Bibliotheca Islamica

The alchemist Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Mūsā al-Anṣārī al-Andalusī, known as Ibn Arfaʿ Raʾs (fl. 6th/12th century) is the author of Shudhūr al-dhahab (The Splinters of Gold), one of the most famous poetry collections of Arabic alchemy, which has been the object of no less than thirteen commentaries. The numerous manuscripts of Shudhūr al-dhahab and its commentaries have been read and copied for more than 700 years in various parts of the Islamicate world, from Morocco to India.

The very first commentary on Shudhūr al-dhahab was composed by the author Ibn Arfaʿ Raʾs himself. It was transmitted by his disciple Abū l-Qāsim Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Anṣārī under the title Kitāb Ḥall mushkilāt al-Shudhūr (The Unraveling of the Difficulties of ‘The Splinters’) and is extant in at least 31 manuscripts, of which 27 have been taken into account for this critical edition. This book provides the first edition of Kitāb Ḥall mushkilāt al-Shudhūr, along with an Arabic-English glossary of its alchemical terminology.

Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl al-Thaʿālibī was a poet, critic, lexicographer, historian of literature, prolific scholar, and one of the most important literary figures in the tenth-eleventh centuries. His work Khāṣṣ al-khāṣṣ fī al-amthāl is a collection of proverbs and their equivalents in a number of cultures and professions.

At the end of the 10^th / 16^th century in Aleppo, a weaver, cloth merchant, and poet named Kamāl al-Dīn would regularly take his time to fill blank pages with his varied observations. But it was not a linear narrative he produced, nor was it a diary. Rather, he scribbled down accounts on the political and social life of his city and the region; the climate; economic developments; his craft; poetry, much of it his own; anecdotes; reading excerpts; obituaries of dignitaries and friends; history. In doing so, Kamāl al-Dīn upends assumptions about literary agency, faith, and class in the Ottoman Arab provinces and thus gives us insights rarely seen in other contemporary works.

Only a fragment of what once must have been a sizeable work survives, now preserved in the Forschungsbibliothek Schloss Friedenstein in Gotha under the shelfmark MS orient. A 114. It represents the earliest known Arabic notebook of an artisan or merchant.

Al-Fawāʾid al-sanīyah fī al-riḥlah al-Madanīyah wa al-Rūmīyah by Quṭb al-Dīn al-Nahrawālī (d. 990/1582) is a unique book in its content and history and has been long-awaited to be seen in an edited publication. The present edition is based on the manuscript in Velieddin Efendi's collection of Beyazit Umumi Kütüphanesi in Istanbul. This manuscript is the author's draft of which he was unable to make a fair copy for public readership. This has rendered the editor's task much more challenging, requiring him to consult a corpus of significant historical, geographical and literary sources to finalize the current edition.

The book includes historical and literary material relating to some Hijaz events in the mid-tenth century/sixteenth century. It also relates the author's many voyages within the Hijaz region and his trip to the court of Suleiman the Magnificent as an envoy carrying a letter of complaint from the Sheriff of Mecca against the Ottoman governor of Medina, Delü Piri.

For an-Nahrawālī, this book was so important that he used to take it with him on all his travels. He expressed deep sorrow when he lost it, and relief when it was recovered through the intervention of the sultan's son Beyazit. Although parts of his travel accounts have been published, this is the first time that the complete work of an-Nahrawālī has been made available to scholars and researchers.

Aḥmad bin ʿAbd al-Laṭīf bin Muḥammad al-Barbīr (1747-1811) was a late eighteenth century adīb, poet, critic, and muftī of Beirut. Born and educated in Egypt of Levantine parents, he travelled to Beirut as a young man and subsequently settled in Damascus, where he composed the lengthy maqāma presented here in print for the first time. This work, entitled Maqāmāt al-Barbīr, is edited based on MS Dār al-Kutub 480 Adab. The scribe of this unique 50-folio manuscript is unknown. This work not only provides a rich portrait of social and cultural life in late-eighteenth-century Ottoman Damascus, but also offers a different and fascinating understanding of the maqāma as a literary form in a historical moment centuries after the classical masters of the genre and just a generation before the transformations of the Nahḍa.

The author of the Sukkardān, Šihāb Ad-Din Aḥmad b. Yahya At-Tilmsānī, known as Ibn Abī Ḥaǧala, was distinguished Sufi writer and poet. He was an important figure of the poetic scene in the late Mamluk era and became the favourite poet at the court of Sulṭān Ḥasan b. Muḥammad bin Qalāwūn after he wrote many books for him, including the Sukkardān as-Sulṭān.

The book is structured around two themes about the number "seven". The first four chapters discuss its relationship and superiority to other numbers. The second theme discussed are the various connections between the number "seven" and the Sulṭān. The volume contains a large amount of narrations and brilliant stories which the author himself considers to be elegant compositions and therefore suitable for a royal audience.

This wonderful intellectual journey can be considered a mirror of the cultural and literary sphere of the reign of Sulṭān Ḥasan and the late Mamluk period in Egypt and the Levant.

Ansāb al-ašrāf is a genealogical encyclopedia of the Arab-Islamic state. This volume contains biographies of the later Umayyad (Marwānid) caliphs. Each biography of these deals with the policies of the concerned caliph and his governors, his children, and his internal and external relations, as well as with rebellious movements in his era.

Ṣalāḥaddīn Ḫalīl b. Aibak aṣ-Ṣafādī (d. 764/1363) was a historian of Turkish descent best known for his 30-volume biographical dictionary al-Wāfī bi-l-Wafayāt. This is a new critical edition of the second volume, which was first published by Sven Dedering in 1949. This revised edition makes use of additional manuscripts as well as some of Ṣafadī’s other writings.

The book Jalāʾ al-abṣār(The Clear-Sightedness) by Muʿtazilī theologian al-Ḥākim Abū Saʿd/Sa‘īd al-Muḥsin/al-Muḥassin b. Muḥammad b. Karrāma al-Jushamī al-Bayhaqī (413-494/1022-1101) is a compendium of the lessons the author gave at the Jusham Mosque in Nishapur. They were given after the Friday Prayer over a period of three years from Ramadan 478/Dec-Jan 1086 to Ramadan 481/Dec 1088. The lessons were held over sixty sessions.

The book provides an Arabic edition of Old Babylonian letters from the Mari Archives (Tell Hariri, Syria) known among Assyriologists as ‘women’s letters’ or ‘feminine correspondence’. Court and elite women from Mari and neighboring areas act as receivers, senders, or both. They tell about their personal stories, but also deliver information on political, cultural, religious, and social aspects of life in ancient Mesopotamia and Syria.