiding always went both ways, the North Africans feared Italian pirates and vice versa. At any moment, an Italian duke or even another unfriendly Berber or Muslim ship, could arrive to take recently captured spoils. Overall, however, the opportunity of the sea still made a protected and strategic port city such as Tunis capable of thriving. Only a short trip from Sicily and the coast of Italy, Tunis was within the same commercial sphere as European cities to the north. The city of Tunis, nestled in a Lake of Tunis, itself protected within a Gulf of Tunis, faced out towards the Western Mediterranean. Following the legacy of Carthage, fewer cities could be better situated than Tunis to take advantage of Western Mediterranean trade. Tunis was to dominate the southern Mediterranean shore and north to the many islands of the Tyrrhenian Sea where boats were sent by steady currents. Although it never became a city at the level of Rome or Cairo, Tunis was often close to this status. It had been on the verge of empire at its height, a stopover point for ideas and movements far vaster than its immediate surroundings. Tunis at one point would be recognized in Mecca and Madina as the capital of the Caliph – leader of the Islamic world.

    Tunis would eventually become the capital of Ifriqiya; the Arabized Latin name of the land that covers much of what is now Tunisia. Like a fat blade between the western mountains of Algeria and the deserts of Libya, Ifriqiya also seems to push northwards into the Tyrrhenian Sea, towards Sicily, with Rome and the strategic islands of Malta, Sardinia and the Balearics (Majorca, Minorca and Ibiza) easily accessible to trade, pillage, invasion or some combination of all three. The Bay of Tunis, in this respect, functioned like a net catapulting boats north and west and capturing them when heading east. Tunis eventually became not only a major port but also a significant center of learning, trade and commerce that not only raided but also rivaled European cities well into the medieval period.

  • 1 - Bèjaïa: Introducing North Africa, Latin Europe and the Mediterranean

  • Allen James Fromherz, Georgia State University
  • Book:
    The Near West
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 September 2017
    Print publication:
    22 March 2016, pp 13-57

  • Summary

    The entire Mediterranean was his classroom. Bright-eyed and curious, the youth from the Italian port of Pisa roamed for his first time through the bustling streets and markets of the North African port of Bèjaïa, also known as Bougie. This commercial city in the northeast of Algeria, only a few hundred miles southwest of Sardinia and almost directly south of Marseille, gave the French their word “Bougie,” candle, after the fine, tapered wax made and traded from there. Even as Europe's candlelight, essential for monastic scholarship in the dark northern winters, was made possible by Bèjaïa, Leonardo Fibonacci's time with the mathematicians of Bèjaïa would soon illuminate far more.

    The name Bèjaïa referred to a Berber tribe from the region of the same name. The city is now the bustling capital of the region of Kabylia, a province that has maintained a largely self-professed Berber (Taqbaylit), as opposed to Arab, or French identity to this day. Indeed, the surrounding countryside was heartland of the “Berber Spring,” an uprising against Arabization in the 1980s. The city in the mid twelfth century had a distinctly cosmopolitan character. In the time of Fibonacci, Berber, Arabic and medieval Italian as well French or Catalan and Castilian were spoken in its markets. Andalusi Berbers were especially numerous, carrying on a trade with Muslim Spain that had linked Bèjaïa to Europe for centuries. They maintained contacts with their extended tribe and families back in North Africa. For instance, before the Almohads, the Berber Zirids, had ruled both around Tunis and in Al-Andalus, and engaged in bustling trade. In terms of political power, Fibonacci's Bèjaïa was then tenuously under the control of the vast and powerful Almohad Empire. Although Arabs comprised part of their army and administration and many claimed Arab blood, the Almohads were primarily Berbers. They were not primarily from the Kabylia, but originated mostly among the Masmuda Berbers of the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco. This coming of the Almohads corresponded with the Commercial Revolution.

    The Commercial Revolution of the Twelfth Century, a great increase in trade and commerce, was often associated only with the northern half of the Mediterranean and, perhaps, Egypt.

