A Medieval Muslim Scholar’s Legacy, Ibn Ṭāwūs and the Afterlife of his Library

This article presents an endowment note as the only surviving material trace from the famous library of the Shiʿite scholar ʿAlī b. Mūsā Ibn Ṭāwūs (589/1193–664/1266).

This note offers new insights into the books he possessed and adds clarity about the legal framework under which it was passed on to Ibn Ṭāwūs’ descendants. The article also traces the further history of this manuscript through Damascus to Istanbul and discusses strategies for tracking these notes, which were often willfully destroyed.

Working with manuscript notes can serve a variety of approaches.1 Sometimes, it is an exercise in applying the smallest and literally most marginal of finds in order to contribute to a larger picture. Since these notes are often dispersed, worn, or purposefully effaced, such small finds frequently hinge on a stroke of luck. Such is the case with the following endowment note.

Endowment notes often follow the same pattern and layout, and their systematic erasure therefore leaves suspicious traces in a manuscript. One of the methods adopted early on was to repeat a simple statement of endowment, sometimes consisting of the single word waqf and sometimes expanded to include the name of an endower or institution, several times throughout a copy above the text. Even when erased, the word waqf with the final fāʾ extended into one long horizontal stroke, is often still discernible due to its peculiar shape. There were those who wanted to eliminate even these traces of script that the razor could leave behind. To have a rectangular piece cut out or pasted over with paper strips above the text at regular intervals should therefore arouse suspicion in the attentive scholar. Propelled by this hint, the reader interested in the history of his text should turn every page in the hope of finding traces of script and, in the end, maybe combine those little pieces into a coherent reading of the endower or the institution that once held the volume.

This is where luck would mean that the hand that erased all the other endowment notes throughout the volume was careless enough, just this once, to allow, again with some concentration, a relatively clear reading. All these factors came together in the case of MS Köprülü, Fazil Ahmed Pasha 1047, now held in the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul, to reveal what is, so far, the sole remnant of a famous library….

Bibliographic Information

Title: A Medieval Muslim Scholar’s Legacy, Ibn Ṭāwūs and the Afterlife of his Library

Author: Boris Liebrenz

Published in: Journal of Islamic Manuscripts

 Language: English

Length: 7 Pages

A Medieval Muslim Scholar’s Legacy