Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters, The by al-Musawi Muhsin J.;

Author:al-Musawi, Muhsin J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2017-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

INVENTORIES OF INDIVIDUAL READINGS

In terms of the Mamluk era’s recognition of the library and archive as defined by the selective acquisition and use of material for research and reading purposes, the books of ibn Wahb and Qudāmah, along with a few others, enjoy a wide reputation, at least in the catalogued concordance of both ibn Abī al-Iṣbaʿ and Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī. Both books function within an educational framework desperately needed by administrators, and within an Islamic polity that is becoming ethnically and socially heterogeneous. This trend is interesting because it illustrates not only an increased awareness of ideological and social divides but also a classification of knowledge in a central space between Arab-Islamic and ancient sciences. It does so by means of significant developments in interpretive and pragmatic methods designed to account for specific situations. The use of Qurʾānic referents is meant to substantiate and instantiate usage, but not to endow social and political power with any kind of divine endorsement.

These two books of ibn Wahb and Qudāmah were no less in vogue than celebrated poems from the past. Their conspicuous prominence in reading inventories (along with other books to be discussed below) and in relation to numerous discussions, books, and libraries in every field confronts us with further questions with respect to the constitution of the medieval literary and cultural world-system.42 Other writers left us quotes, emendations, and a gloss here and there, but biographers and bibliophiles documented these and many others so as to become part of secretarial and administrative writing in general. Indeed, the tenth century is witness to this move, which went beyond ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd’s superimposition of the divine order. Works such as al-Jahshiyārī’s (d. 331/942) Kitāb al-wuzarāʾ wa-l-kuttāb (The Book of Wazirs and Secretaries) are rooted in the actual running of the state through an exploration of the functions of its highest administrators. This kind of target-specific record, which can clearly be observed in the epistles of Ibrāhīm b. Hilāl al-Ṣābiʾ (d. 384/994), demonstrates the fusion of the writing craft (ṣanʿat al-kitābah) with a more worldly state power (“The craft of writing has marked them with its honor and its occupation of the rank of rulers”).43 But this disposition is by no means absent from the realm of poetry and poetics, simply because writing and eloquence also have to draw on a growing but unified wordstock and a repertoire of specific and general lexica enlivened and given power and impetus by an enriched rhetorical practice.44

The celebration of the craft of writing is more than self-promotion. Here is a consistent movement aimed at the fusion of writing and statist performance. Even the philosopher Abū al-Naṣr al-Fārābī in his ʾIḥṣāʾ al-ʿulūm (Enumeration of Sciences) allots a prioritized epistemological space to the sciences of Arabic language, followed separately by the sciences of the ancients, that is, the Greeks, which are to be acquired by the exertion of human intelligence.45 Both pursuits serve the state and the Islamic polity and hence require an effort. According to al-Kindī (d. 250/865),

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