  • 7 - Conclusions: A Second Axial Age

  • Allen James Fromherz, Georgia State University
  • Book:
    The Near West
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    23 September 2017
    Print publication:
    22 March 2016, pp 209-225

  • Summary

    Ibn Khaldun experienced profound angst and internal conflicts between spiritual enlightenment and the appeal of worldly power. In this way, he reflected a much larger trend in the medieval Mediterranean. The conflict between money, power and spirit, the simultaneous rise of both a commercial revolution and a spiritual revolution on all shores of the Western Mediterranean, was one of the most defining struggles of the medieval world. Ibn ‘Arabi, for instance, was the great Unlimited Mercifier who, coming from the Almohad West, transformed the Islamic world with his teachings and spiritual exercises, far from the realm of political power and its allures. His followers and disciples as well as the disciples of many more Sufi saints spread throughout the Islamic world, following trade routes deep into Eurasia and Africa. St. Francis, and many others, similarly rejected worldly goods, war and the life set before him by his father and by society. Strategically embraced by the Church, his movement and his friars, from William of Rubruck to Lorenzo of Portugal, Lope d’Ayn, spread out through the known world, from Marrakech to the Mongols, following the mercenaries and merchants whose fortunes were being made with the rise of global trade. Yet along with this trade and new wealth, for both merchants and rulers, came profound spiritual crisis.

    In the period covered by this book, roughly between 900 and 1450, and especially in the twelfth century midpoint, major religious traditions throughout Eurasia and North Africa, well into the Sahara, experienced a great spiritual transformation. The rise of commercial wealth and trade and the interactions between different faiths it caused sparked this spiritual revival. This could be called a Second Axial Age: a world historical transformation marked by profound changes and encounters both within and between matured religious traditions and cultures. While conflict has often been downplayed in favor of studying tolerance and commercial exchange, informed recognition of, and then reaction to, other, rival religious traditions characterized this age.

    Rather than being marked only by passive dismissal, tolerance or crosscultural conversion, encounters between different universal faiths provoked profound changes and reactions within those very traditions. Although the “dream of conversion” was not always the central concern, it could lead to angst.

Shari'a in the Modern Era
  • Muslim Minorities Jurisprudence
  • Iyad Zahalka
  • Published online:
    05 March 2016
    Print publication:
    01 April 2016
  • Written by the Qadi (judge) of the Shari'a Court of Jerusalem and former director of the Shari'a Court system in Israel, this book offers a unique perspective on the religious law of Muslim minorities living in the West. Specifically, it explores the fiqh al-aqalliyyāt doctrine of religious jurisprudence developed by modern Islamic jurists to resolve the challenges of maintaining cultural and religious identity in majority non-Muslim societies. The author examines possible applications across numerous cultural and geographical contexts, answering such questions as: what are the rules for assuming political and public roles, and should one deposit money that incurs interest? Building on a growing scholarship, this book aims to resolve points of view and facets of religious law that have been neglected by previous studies. Accessibly written, Shari'a in the Modern Era is designed to promote cross-cultural understanding among readers of all faiths.

  • Middle Eastern Influences on Islamist Organizations in Malaysia: The Cases of ISMA, IRF and HTM

  • Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid, Che Hamdan Che Mohd Razali
  • Book:
    Middle Eastern Influences on Islamist Organizations in Malaysia
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    09 March 2019
    Print publication:
    29 February 2016, pp 1-28

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Islamist activism in the politics of the Malayan peninsula began during the early post-Second World War years, and was dominated until the early 1970s by the Pan-Malayan Islamic Party (PMIP). PMIP was the chosen outfit for political Islamists previously associated with such fiercely anti-colonial movements as the Malay Nationalist Party (MNP, or Pertubuhan Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya), Party of Muslims (Hizbul Muslimin [HM]) and Defenders of the Motherland (Pembela Tanahair [PETA]) (Ahmad Fauzi 2007a, pp. 387–91; Liow 2009, p. 21). By the time the National Front (Barisan Nasional [BN]) was founded in 1974 to succeed the Alliance (Perikatan) coalition, PMIP had morphed into the Islamic Party of Malaysia (Parti Islam SeMalaysia [PAS]), which is still a major actor in Malaysia's Islamist scene today.

