At the high end of learning, we find the scholar at work in verifying his source, checking his copy by painstaking collation, quite often on the basis of more than one manuscript, adding variants and learned annotation. Here, codicology goes far beyond the bread-and-butter job of textual philology, but brings to life the wealth of intellectual exchange and scholarly debate of a whole age in history.1
∵
In the quotation that opens this chapter, Gerhard Endress evokes a scholar eagerly working amidst his Arabic manuscripts.2 In the study I present here, I would like to look over the shoulder of one of this man’s colleagues, likewise stimulated by his thirst for knowledge. His mother tongue is Gujarati, the language of his domestic and local region, his scholarly languages are Arabic and the scholarly lisān al-daʿwa – that is, the Gujarati regional language in Arabic script, fed with Arabic as well as Persian vocabulary. Amidst his materials lies his notebook. His name is Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī (1249–1315/1833–1898), and he is a prominent member of the Ṭayyibī Dāʾūdī Bohras, an Ismaili community in northwest India and other regions around the Indian Ocean, prospering through maritime trade.3
Al-Hamdānī is revered by admirers as an ʿallāma, a high scholar.4 As we watch him at work through his notebook, he is leafing through his manuscripts, studying the texts, selecting passages from them; he is copying excerpts into his personal manuscript,5 in which he sometimes carefully arranges texts worth knowing and memorising across the page(s) according to his interests. Generally, he writes in a distinctive, very tiny and elegant script, but sometimes seemingly fast and associatively. Occasionally, he is commenting his material.
In this chapter, we want to focus our attention particularly on al-Hamdānī’s commentary practices, documented in the margins and between the lines of his excerpts. However, his multiple roles as compiler, copyist, and annotator allow us to gain a “holistic” view of his entire working process that goes beyond his commentary practices: it gives us the opportunity to study the intertwined acts of reading, excerpting, and commenting as essential tools of working and engaging with texts. In a more comprehensive article, I have explored further research questions in greater depth. These include the materiality, content, function, organisation, and development of the notebook. Historical and literary-historical backgrounds and details are further explained or explored.6
The overarching term “notebook” is used for a variety of formats. Different disciplines use different terms depending on form, function, and content, such as “study book”, “commonplace book”, “reference book”, “scrapbook”, “excerpta”, “miscellanea”, or “collectanea”. The Germanist and Enlightenment researcher Elisabeth Décultot classifies the “art of excerpting” historically and presents a wide variety of types, variations, terminologies, and functions.7 From the perspective of manuscript studies, the format “notebook” was recently defined in an edited volume titled Personal Manuscripts: Copying, Drafting, Taking Notes. David Durand-Guédy and Jürgen Paul, the editors, assign “notebooks” to the (large) group of “personal manuscripts” compiled and used by one person (sometimes several persons). From a double perspective, combining manuscript and literary studies, they attribute the following constitutive characteristics to it: heterogeneity of content; wholly or largely disordered internal organisation; openness of the writing process; accretion of content, that is, earlier entries can be added to at a later date.8
Thus, a very personal testimony of Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī’s readings and intellectual interests is preserved: his notebook documents his work and engagement with his compiled materials, which consist of texts, but also lists, tables, and diagrams he made himself. Although the book seems to us “jumbled” at first, it is not to be considered as a random and obscure mix, but a knowingly and deliberately produced compilation of his working materials and comments, developed over time. In the following, I will give a brief insight into the context in which it was created. Then I will describe the personal manuscript in terms of form and content, focusing primarily on al-Hamdānī’s commentary practices.9
1 Commentator and Context
Muḥammad ʿAlī b. Fayḍ Allāh b. Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī b. Saʿīd al-Yaʿburī al-Hamdānī is a son of the well-known al-Hamdānī family, which has its roots in Yemen. His great-grandfather, the patriarch ʿAlī b. Saʿīd al-Yaʿburī al-Hamdānī had moved, together with his family and his valuable collection of books – now the Hamdani Collection in the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London10 – from the Ḥarāz Mountains west of Sana’a across the Indian Ocean to the northwestern coastal province of Gujarat in India. He died in 1212/1798 in Surat. It was also there that Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī was born in 1249/1833. The city, on the coast of the Indian Ocean, was long an important port for the East India Company (until 1857), and then, from 1858, for the British Crown.11 The British colonial power gave the Bohras (and other minorities, such as the Parsis and the Sikhs) continued reliable protection. The Bohra community experienced a sustained economic upturn. Especially in Surat, which was the headquarters of their supreme, “absolute dāʿī” (dāʿī muṭlaq) from 1200/1785 until well into the twentieth century, schools, institutions of higher learning, and libraries were established.12 The community experienced, according to Tahera Qutbuddin, a “literary renaissance”, which went hand in hand with the cultivation of its religious identity, its traditions, and its specific, value-conservative orthopraxy.13 Muḥammad ʿAlī grew up from early childhood in the productive scholarly community of Surat where he spent the greater part of his life. The present notebook is a unique testimony from this vital milieu from the second half of the nineteenth century.
The Bohras, an Ismaili merchant community mobile in the Indian Ocean, consider themselves to be the heirs of the religious and literary heritage of the Fatimids (297–567/909–1171).14 Fatimid missionaries (dāʿī, pl. duʿāt) had already converted them to the Ismaili belief by the fifth/eleventh century.
