This work discusses the largest private book collection of the pre-Ottoman Arabic Middle East for which we have both a paper trail and a surviving corpus of the manuscripts that once sat on its shelves: the Ibn Abd al-Hadi Library of Damascus.

Winner of the 2012 BRISMES book prize. How the written text became accessible to wider audiences in medieval Egypt and Syria. Medieval Islamic societies belonged to the most bookish cultures of their period. Using a wide variety of documentary, narrative and normative sources, Konrad Hirschler explores the growth of reading audiences in a pre-print culture.The uses of the written word grew significantly in Egypt and Syria between the 11th and the 15th centuries, and more groups within society started to participate in individual and communal reading acts. New audiences in reading sessions, school curricula, increasing numbers of endowed libraries and the appearance of popular written literature all bear witness to the profound transformation of cultural practices and their social contexts.

The written text was a pervasive feature of cultural practices in the medieval Middle East. At the heart of book circulation stood libraries that experienced a rapid expansion from the twelfth century onwards. While the existence of these libraries is well known our knowledge of their content and structure has been very limited as hardly any medieval Arabic catalogues have been preserved. This book discusses the largest and earliest medieval library of the Middle East for which we have documentation - the Ashrafiya library in the very centre of Damascus - and edits its catalogue. This catalogue shows that even book collections attached to Sunni religious institutions could hold rather unexpected titles, such as stories from the 1001 Nights, manuals for traders, medical handbooks, Shiite prayers, love poetry and texts extolling wine consumption. At the same time this library catalogue decisively expands our knowledge of how the books were spatially organised on the bookshelves of such a large medieval library. With over 2,000 entries this catalogue is essential reading for anybody interested in the cultural and intellectual history of Arabic societies. Setting the Ashrafiya catalogue into a comparative perspective with contemporaneous libraries on the British Isles this book opens new perspectives for the study of medieval libraries.

Afghanistan has played a crucial role in shaping the history of Islam. This book provides the first in-depth study of the sacred sites and landscape of medieval Balkh, in today's northern Afghanistan, in the five centuries from the Islamic conquests of the eighth century to the arrival of the Mongols in the thirteenth century.

On the basis of a newly discovered manuscript this book offers the most comprehensive bibliography of the enormous output of the fifteenth-century scholar Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī – enlarging our view of his scholarly contribution and correcting numerous mistakes in this regard. This book is thus essential reading for all those interested in the writerly world of Damascus and the scholarly world of the late fifteenth century, especially with regard to the Ḥanbalī tradition and ḥadīth scholarship. In particular, linking the titles of his books with the extant manuscripts in libraries around the world opens new perspectives to these scholarly worlds. At the same time this book offers a new framework to studying social history with reference to documents and the material culture of the book. في اكتشاف جديد لمخطوطة تسمية كتب يوسف بن حسن بن عبد الهادي، يُقدِّم سعيد الجوماني وكونراد هيرشلر أضبط قائمة ببليوغرافية بمؤلفاته الشخصيَّة وبخط يده؛ فنبَّهت هذه القائمة إلى جزءٍ من إنتاجه الفكري كان مجهولاً تماماً، وصححت الكثير من أخطاء القراءة في القوائم السابقة. ونشرها سيدعم الأبحاث العاملة بحقل حركة التأليف بدمشق والحياة الفكريّة فيها نهاية القرن التاسع الهجريّ، خاصّةً ما يتعلق بالتراث الحنبليّ وعلم الحديث. وسيفتح الربط بين المؤلفات المذكورة في تسمية الكتب من جهة ووقف كتب ابن عبد الهادي من جهة ثانية والمخطوطات الموجودة في مكتبات العالم من جهة ثالثة باباً جديداً إلى دراسة التراث الفكري في مدينة دمشق أواخر العهد المملوكي. وتقترح هذه الدراسة إطاراً جديداً لدراسة التاريخ الاجتماعي اعتماداً على الوثائق الشخصيَّة والهيئات الماديّة للمخطوطات الشخصيّة.

Abu Bakr al-Suli was an Abbasid polymath and table companion, as well as a legendary chess player. He was perhaps best known for his work on poetry and chancery, which would have a long-lasting influence on Arabic literature. His decades of service at the court of at least three caliphs give him a unique perspective as an historian of his own time, although he is often valued as an observer rather than an interpreter of events for posterity. Letizia Osti here provides the first full-length English-language study devoted to al-Suli, illustrating how investigating the life, times and works of such a complex individual can serve as a fil rouge for tackling broader, contested concepts, such as biography, autobiography, court culture, and written culture. The result is an exploration of the ways in which the Abbasid court made sense of the past and, in general, of what 'historiography' means in a medieval Arabic context.

In Weltgeschichtsschreibung zwischen Schia und Sunna Philip Bockholt examines the manuscript tradition of Khvāndamīr’s Ḥabīb al-siyar, and gives an in-depth analysis of how the author adapted his chronicle to the Shiʿi and Sunni religio-political convictions of his Safavid and Mughal overlords. In Weltgeschichtsschreibung zwischen Schia und Sunna untersucht Philip Bockholt die Handschriftentradition von Ḫvāndamīrs Ḥabīb as-siyar und analysiert die Arbeitsweise des Historikers, seine Weltchronik vor dem Hintergrund der politischen Umwälzungen in Iran und Indien um 1500 an schiitische und sunnitische Kontexte anzupassen.

The Qur’an and the Bible have been called "intertwined scriptures" due to the Qur’an’s frequent invocation of biblical narratives and figures. But what is the history of Muslims’ exegetical engagement with the biblical text? Through a comprehensive survey of more than 170 Qur’an commentaries, Samuel Ross traces the longitudinal history of the Bible in tafsῑr. Offering detailed case studies and rich in historical context, Ross’s narrative culminates in the remarkable late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century biblical turn. Global in scope, this development has not only generated new Muslim views of the Bible but even new interpretations of the Qur’an itself. This monograph has been awarded the annual BRAIS – De Gruyter Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World.