    Following the May 1969 racial troubles that engulfed the capital city of Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian state embarked on a series of reconstruction policies, chief of which was the New Economic Policy (NEP, 1971–90). The affirmative action policies of the NEP laid the first seeds of a new wave of Islamic revival in Malaysia, as state-provided educational opportunities exposed new cohorts of Malay-Muslim youths to political socialization in university campuses both at home and abroad. A significant portion of these new experiences, taking place far away from their traditional village ambience, took on religious colouring as they mixed with international Muslim students and academics through whom they were introduced to the writings of Islamic resurgence ideologues such as Hassan al-Banna (1906–49), Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), Abul A'la Maududi (1903–79), Fathi Yakan (1933–2009), Sa'id Hawwa (1935–89), Said Ramadan (1926–95), Abdul Karim Zaidan (1917–2014), Said Ramadan al-Bouti (1929–2013) and Yusuf al-Qaradawi (1926–). Except for Maududi who was Indo-Pakistani, all the other major influences on post-1969 Islamic revivalist thought in Malaysia were Middle Eastern thinkers, whose original works were written in Arabic. This meant that their books and treatises reached their Malaysian audience mainly through translations, either into Malay or English. Apart from the Middle Eastern figures, two other scholars whose writings made a discursive impact on Malaysia's Islamist scene, although to a lesser extent than the others listed earlier, were the Indian Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi (1914–99), and Said Nursi (1877–1960), a Turk of Kurdish descent (Kamal Hassan 2003, pp. 430–40; Lemiere 2009, pp. 66–67, 71, 78, 83; Zulkifli Hassan 2013).

Middle Eastern Influences on Islamist Organizations in Malaysia
  • The Cases of ISMA, IRF and HTM
  • Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid, Che Hamdan Che Mohd Razali
  • Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    09 March 2019
    Print publication:
    29 February 2016
  • Interaction between Muslims in Malaysia and their Middle Eastern brethren has consistently been a source of apprehension to the powers-that-be from colonial times till today. Islamist activism in Malaysia has indeed undergone changes, and these did indeed arise from contemporary Middle Eastern influences. The religious thought, practices and lifestyles of Muslims in Malaysia have traditionally been regarded as moderate. Of particular importance in the present context is the transmission of puritanical interpretations of Islam. Furthermore, the Malaysian version of Islamist puritanism has always been pragmatic rather than dogmatic, moderated by its multi-cultural and multi-religious setting. But newer strands of Islamism influenced by developments in the Middle East have alarmed authorities. The impact of this Middle East-driven wave of Islamism is not restricted to Malaysian chapters of transnational extremist groups such as the Islamic State (IS) and Al Qaeda. However, in Malaysia, the influence is more varied in its organizational impact. Newly formed Muslim organizations such as Ikatan Muslimin Malaysia (ISMA, or Muslim Solidarity Front), the Islamic Renaissance Front (IRF) and Hizb at-Tahrir Malaysia (HTM) are all found to have maintained strong Middle Eastern links, both at the discursive or organizational levels. All three movements in question have so far not displayed violent tendencies although their versions of Islamism exhibit varying degrees of ideological absolutism, distinguishing them markedly from the wave of Islamism that engulfed Malaysia in the 1980s.