The Ṭayyibī branch of the Ismailis goes back to a schism in the Fatimid dynasty in 524/1130. Their doctrine first unfolded in Yemen during the reign of the Ṣulayḥids (439–532/1047–1138), vassals of the Fatimids. After the schism, the Ismailis in Ṣulayḥid Yemen and the Bohras in India established their own, joint, religious and political system independent of the Fatimids, the so-called Mustaʿlī-Ṭayyibī mission (daʿwa). Here it was held that the prince al-Ṭayyib, the infant son of the assassinated tenth imam-caliph al-Āmir b. Mustaʿlī (d. 524/1130) was deprived of his rightful succession to the throne. His followers believe that the child survived the rebellion in concealment, and that the rightful Imamate will be passed on through his descendants. According to their doctrine, at an unknown future date, an Imam from al-Ṭayyib’s lineage will appear as al-Qāʾim (the one who rises, the ascending one) in the community: he will open a new cycle of the Ṭayyibi mythohistory. Until his arrival a deputy, the dāʿī muṭlaq, the absolute dāʿī, was to rule over the community, holding all religious and political authority. In 946/1539, the headquarters of the religious mission and administration moved from Yemen to India.15
The literary tradition of the Bohras goes back to the rare Ismaili works of pre-Fatimid times (4th/10th cent.), then draws on the “classics” of the Fatimid period (4th/10th–5th/11th cent.); after the aforementioned schism, it is continued by the works of the Ṭayyibī tradition that developed in Yemen (from the 5th/11th cent.) and finally by the literature produced in the Bohra Ismaili community, who continue this legacy (from the 10th/1th cent.). The texts of this 1200-year-old transhistorical and transregional tradition, which are copied by hand to this day, mostly relate to the fields of religion and philosophy, jurisprudence, and historiographical works and compilations, which are considered to be extremely productive sources for the history of the Ismailis back to the origins of the community.16
2 Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī as an Author with Agency
Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī is the author of several Rasāʾil,17 as well as the copyist of several manuscripts18 that are part of the Hamdani Collection in the Institute of Ismaili Studies. Moreover, he authored a Dīwān.19 Some treatises in lisān al-daʿwa (the Gujarati language in Arabic script)20 are related to Ismaili-internal religious-political dynamics in the Indian community.21 The Risālat al-hijra fī wujūb al-ṭalab (MS 1567) is, according to François de Blois, “a treatise about the prophets of previous ages, such as Adam, Noah, Moses, and Jesus, discussing, among other things, the time elapsed between their respective missions”.22 The chronology and sequence of the prophets seems to be the main argument for the search for the Hidden Imam which took Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī to the Arabian peninsula and from there to several other countries of the Ottoman Empire for more than ten years in the 1870s and 1880s.23 Other treatises (risāla, pl. rasā’il) listed by Ismail K. Poonawala are probably stored in inaccessible Bohra libraries. They apparently tackle highly topical issues, and include, among others, his Risālat Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, which deals critically with the question of the rightful designation (naṣṣ) and succession of the forty-seventh supreme dāʿī Sayyidī ʿAbd al-Qādir Najm al-Dīn (1256–1302/1840–1885), who was no longer recognised by Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī and his comrades from a late stage of his term of office as they accused him of corruption. The Risālat Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ was apparently the manifesto of the dissidents.24
3 The Manuscript
Personal notebooks, whatever they may be called and whatever they may be used for, have survived comparatively rarely, since they were not intended for reproduction and distribution.25 The personal manuscript left by Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī was written after 186126 and later restored (see below). It was filled over a long period of time and thus was used as an “open manuscript”.27 It contains 106 numbered folios of grey paper, with thin chain lines and thick laid lines in regular intervals. Many of the textual and tabular materials within it have been annotated. The original notebook is embedded into a few unnumbered leaves in yellowish-brown paper, probably added during the rebinding during restoration (see below), added at the front and back parts of the textblock. The notebook measures 19 × 14.5 cm. It is not dated, and neither a designation nor a title, nor the name of the owner, are mentioned. Very rarely is a first person subject speaking in a note relating to a primary text (see below). Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī can be identified by his characteristic tiny script, which can also be clearly identified in several other manuscripts in the collection.28 However, there are also a few texts in the manuscript in another, larger, and slightly clumsy-looking script. François de Blois assumes that it might be the hand of Muḥammad ʿAlī’s father, Fayḍ Allāh b. Ibrāhīm (1798–1876). Muḥammad ʿAlī is sometimes complementing the entries of this earlier hand.29
After Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī’s death in 1315/1898, the notebook was preserved by his youngest son Fayḍ Allāh b. Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī (1294–1388/1877–1969) of Surat as part of the inherited family library. According to a pencil note (fol. 1r), he even lent it to (at least) one interested, high-ranking member of the community and, after the laterally numbered quires had become loose and partially disarranged when returned, had it restored to the old order in the late 1950s. In the course of this, he had the book rebound and provided with a silky, shimmering, pale green cloth cover into which a delicate leaf pattern was woven. The leaf of a neem tree was inserted to keep vermin away from the document, which was obviously considered valuable.30 It is thanks to the careful handling of Fayḍ Allāh that this singular and unique notebook is now part of the Hamdani Collection housed in the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London.31
When working with his notebook, Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī drew from a wide variety of sources from different knowledge cultures.32 Over time, the notebook became a repository for texts from Islamic, Ismaili, and Old and New Testament Judaeo-Christian religious and scientific history. The history of ancient Greece, Rome, and Iran also caught his interest. Chronologies of events from the Old Testament, and specifically chronologies of the history of the prophets, were apparently of particular interest to him. He quoted many pages from the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (4th/10th cent.), the syncretic proto-encyclopedia of ancient Greek, Asian, and Islamic sciences. The Rasāʾil are of utmost importance in the literature of the Ṭayyibī daʿwa, where its authorship was attributed to one of its early Hidden Imams during the reign of the Abbasid caliph al-Maʾmūn (r. 198–201/813–817).33 According to the late Abbas Hamdani, his great-grandfather Muḥammad ʿAlī was intellectually closely associated with the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ34 – which indeed is reflected in the occasional but persistent occurrences of excerpts and quotations from various rasāʾil throughout his notebook.35 Beside the often thoroughly copied textual materials, tables provide synopses of astronomical calculations and terms. In several tables, “intercultural” calculations and conversions and of calendar systems and dates occur, as well as comparisons of terminologies, names of celestial bodies, stellar constellations, measurements, currencies, and more.36 In summary, the range of topics can be classified as follows:
Frequently represented thematic groups
Astronomy, mathematics, trigonometry, geometry, physics
Tabular comparisons of terms, measuring units, and constellations in the fields of currency, calendars, celestial bodies, astronomy, and time calculation
Biblical history, chronology, and genealogy
Ismaili-Fatimid religious philosophy and majālis
Historical aspects of the Ṭayyibī daʿwa
The Prophet’s biography, early Islam, Mecca
Occasionally represented subject groups
Arabic language and literature
Historical events in antiquity (Greece, Roman Empire, Iran)
Qurʾan and hadith
Religious duties (furūḍ al-dīn), Islamic law
Geography
Magic (including magical squares); astrology, prognostication, dream interpretation, and secret sciences (ʿulūm al-gharība)
Remedies and recipes (sometimes in Gujarati either transcribed in Arabic script or in the scholarly lisān al-daʿwa)
4 Multilayered Note-Taking
Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī obviously used his notebook for both storing and further engaging with his materials. The organisation of his compilation, which developed over the course of time, is not clearly discernible. Some groups of topics form small clusters here and there, however they not systematically ordered, but mixed with texts that can be assigned to various disciplines and fields of knowledge. The materiality of the notebook, the changing mise-en-page and layout of the pages, and the loose mixture of different textual and tabular forms placed there allow free space for adding and commenting on all edges, between the lines, and sometimes in all directions.
