Maktaba madrasīya fī Ḥalab nihāyat al-ʿahd al-ʿuṯmānī : ad-daftar al-muǧaddad li-kutub waqf ʿUṯmān Baša ad-Dūrikī

Abstract

'The Library of a madrasa in Aleppo at the end of the Ottoman Era' argues for the importance of Islamic libraries’ inventories, most of which are still in manuscript form, in writing the histories of libraries. It provides a unique insight into the book culture of Aleppo in the 19th century. The document at the heart of this book is the "renewed register of the books endowed by ʿUthmān Pāshā". Among its over 1200 titles we find a variety of different subjects, most importantly those concerned with the transmitted fields of knowledge. Such registers also contain valuable information that can hardly be found in other sources. Conditions of endowment set out the workflow at the library. They help us to identify its targeted users, how the job of the head librarian was conceived, and how the library was supposed to function on a daily basis. Registers even included lists of librarians and their salaries. Moreover, the attached inventories themselves are arguably the best instrument at our disposal to identify disciplines and sciences that were of interest to scholars and students during that period. A qualitative and quantitative analysis and categorisation is possible on the basis of the library's acquisition as found in its inventory. In a second part, this study follows the 20th century trajectory of the books that once sat on the shelves of this library. Most importantly, it succeeds in identifying for almost half of the titles the actual manuscripts among the holdings of the Syrian National Library in Damascus. The book invites us to reassess inventories, both as a major source for studying the histories of medieval and early modern libraries, and through a case study of an endowed library in Aleppo. It thus exemplifies the use of endowment documents and book registers as an additional window to survey the intellectual life of a city in a particular period.