  • Middle Eastern Influences on Islamist Organizations in Malaysia: The Cases of ISMA, IRF and HTM

  • Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid, Che Hamdan Che Mohd Razali
  • Book:
    Middle Eastern Influences on Islamist Organizations in Malaysia
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    09 March 2019
    Print publication:
    29 February 2016, pp vii-viii

  • Summary

    EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

  • • Interaction between Muslims in Malaysia and their Middle Eastern brethren has consistently been a source of apprehension to the powers-that-be from colonial times till today. Such interaction was historically made possible by the haj pilgrimage, inter-continental sufi networks, returning Malay-Muslim students from the Middle East and indigenized Arab communities who maintain links with their motherland.

  • • Islamist activism in Malaysia has indeed undergone changes, and these did indeed arise from contemporary Middle Eastern influences. The religious thought, practices and lifestyles of Muslims in Malaysia have traditionally been regarded as moderate. Of particular importance in the present context is the transmission of puritanical interpretations of Islam.

  • • Furthermore, the Malaysian version of Islamist puritanism has always been pragmatic rather than dogmatic, moderated by its multi-cultural and multi-religious setting. But newer strands of Islamism influenced by developments in the Middle East have alarmed authorities.

  • • The impact of this Middle East-driven wave of Islamism is not restricted to Malaysian chapters of transnational extremist groups such as the Islamic State (IS) and Al Qaeda. However, in Malaysia, the influence is more varied in its organizational impact. Newly formed Muslim organizations such as Ikatan Muslimin Malaysia (ISMA, or Muslim Solidarity Front), the Islamic Renaissance Front IRF) and Hizb at-Tahrir Malaysia (HTM) are all found to have maintained strong Middle Eastern links, both at the discursive or organizational levels.

  • • All three movements in question have so far not displayed violent tendencies although their versions of Islamism exhibit varying degrees of ideological absolutism, distinguishing them markedly from the wave of Islamism that engulfed Malaysia in the 1980s.

  • Foreword

  • Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid, Che Hamdan Che Mohd Razali
  • Book:
    Middle Eastern Influences on Islamist Organizations in Malaysia
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    09 March 2019
    Print publication:
    29 February 2016, pp v-vi

  • Summary

    The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

    The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

    The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policy makers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

  • Introduction

  • Konrad Hirschler
  • Book:
    Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    05 August 2016
    Print publication:
    19 February 2016, pp 1-16

  • Summary

    This is the story of a medieval Arabic library. Positioned in the centre of seventh-/ thirteenth-century Damascus, part of an educational institution and endowed by members of the political and social elite there is nothing too unusual about the Ashrafīya library. In many ways it is a run-of- the- mill library of which dozens probably existed in Damascus and hundreds more in the various Syrian and Egyptian cities. Yet this library differs in one significant way from all of its counterparts: its catalogue has come down to us. Library catalogues do not sound like the most exciting documents we can lay our hands on and this book is certainly not the Middle Eastern equivalent to Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose (although the first shaykh to preside over the library's mother institution did fall victim to a highly suspicious and unsolved murder). Rather this library catalogue is so valuable because it opens a door into a pre-print world of books and shelves, which was at the very heart of society but was hitherto largely inaccessible.

    For the first time we are able to gain a detailed insight into what books were held in such a medieval Arabic library and thus its intellectual profile. William of Baskerville would not have found Aristotle's Book on Comedy on the library's shelves, but at least eighteen other titles ascribed to Aristotle, Plato, Galen and Socrates would have been available to him among the 2,000 books in its stock. The catalogue also allows us to understand for the first time how the books were actually organised on the shelves (How do we make the books retrievable?) and it allows us to grasp the spatial dimensions of a medieval library (How do we cram all of these books into such small places?). Finally, for the first time one can follow the nuts and bolts of founding a medieval library in the Arabic Middle East (From where do we get the books?) and of running it in the subsequent decades and centuries (How do we prevent those folks from running off with the books?). The catalogue was known to the great scholar of manuscripts Ramazan Şeşen, who briefly cited it in some of his publications from the 1970s onwards.