We will now browse through this notebook. Apart from the fifty-six pages (of 106 folios) that have remained blank despite being numbered (probably by the compiler of the notebook himself), it is densely inscribed. Many excerpts, tables, graphs, and lists gathered there are more or less heavily annotated. Not all, but many pages are black with a large number of annotations as, according to ʿAbd al-Bāsiṭ al-ʿAlmawī, some people can only wish.37 They head in all directions on the page. Interlinear comments protrude from the text block and swarm across the page like thin streamers. Sometimes marginalia push their way into the text from the outside and squeeze in between the lines; sometimes they neatly fill the corners. What types of marginalia can be defined, what working processes are represented by them?
“Talking to the text” is the title of a conference volume referred to by medievalist Claudine Moulin, and she describes this dialogue as a “central function of base-text annotation”.38 In the notebook presented here, we find two types of annotations: they have the purpose of adding information either about the manuscript or about the content of the primary text. Of course, sometimes both dimensions appear in one and the same marginal note. Nevertheless, I would like to list them separately here in order to illustrate Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī’s interests and methods in dealing critically with his manuscript sources:
Related to manuscripts and the manuscript tradition
Checking, verifying, and/or documenting the transmission of a certain text
Documenting a supplementary or alternative tradition
Related to the primary text
Explaining and specifying content
Exemplifying content
Expanding and continuing content
Enabling quick orientation in the excerpt through/by keywords in the margins
Linking the primary text with another text
I would like to present some examples of both perspectives, which are either related to manuscript transmission or to the primary text.
4.1 Tracing Transmission
4.1.1 Historiographic and Oral Sources
In Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī’s notebook, various methods of verifying quoted texts in the margins of the primary text can be found. Thus, in connection with a letter attributed to the Hidden Imam al-Ṭayyib,39 he added a tradition that he once found “[…] at the end of a manuscript of the Kitāb al-Maṣābih fī-ithbāt al-Imāma,40 copied by ʿAlī b. ʿAbdallāh, finished on the 9th of the month of Ṣafar of the year 974 [1566 CE] […]”. This is followed by a northern Arabic genealogy that goes back to Maʿad b. ʿAdnān.41
Another marginal commentary refers to the same letter. On fol. 21r a list of the names of the imams that are expected after the return of the Hidden Imam al-Ṭayyib is given. It is traced to an oral source – namely a man from Cairo, mentioned by name, who appeared on 20 Ṣafar 1228 (February 1813) in the city of Pune in Deccan, India, in the presence of the forty-third religious leader, the dāʿī muṭlaq Sayf al-Dīn (officiated 1213–1232/1798–1817), accompanied by his son and successor.42
4.1.2 Documentary Sources (Copyists’ and Owners’ Notes)
On fol. 22v of the notebook begins a list of the leaders and high dignitaries of the Ismaili daʿwa in Yemen from the Ṣulayḥid period (439–532/1047–1138) up to Queen al-Sayyida Arwā bt. Aḥmad al-Ṣulayḥī (r. 492–532/1099–1138), with whom the dynasty ended. The list continues on the reverse of the folio up to the dāʿī muṭlaq Sayyidnā Dāʾūd b. Quṭbshāh, the founder of the Dāʾūdī branch of the Ṭayyibī Ismailis (d. 1021/1612). Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī extracted the entries on fol. 22v on the basis of the narrative accounts of the chronological-biographical work ʿUyūn al-akhbār wa-funūn al-āthār by the Yemenite dāʿī muṭlaq Idrīs ʿImād al-Dīn.43 The title of this extensive work is written above the list. The meagre information on the list – mostly names, functions, and dates of birth and/or death – was supplemented, possibly at a later date, by al-Hamdānī with further biographical information on the listed leaders: dates, places of residence or burial, and other biographical information were added.
On the left of the list, close to the name of the Qāḍī Lamak b. Mālik (d. 491/1097),44 is a commentary in which Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī refers to his son and successor, Yaḥyā b. Lamak b. Mālik (d. 520/1126), the supreme qāḍī and dāʿī during the reign of the Ṣulayḥid Queen al-Sayyida Arwā in Yemen. The first part of the commentary contains information about the manuscript source, in which – as the second part of the commentary goes on to show – he found paratexts referring to its original ownership:
I found in the library of the daʿwa (khizānat kutub al-daʿwa)45 a manuscript of the Kitāb al-Shajara of Abū Tammām.46 This nuskha was completed in the second tenth (fī al-ʿushr al-thānī) of Muharram 509 AH (May 1115 CE) by the copyist Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Hindī.
The khizāna mentioned is most probably the library of the leading dāʿī in Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī’s home town of Surat, where he was studying.47 After naming the copyist and the date of the copy, the commentary turns ninety degrees, a change of direction accompanied by a sweeping pen stroke. The commentary continues: “At the beginning of this nuskha it is noted that it belonged [originally] to the khizānat al-kutub of the supreme qāḍī and dāʿī Yaḥyā b. Lamak b. Mālik (in Yemen).”48 And later: “And behind it and below it […] follows the personal signature (tawqīʿ) of him, and [that] he handed it [the manuscript] – as he wrote with his own hand – to the shaykh Dhuʾayb b. Mūsā.”
