Studying historical book cultures of North Africa and West Asia on the basis of documentary texts such as manuscript notes and library catalogues has gained in pace in recent years.[1] Among the most important sites for documentary booklists is the Cairo Geniza corpus, which contains the largest body of pre-Ottoman Egyptian book lists known to date. Yet these documents have not always been fully integrated into wider discussions of medieval book culture of the region. This is part of the general problem that the relevance of the Geniza for wider Middle Eastern history has often been underplayed, especially by those researchers, such as ourselves, who primarily work with Arabic-script and Muslim sources. This is changing and the work by colleagues such as Marina Rustow at the Princeton Geniza Lab and Ronny Vollandt’s MAJLIS project in Munich are crucial to bridge the gap between Geniza (often Jewish) Studies and medieval Middle Eastern (de facto often Muslim) history.

The booklist Cambridge T-S Misc. 24.28 is a particularly pertinent document for setting documents from the Geniza corpus into their wider context, as it is one of its booklists written in Arabic script. It is a fragmentary single sheet with three columns listing thirty-three legible book entries. Arguably it was once part of a daftar-style catalogue of a private book collection in Cairo as is evident from the list’s documentary logic. Each entry first defines the book’s content (such as The Poetry of X) and then provides information on the materiality of the specific book (number of volumes) held in this library. Even though the list is not dated, the chronological profile of its titles indicates that it was written in the seventh/thirteenth century.

All thirty-three titles in this list refer to one single genre, Arabic poetic anthologies. Any other field of knowledge, such as law, history, medicine or philosophy, is entirely absent – what we have here is thus the extant poetry section of a larger catalogue that was organised by topic (history, medicine, poetry and so on). The list does not provide any indication as to the owner’s identity and this brings us to the question of the religious identity of this library. The profile of the library as we see it from this fragment does not indicate any particular religious background and there is thus nothing in this book list that calls for the use of the label ‘Jewish’ except its provenance from the Geniza corpus. As we will show, its book owner was part of an elite book culture that cut well across religious identities. In consequence, this library that can be described as an Egyptian-Syrian elite library that could have equally have been owned by a Muslim or Christian owner.

To make this point, comparative material is needed, but regrettably no comparable documents from Cairo of the seventh/thirteenth century beyond the Geniza corpus are known so far. Yet, we do have a ‘Muslim’ library from Damascus of that period, the Ashrafīya library in the mausoleum/madrasa of the city’s ruler. The largest group of books in this library were diwans of poetry, while topics such as Islamic law play a rather secondary role. This salience of poetry goes back to the library’s sources, the ruler’s personal library in Damascus and that of a high-ranking Cairene court administrator. In other words, the Ashrafīya’s books came from households of the social elite that participated in Egyptian-Syrian book culture as much as the owner of the Geniza booklist did.

The shared Egyptian-Syrian book culture is evident when comparing the book titles in both libraries. More than half of the titles in our Cairene library can also be found in the Ashrafīya library. Among these matches are pre-Islamic poetry, such as the poems ascribed to Ṭarafa b. al-ʿAbd and ʿAntara (no. 20), early Islamic poetry, such as that of Ḥassān b. Thābit (no. 33), ʿAbbāsid poets, including Abū Nuwās (no. 32), Fāṭimid poets, for instance Ẓāfir al-Ḥaddād (no. 16) and ʿAlī al-Ballanūbī (no. 21) as well as Būrid poetry such as that by Būrī b. Ayyūb Tāj al-Mulūk (no. 7). The shared world of books extends beyond the overlap of poets and includes also the textual format in which the respective poetry was held. Poetry could either be brought together in stable anthologies (‘The Diwan of Poet X’) or in a collection that had not (yet) received the status of a fixed anthology (‘Poetry of Poet Y’). In ten of the seventeen matches we have an exact overlap between the textual format in the Cairo library and the Ashrafīya library.

If we move to those titles that were unique to the Cairo collection, we see again that there is relatively little that is specifically Jewish about this library. We have the poetry of Dhū al-Nūn al-Miṣrī a third/ninth-century Muslim mystic from Akhmīm in Upper Egypt (no. 1) or that of Ibn al-ʿArīf al-Andalusī a sixth/twelfth-century celebrated Ṣūfī from Northern Africa (no. 2). We know little about Muḥammad al-Ruṣāfī (d. 572/1177; no. 24), but he left a poem celebrating the Almohad caliph ʿAbd al-Muʾmin for restoring ‘proper’ Muslim governance. The poets unique to the Cairo list also include famed litterateurs such as Ibn Ṭabāṭabā al-Iṣfahānī (d. 322/934), author of one of the major early works on literary criticism in Arabic (no. 15). In the same vein, we find the early Islamic poetry by al-Shammākh b. Ḍirār (no. 19) or that of ʿUmayr al-Quṭāmī (‘the falcon’; no. 30) who was on account of one of his verses also nicknamed Ṣarīʿ al-Ghawānī (‘the one felled by beautiful maidens’). Sudayf b. Maymūn was deeply involved in the political conflicts of the late Umayyad and early ʿAbbāsid periods (no. 17) and so the list goes on. What was once on the shelves of this book owner’s house clearly had an appeal to reading audiences across the various religious communities in the region. Booklist T-S Misc. 24.28 is only a fragment and its argumentative potential should not be overstretched. Yet, this booklist indicates the urgency of projects such as MAJLIS aimed at bridging outdated disciplinary silos to (re)connect the written heritage of the region.

Konrad Hirschler is a Professor of Middle Eastern History at Universität Hamburg (Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures) and was previously Professor of Middle Eastern History at SOAS (London) and Freie Universität Berlin. Over the last years he has primarily worked on the history of reading, the book and libraries with an emphasis on material culture. He is author of prize-winning books such as A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture, Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library, The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands and Medieval Arabic Historiography, co-author of Owning Books and Preserving Documents in Medieval Jerusalem (2023) and Muʾallafat Yūsuf b. Ḥasan Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, as well as co-editor of The Damascus Fragments and Manuscript Notes as Documentary Sources.

Footnotes

[1] We would like to thank the colleagues at the Princeton Geniza Lab whose tweet first alerted us to the existence of this document: https://twitter.com/GenizaLab/status/1530426743902744577?t=Vw7nqMoZoBDdLDhGDz2XWQ&s=19
Further thanks are due to Geert Jan van Gelder.

This blog entry is based on the article Said Aljoumani/Konrad Hirschler, A glimpse into Egyptian/Syrian elite book culture during the seventh/thirteenth century: Booklist T-S Misc. 24.28 from the Cairo Geniza corpus (forthcoming Der Islam).

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