  • 2 - Organising the Library: The Books on the Shelves

  • Konrad Hirschler
  • Book:
    Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    05 August 2016
    Print publication:
    19 February 2016, pp 60-101

  • Summary

    With its large library collection the Ashrafīya had to have some system of how to arrange and organise its books. This was paramount for two reasons: first, space was – as we will see below – a scarce resource in such an endowment and the books had to be stocked in an efficient way to avoid unnecessarily wasting it. Perhaps even more importantly a collection holding more than 2,000 books had to provide some reliable system to retrieve specific titles in order to be of any use to its librarian and readers. Smaller collections could afford the luxury of organising their books into rough categories and could also, arguably, afford to use comparatively inefficient library furnishings such as book chests. The only other surviving catalogue from this period pertaining to the mosque library in the North African city of Kairouan only listed 125 books. On account of its small size, there is no real organisation to speak of apart from grouping the copies of the Koran. However, a library such as the Ashrafīya required a sophisticated and highly developed system for storing and retrieving its books. Its catalogue of forty-eight pages was a crucial tool in achieving these goals and the present chapter will analyse its structure to present the organisation of this library and its spatial arrangement. As the catalogue was most likely written by the librarian al-Ansārī in the 670s/1270s, I will in the following repeatedly talk of al-Ansārī's role in organising the library. This is not meant to imply that he completely reorganised the library on his own, but rather to put a name to a process, which certainly began with the foundation of the library some four decades earlier and involved more than one individual in subsequent years.

    So far the document at the heart of this book, the fihrist, has been consistently called a ‘catalogue’. This conscious choice was made in order to argue against the assumption that a medieval library's ‘fihrist is a legal register’ in the first place and functions as a catalogue as a by-product, if at all. In this vein the Ashrafīya catalogue has been described as a ‘failure in being a veritable tool for retrieving books, but it rather leans towards being a mere tool for listing them’.

  • 4 - The Ashrafīya Catalogue: Translation and Title Identification

  • Konrad Hirschler
  • Book:
    Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    05 August 2016
    Print publication:
    19 February 2016, pp 133-441

  • Summary

    This chapter presents the data contained in the Ashrafīya catalogue in a standardised form. The central challenge in preparing this list, and in working with medieval book lists and catalogues in general, is the identification of titles. In many cases this is a straightforward endeavour, as titles are given with a reasonable degree of detail and are sufficiently well known: an entry such as Adab al-dīn wa-al- dunyā (On Conduct in Religious and Worldly Matters) by al-Māwardī is unequivocal and requires no further research. Easily identifiable titles are especially found whenever al-Ansārī provides the author's name, which is the case for almost half of the catalogue's entries (965). In these cases modern reference and overview works such as the Encyclopaedia of Islam, Baghdādī's Ī∂āa al-maknūn, Sezgin's Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, al-Ka hhāla's Muʿjam al-Mu ʾallifīn, Brockelmann's Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur and al-Ziriklī's al-A ʿlām are generally sufficient if combined with early modern bio-bibliographical works such as Oājjī Khalīfa's Kashf al-Ounūn as well as subject-specific and author-specific works such as Ullmann's Die Medizin im Islam, Gutas's Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition, Pellat's Nouvel essai d’inventaire de l’oeuvre ĞāaiOienne and Alwajī's Muʾallafāt Ibn al-Jawzī. However, in many other cases the identification is far from straightforward and rather resembles, as quoted in the Introduction, a fiendish species of crossword. In these cases the information on the author is generally absent and the title given poses particular problems. From my experience of working with the Ashrafīya catalogue and other medieval book lists, the titles of these problematic cases broadly fall into four main categories: the generic title, the popular title, the ‘book-in- the- making’ title and the key word title.

    The first category of generic titles includes entries such as Multiple-Text Manuscript with Poems and Reports (Majmūʿ ashʿār wa-akhbār), Stories, Poems and Anecdotes (Akhbār wa-ash ʿār wa-nawādir) and Persian Correspondence (Tarassul ʿajamī).

Page 165 of 430