According to my interpretation of the commentary, some of which is difficult to follow, Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī writes in his notebook – in the margin of the list of Yemeni leaders and dignitaries – that he discovered a very old manuscript from the personal possession of the Ṣulayḥid qāḍī and dāʿī Yaḥyā b. Lamak b. Mālik (d. 520/1126) in the khizānat kutub al-daʿwa in Surat. As is confirmed and documented by a personal note of this prominent owner, Lamak handed it over to his successor Dhuʾayb b. Mūsā al-Wādiʿī al-Hamdānī (d. 546/1151), a member of the al-Hamdānī clan. Thus, the manuscript, later transferred from Yemen to Gujarat49 and stored in Surat, once belonged to Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī’s most prominent ancestor.50
4.2 Related to the Primary Text
4.2.1 Confirmation, Variation and Addition to Historical Tradition Through References and Quotations
On fols. 70v–72r, we come across a dense and detailed biblical chronology that begins with Adam and traces the prophetic history told in the Old and New Testaments up to Jesus and his disciples. This list was edited in several ways by Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī. Most notably, respective historical details (such as the Flood, the marriage of Abraham and Sarah, the daʿwa of Ibrāhīm, the rise of the prophets Ṣāliḥ and Hūd) are spun into a dense web of references, which quote, in the form of marginalia that are (mostly) turned by ninety degrees from the primary list, from works of the Fatimid and Ṭayyibī literary traditions. Thus, between fols. 70v and 72r, quotes and summarised information from the following works are added: Kitāb al-Masʾala wa-l-jawāb (ʿAlī al-Ṣulayḥī, r. 439–459/1047–1067),51 Kitāb al-Zīna (Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī, d. 322/934–935),52 the Torah, Asrār al-nuṭaqāʾ (Ibn Ḥawshab Manṣūr al-Yaman, d. ca. 303/915),53 and Asās al-taʾwīl (Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān, d. 363/974).54 On fols. 71v and 72r, works from the Yemeni-Ṭayyibī literary tradition, such as Kitāb al-Azhār (Ḥasan b. Nūḥ al-Bharūchī, d. 939/1533) and Kitāb Anwār al-laṭīfa – a work on ḥaqāʾiq – (Muḥammad b. Ṭāhir al-Ḥārithī, d. 584/1188),55 are also consulted for supplementary information or variants.
These small secondary excerpts in the margin of the primary excerpts56 have various functions. On one hand, the listed tradition is confirmed by citing authoritative works; on the other, some commentaries contain variants. On a third level, the primary text (in this case a list) is further developed by the annotator, who condenses and elaborates the initially cursory historical accounts of the prophets by selected quotations.
4.2.2 Combination of Notes to Express a Thought or Inner Attitude?
As has been shown, Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī was checking and referencing the primary text against another text from which he quoted in the margins. These relationships between texts were often motivated by his scholarly endeavour, to examine, to verify, or to enrich the primary text with additional information or variants from other sources.
Marginal commentaries open up a space for many different questions and interpretations of the findings. This can also include the question of whether marginal comments sometimes reveal a subjective attitude of the annotator: Do they mirror his outlook or opinion? How and with which methodical devices could a marginal comment, which is, for the researcher, not more than a trace of a different and unknown person,57 be interpreted as a personal positioning?
While I was studying Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdanī’s notebook,58 I hunted for a clear and distinct trace of the owner’s subjectivity or cognitive and normative orientation. I finally came to the cautious assessment that his attitude and commitment might be found in the spirit of openness in relation to the three monotheistic religions and his broad interest in the history and cultural achievements of the ancient Near Eastern cultures. This spirit runs like a common thread through the notebook. It can be interpreted as a reflection of al-Hamdānī’s already mentioned respect for the extensive Islamic syncretic proto-encyclopedia “The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity” (Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ) of the fourth/tenth century.59 The voices and perspectives in the compendium, dealing in their rasāʾil with mathematics, natural philosophy, sciences of the soul and intellect, and theology, are definitely diverse. The authors were esoteric and Shiʿi, and – at least in the case of some of them – possibly also Ismaili-oriented. Some Ṭayyibī authors even describe the authorship of the encyclopaedia to one of their hidden, Pre-Fatimid Imams. The Ikhwān subscribe to the Qurʾan and the hadith, but also revere Torah and Gospel. They revere the legacy of the Stoa and Pythagoras, Plato and the Neoplatonists, the mathematician Euclid, the astronomer Ptolemy, and the physician Galen; as well as Socrates and many other Greek thinkers and philosophers of late antiquity in addition to Buddhist, Manichean, Zoroastrian, and other Eastern traditions.60
I found a single marginal annotation that could reflect Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī’s outlook and his ethical attitude in relation to the content of the primary, or main text. This annotation is an excerpt from the Ikhwān’s Risāla al-Ḥayawānāt. Both texts appear on fol. 27r.
At the centre of the folio is a circular diagram depicting the most ancient history of mankind, which, according to the Old Testament, begins with Adam. This circular diagram, which Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī must have copied from a manuscript of the universal history al-Mukhtaṣar fī akhbār al-bashar of the Mamluk historian Abū l-Fidāʾ (672–732/1273–1331),61 takes up most of the folio. In the centre is another, smaller, circle, with the inscription “between the hijra” (bayna al-hijra). Outside this central element, the diagram is divided like a pie chart into twenty-four segments. These are filled with specific historical information, ranging from the Flood to the death of the prophet Muḥammad. On the outside of each segment is an indication of time, referring to the distance in time to the hijra, as written in the inner circle. The historical figures mentioned in a chronological order are figures from the Old Testament, beginning with Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses; the events are the Flood, the construction and the first and second destructions of Jerusalem (Bayt al-Maqdis); from the ancient empires of Babylon, Greece, Rome, and Iran we encounter Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander, Ardashīr, Hadrian, and Diocletian. From Greek-Iranian history, the conquest of Iran and the death of Darius are mentioned. The birth of Jesus (al-Masīḥ) is listed. From Islamic history, the construction of the Kaaba and the birth, mission, and death of Muḥammad, the Messenger of God, are mentioned. The longest stretch of time to the hijra that is mentioned is 5976 years, the shortest is the time between the hijra and the death of the Prophet: nine years, eleven months, and twenty-two days.
Four marginal comments refer to this circular diagram. The three marginal commentaries on the left side add historiographical and astronomical information including a citation from tenth/sixteenth century Mujīr al-Dīn al-Ḥanbalī’s (d. 928/1522) al-Uns al-jalīl bi-tārīkh al-Quds wa-l-Khalīl, on the history of Jerusalem and Hebron.
The commentary in the right-hand corner of the page involves a quotation from the “Epistle of the Animals” (Risālat al-Ḥayawānāt), from which there are several detailed or short excerpts in the notebook. This is a famous and widely received animal epic, the twenty-second epistle of the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ.62 It is the longest epistle in the compendium and part of a group of rasāʾil on zoology. In this “Aesopean satire”,63 where central questions of political ethic are negotiated in stirring rhetoric and vividness, the animals accuse humans (Banū Ādam) for their cruelty, merciless exploitation, oppression, unpredictability, and ingratitude, the animal’s services – “a litany of torture and abuse”, as summed up by Lenn E. Goodman in his comprehensive comment that accompanies the edition and translation of the piece.64 The complaint is made by the spokesperson for the animals, a mule. He is accompanied by wild animals and livestock, all of whom have many things to complain about. The accusations of the animals lead to a questioning of the human self-image as the highest of all beings in creation: animals are able to compete with humans, or are superior to them, in terms of their anatomy and sensory organs as well as their social organisation.65 There is no reason for arrogance and self-importance on the part of human beings. Each animal contributes something to creation and the functioning of the system as a whole. The Risāla is informed, according to Goodman, by an ecocritical ethics: the self-image of humans that they are superior is countered by a value system held by the animals, in which every creature has an indispensable role and significance in the system as a whole.66 In the end, however, the animals lose before the court: in contrast to animals, humans have the potential for moral or spiritual purity, transcendence, and immortality. But their superiority is not a licence to use and abuse other creatures. Humans possess freedom and options to choose their ends and means. The Risāla exhorts humans to be responsible and to choose his ends and means. Only when combined with piety, insight, and generosity does this freedom enables him to achieve spiritual reward and immortality.67
Multilayered notes: The marginal commentary on the right side of the circular diagram probably mirrors al-Hamdānī’s own attitude towards the history of humanity, as represented in the central diagram. MS London, Institute of Ismaili Studies, Ms. 1662, fol. 27r
Lenn Goodman and Richard McGregor translate this excerpt as follows; wherever there are deviations in the translation of Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī, I have put them in brackets:
[From the Risālat al-Ḥayawānāt, on the speech of the king of the beasts of prey]: You say that we beasts of prey attack other animals, seize and slay them. But we took up that practice only when we saw the sons of Adam doing them same to each other since the days or Cain and Abel. Down to our own time we’ve seen killing and maiming, warfare and combat, from the days of Rustam and Isfandiyār, Jamshīd and Ḍaḥḥāk,68 Tubbaʿ69 and Afrīdūn, Siyawūsh and Manūjahr, Darius and Alexander, Nebuchadnezzar and the House of David, Bahrām and the House of Adnān, Constantine and the folk of Greece, ʿUmar [the days of ʿUthmān]70 and Yazdijird, the ʿAbbāsids and Marwanids, and the rest, down to this day. Every year, every month, every day, and every minute we see men at one another’s throat and witness the countless, measureless evils that result, even now – the killing, maiming, and plundering. [Every year, every month, every day, there is a fight of people against each other and with each other.]71
It is likely that the Biblical, Persian, Mesopotamian, Arab, Greek, Sassanian and Islamic rulers and prophets mentioned in the quotation find their echo in the figures of the rulers in the circle diagram where some of them are also mentioned. Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī also seems to be thinking here of the history of humanity, which is always accompanied by conquest, violence, and bloodshed. This is shown by the history told in the Torah, the Gospels, and the Qurʾan, as well as in the ancient history of Iran. He quotes from the Risāla, in which, as shown, the animals complain of the suffering done to them by humans. In the passage cited above, the spokesman for the predators emphasises that it was not the predators who brought mutual violence and bloodshed into the world, but that humans are the first and greatest permanent aggressors, from whom the predators learned.
According to the medievalist Claudine Moulin,
annotations are never completely transparent. A researching gaze can at best encircle them and make them more tangible through various approaches to a methodologically reflective combination of description and interpretation of findings.72
If we adopt Moulin’s approach we can do no more than encircle a possible explanation for the close neighbourhood of diagram and note. We find a trace in al-Hamdānī’s particularly intensive relationship with the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, a relationship that is evident from his belief as well from several long and short excerpts from the Encyclopedia throughout his notebook.73 A content-related relationship between the historiographical circle diagram and the quotation, both referring to the kings of the ancient empires of Greece, Rome, and Iran, is obvious. We could consider that the excerpt quoting the Risālat al-Ḥayawānāt right next to the diagram reflects the annotator’s own attitude and concern about the major role of violence and bloodshed in the course of many thousands of years of human history.
5 Conclusion: between Reading and Writing
Notebooks rarely make it into libraries. We have presented here Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī’s notebook, preserved in a valuable family collection, as a productive source disclosing traces of the intellectual interest, the work, and the working methods of one specific scholar. Moreover, a notebook can be, as Bauden demonstrates in the case of a notebook of the Mamluk historiographer and polymath al-Maqrīzī, a fruitful starting point to explore “writing in all its complexities” and to proceed towards an “archaeology of scholarship”.74 Indeed, rich insights can be drawn from the “level/floor (in German, Etage) between reading and writing, where readings are stored and processed”.75 Of course, this level of knowledge is not only shaped by the motivation and practice, but equally by the time, environment, milieu, and social and intellectual networks of the scholar in question. Thus, Muḥammad ʿAlī’s notebook can also be considered a testimony of the Ismaili scholarly class in the period of its “literary renaissance” in nineteenth-century colonial India.76
In the quote that introduces this study, Gerhard Endress evokes a scholar’s thirst for knowledge and his complex, multilayered work. Al-Hamdānī’s notebook proves to be a very productive documentary source for taking a closer look at the practices and methods of a concentrated scholar at work. His notebook, thanks to its material nature, is a living testimony to his conversation with his selected and copied working materials. The marginal frame of a text is “a dynamic place”77 or, even more, an “operating system”78 in order to acquire and deposit or store knowledge from which new knowledge could be generated through intellectual interaction with it.79
Excerpts have often been explored as a starting point for planning and creating new texts.80 Al-Maqrīzī’s notebook and the large number of the author’s other extant autographs (twenty-three manuscripts with nearly 5000 leaves) enabled Bauden to trace in detail the multistage working process between al-Maqrīzī’s entries in his notebook and their (often modified) reappearance in the various preliminary stages of drafts and finally in the completed work.
Unlike al-Maqrīzī’s notebook, Sayyidī al-Hamdānī’s notebook stands completely on its own. But it reveals a dynamic that leads, step by step, from the act of reading to excerpt and commentary, and from this, presumably, further to the creation of new texts. As mentioned above, this Ismaili scholar is the author of around five rasāʾil. According to their titles, these works are closely related to his political activity and agency in the conflict over the designation of the forty-seventh leading dāʿī mentioned above. We know from his memoirs and information from his family that his Risālat Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ was the manifesto of a dissident circle.81 Another possible point of reference between the notebook and further authorship is his search for the place and time of the appearance of the Hidden Imam in the sacred sites in Arabia. This individual biographical background82 could be an anchor point for the numerous excerpts, lists, and diagrams and the vivid commentary activity related to it in the notebook. They offer chronologies of prophetic and salvation history – as told in the Holy Scriptures and from Ṭayyibī Ismaili authors in Yemen – as well as tables of astronomical calculations and planetary constellations on the basis of which he possibly wanted to calculate or recognise the time of the Hidden Imam’s return. But so far, none of his rasāʾil are accessible in order to trace a possible further stage of the excerpted primary materials and the comments.
Despite the limited source material, we had the opportunity to get to know Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī, an erudite nineteenth-century Indian Ismaili scholar and manuscript specialist with universal intellectual interests. We could learn from his notebook that his role as an annotator can be placed in the context of a wider process of work. The commentary practices which he used to explore the content and the transmission of his collected materials do not stand on their own, but are steps in a dialectic process of knowledge generation that led from the reading and selecting of his sources through his notebook and work tools most probably to his own authorship.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Delia Cortese for her constructive ideas and criticism.
List of Manuscripts
Note that the following abbreviation is used for libraries in the footnotes:
| IIS | Institute of Ismaili Studies |
al-Hamdānī, Muḥammad ʿAlī b. Fayḍ Allāh: Dīwān Muḥammadī
MS London, Institute of Ismaili Studies, Ms. 1565.
al-Hamdānī, Muḥammad ʿAlī b. Fayḍ Allāh: [untitled personal notebook]
MS London, Institute of Ismaili Studies, Ms. 1662.
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Schmidt, Johannes: “Der Zettelkasten Niklas Luhmanns”, Niklas Luhmann-Archiv, version 16, 30 November 2023. https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/nachlass/zettelkasten.
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Endress: “‘One-Volume Libraries’”, p. 204.
This metaphor was coined by Franz Rosenthal, in his article “From Arabic Books and Manuscripts V: A One-Volume Library of Arabic Scientific and Philosophical Texts in Istanbul”. The metaphor is still regarded as meaningful and conceptually productive in manuscript studies today; see Friedrich and Schwarke: “Introduction”, p. 2.
On Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī’s biography, see Hamdani, A.: “History of the Hamdani Collection”, pp. xxviii–xxx; Poonawala: Biobibliography, pp. 217–218. On the Bohras, see Qutbuddin, T.: “Bohras”. The Bohras are divided into three branches, the Dāʾūdī, Sulaymānī, and Alawi Bohras. By far the largest group are the Dāʾūdīs; their number is estimated at 1–2 million members. The majority of the Dāʾūdīs – and their religious leader, the supreme dāʿī (dāʿī muṭlaq; “absolute” dāʿī) – live in Gujarat, but there are also Dāʾūdīs in other parts of India and in Pakistan, Yemen, and East Africa. See Halm: “Schiiten”, pp. 36–39; Qutbuddin, T.: “Bohras”.
See his Dīwān, whose copyist refers to him as such several times (MS London, Institute of Ismaili Studies (henceforth IIS), Ms. 1565; early 20th cent.).
MS London, IIS, Ms. 1662. De Blois describes it as “A Scrapbook” and produces a detailed table of content of the primary texts: See de Blois: Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, pp. 230–234. As described below, the manuscript is part of the Hamdani Collection housed in the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London.
I refer interested readers to my article “A Library in One Volume” (2024).
See Décultot: “Einleitung”, pp. 7–47.
See Durand-Guédy and Paul: “Introduction”, pp. 1, 16–17. The collected volume in which this appears goes back to a conference held by the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (University of Hamburg) in 2020.
In his pathbreaking and comprehensive analysis of the notebook of the Mamluk historian and polymath al-Maqrīzī (764–845/1364–1442), Frédéric Bauden focused in particular on the content, sources, organisation, and evolution of the notebook and the working methods of its author; see Bauden: “Maqriziana I (Description: Section 1)”; Bauden: “Maqriziana I (Description: Section 2)”; Bauden: “Maqriziana II”. It is not clear from the tripartite article how intensively al-Maqrīzī commented on his notes. Bauden has not devoted himself specifically to commentaries that might have accompanied the systematically arranged excerpts, resumés, drafts, and summaries. The manuscript notebook (MS 2232) is housed in the library of the University of Liège in Belgium. So far, it is not accessible digitally or in facsimile.
Hamdani, A.: “History of the Hamdani Collection”, pp. xxv–xxxiv. The collection has been donated to the Institute of Ismaili Studies in two cohorts (2007 and 2014) by Professor Abbas Hamdani (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, d. 2019).
See also Blank: Mullahs on the Mainframe, pp. 35–92.
See Qutbuddin, T.: “Daʾudi Bohra Tayyibis”, pp. 344–345.
See Qutbuddin, T.: “Daʾudi Bohra Tayyibis”, p. 339.
See Akkerman: Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, pp. 3–6 and passim.
See Daftary: The Ismāʿīlīs, p. 261; Blank: Mullahs on the Mainframe, p. 40.
See Poonawala: Biobibliography, pp. 19–28; Qutbuddin, T.: “Daʾudi Bohra Tayyibis”, pp. 338–344.
See de Blois: Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, pp. 167–174 (MSS London, IIS, 1565, 1566, 1567, 1569) and MS London, IIS, Ms. 1662 (“A Scrapbook”), pp. 230–234. For four Rasāʾil that are not part of the Hamdani Collection, see Poonawala: Biobibliography, p. 228 (no manuscripts mentioned).
See de Blois: Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, pp. 170–175; MSS London, IIS, Ms. 1567 (autograph), Ms. 1568 (Muntakhabāt), 1569 (three co-authored Rasāʾil, copied by Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī).
MSS London, IIS, Ms. 1565 and Ms. 1566; see de Blois: Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, p. 170; Poonawala: Biobibliography, p. 228.
The lisān al-daʿwa was introduced in the early nineteenth century as a scholarly script. The Sanskrit-based Gujarati vocabulary, especially in the field of religion, has been gradually replaced by Arabic Islamic and Persian terms. See Qutbuddin: “Daʾudi Bohra Tayyibis”, p. 346.
For more details with regard to Muḥammad ʿAlī’s role as a “moving spirit” (Abbas Hamdani) of his time in the Dāʾūdī Ṭayyibī daʿwa, and his agency during the last part of the reign of the forty-seventh Dāʿī, Sayyidnā ʿAbd al-Qādir Najm al-Dīn (r. 1256–1302/1840–85), see Klemm: “A Library in One Volume”. For the crisis and dissident movements of the time, see Daftary: The Ismāʿīlīs, pp. 286–288.
See de Blois: Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, p. 170.
MS London, IIS, Ms. 1567; see de Blois: Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, pp. 170–171; Hamdani, A.: “History of the Hamdani Collection”, p. xxix.
See Poonawala: Biobibliography, p. 228 (no. 3).
See Bauden: “Maqriziana II”, p. 56; Durand-Guédy and Paul (eds.): “Introduction”, pp. 1f.; Klemm: “A Library in One Volume”.
See Klemm: “A Library in One Volume”. The date post quem of 1861 is derived from the watermark “Glasgow 1861” which occasionally appears in the manuscript. It was presumably minted by the British Crown on the occasion of the launch of the flagship of the same name in the Indian Ocean; see Klemm: “A Library of One Volume”.
Antonella Brita and Janina Karolewski undertook to define and differentiate the various types within the category “personal notebook”, which they assigned to the group of “open MTMs”. See Brita and Karolewski: “Unravelling Multiple-Text Manuscripts”, pp. 475–478.
See de Blois: Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, p. 230.
See de Blois: Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, p. 230. The basis for the assumption is that a relevant list of the Ṭayyibī imams given in the notebook (fols. 22v, 24r) ends with mention of the year of death of the forty-third dāʿī, Sayyidnā ʿAbd ʿAlī Sayf al-Dīn (1213–1232/1798–1817). It is definitely an earlier hand, since the list was updated and expanded by Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī with further information in the form of interlinear and marginal commentaries.
The institute kindly provided me with the notebook (MS London, IIS, Ms. 1662) as a scan in September 2022. On 30 May and 1 June 2023, I was able to view the original in the Ismaili Special Collections Unit at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London.
For a detailed description of the manuscript, see Klemm: “A Library in One Volume”.
See Klemm: “A Library in One Volume”.
See al-Hamdānī, H.: “Rasāʾil Ikhwān aṣ-Ṣafāʾ”, pp. 291–297.
See Hamdani, A.: “History of the Hamdani Collection”, p. xxix.
Excerpts from different epistles: MS London, IIS, Ms. 1662, fols. 28r (two quotations), 27r, 32r, 58v–60r, 104v.
For a detailed list of the contents and the thematic clusters that sometimes appear, see Klemm: “A Library in One Volume”. See also the very knowledgeable list of contents by de Blois: Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, pp. 230–234. De Blois identified several texts and some of the content in the notebook.
See Stefanie Brinkmann’s introduction to this volume, which she opens with a pertinent quote of the Damascene scholar ʿAbd al-Bāsiṭ al-ʿAlmawī (10th/16th cent.), who visualises the radiance of a book dark with annotations.
See Moulin: “Rand und Band”, p. 20. Moulin refers to the work edited by Fera, Ferraù, and Rizzo: Talking to the Text. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
MS London, IIS, Ms. 1662, fol. 21r–v. The letter was allegedly sent from the Hidden Imam to the Yemeni dāʿī muṭlaq Idrīs ʿImād al-Dīn (d. 872/1468 in Shibām, Yemen); on him, see Poonawala: Biobibliography, pp. 169–175. For more details of the letter, see de Blois: Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, pp. 231–232.
The work was written by the outstanding Ismaili Neoplatonic philosopher Ḥamīd al-Dīn al-Kirmānī during the reign of the eighth Fatimid imam-caliph al-Mustanṣir biʾllāh (r. 427–487/1046–1094); see Poonawala: Biobibliography, pp. 94–102 (on the work, see p. 98). Two manuscripts of the work in the Hamdani Collection in the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London (Mss 1452, 1453) are, however, copied by other scribes. See de Blois: Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, pp. 49–51.
MS London, IIS, Ms. 1662, fol. 21v.
Translated in de Blois: Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts, p. 231.
This is a comprehensive work of history by the supreme Dāʿī Idrīs ʿImād al-Dīn al-Ḥasan b. al-Walīd (d. 872/1467–1468) from Shibām in the Ḥarāz; see Poonawala: Biobibliography, pp. 170–173. The seventh volume, on the basis of which Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī drew up his list, contains the history of the Fatimids from Imam-Caliph al-Mustanṣir onwards, and of their Ṣulayḥid vassals; see Idrīs ʿImād al-Dīn’s ʿUyūn al-akhbār.
See Daftary: The Ismāʿīlīs, pp. 263–264. Lamak b. Mālik was supreme qāḍī and dāʿī of the early Ṣulayḥids as well as their designated envoy and intermediary to the Fatimid court. Lamak established Fatimid-Ṣulayḥid relations at the time of Imam-Caliph al-Mustanṣir (427–487/1035–1094; see Daftary: The Ismāʿīlīs, pp. 263–264).
The designation “The Treasury of the Books of the Daʿwa” refers back to the Fatimid term for the royal library of the Fatimid imam-caliph (khizānat al-kutub) supervised by the supreme dāʿī; Muḥammad ʿAlī most certainly means the library of the supreme dāʿī of his time; see Akkerman: Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, pp. 106–107, 120–121.
See Poonawala: Biobibliography, p. 132. According to Paul Walker, this largely unknown author can be assigned to the Persian Neoplatonic school of his teacher Muḥammad al-Naṣafī in the tenth century; see Walker: “Abū Tammām”.
During al-Hamdānī’s lifetime, the leading dāʿī was the forty-seventh dāʿī of the Dāʾūdī-Bohras Sayyidnā ʿAbd al-Qādir Najm al-Dīn (1256–1302/1840–1885) and then his successors ʿAbd al-Ḥusayn Ḥusām al-Dīn (1302–1308/1885–1891) and Sayyidnā Muḥammad Burhān al-Dīn (from 1308–1323/1891–1906).
Yaḥyā b. Lamak b. Mālik al-Ḥammādī; see Daftary: The Ismāʿīlīs, pp. 263–264.
On the transoceanic transfer of Ṭayyibī-Fatimid manuscripts to Gujarat that took place gradually even before the official transfer of the daʿwa from Yemen to India in 974/1566, see Akkerman: Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, pp. 133–142.
Dhuʾayb b. Mūsā al-Wādiʿī al-Hamdānī was declared by Queen al-Sayyida Arwā as the first dāʿī muṭlaq after the Ḥāfiẓī-Ṭayyibī schism and the break with the Fatimid regime. He thus stands at the beginning of an independent Ṭayyibī daʿwa; see Daftary: The Ismāʿīlīs, p. 264. On the clan of Hamdān, see Poonawala: Biobibliography, p. 133.
Founder of the Ṣulayḥid dynasty; see Poonawala: Biobibliography, p. 103.
See Poonawala: Biobibliography, pp. 36–38.
See Poonawala: Biobibliography, p. 34.
See Poonawala: Biobibliography, pp. 46–48.
See Poonawala: Biobibliography, pp. 179–182; 148.
Cf. Moulin: “Glossieren”, p. 342.
See Moulin: “Rand und Band”, p. 58.
See Klemm: “A Library in One Volume” (forthcoming).
See El-Bizri: “Prologue”; El-Bizri: “Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ”.
See El-Bizri: “Foreword”, p. xviii; El-Bizri: “Prologue”, pp. 10–13.
I was kindly given this interesting information by Gowaart Van Den Bossche (Univ. Ghent, now Univ. Zurich), who has collected a large number of manuscripts of this work in preparation of a study of its manuscript tradition. The circle appears in numerous manuscripts. Comparing one such instance in MS Fazil Ahmad Pasha 1143, fol. 3r to the circle in al-Hamdānī’s notebook, it is striking that they are completely identical in content, with only a few differences in wording and minimal differences in script. This increases the likelihood that al-Hamdānī used a manuscript of this specific work – rather than another universal history in which this circle could have been transmitted and where the likelihood of differences would be greater. This also indicates that he likely did not make use of an early published edition of the work as Taʾrīkh Abū al-Fidāʾ (Constantinople, Dār al-Ṭabāʿa al-ʿĀmira al-Shāhāniyya, 1286/1870), as there are clear graphical differences between the circle reproduced in this edition (on p. 130) and the circle in al-Hamdānī’s notebook.
There are extensive excerpts from different epistles, see footnote 35. For a detailed summary, elaboration, and contextualisation with regard to the reception history of this Risāla in Arabic and Hebrew, Yiddish, and European literature, see Goodman: “Introduction”, pp. 1–55.
Goodman: “Introduction”, p. 4.
See Goodman: “Introduction”, p. 14.
See Goodman and McGregor (eds. and trans.): Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, Epistle 22, e.g., chapters 21–25, pp. 222–237.
See Goodman: “Introduction”, pp. 30–34.
See Goodman: “Introduction”, pp. 51–55.
Al-Ḍaḥḥāk was a follower of Muʿāwiya, first as head of the police (ṣāḥib al-shurṭa), and then as governor of the jund of Damascus. After the death of Muʿāwiya II in 64/684, he went over to the side of the rival caliph ʿAbdallāh b. al-Zubayr. He was killed in the battle of Marj Rāhiṭ (64/684). See Dietrich: “al-Ḍaḥḥāḳ b. Ḳays al-Fihrī”.
Tubbaʿ (pl. tabābiʿa) was the dynastic title for those Himyarite rulers who controlled the whole of southwest Arabia (3rd–6th cent. CE). One tubbaʿ, Abūkarib Asʿad (4th cent. CE) pushed his military expeditions into central Arabia. See Beeston: “Tubbaʿ”.
Goodman (Epistles of the Brethren of Purity: Epistle 22, p. 264 n. 429) interprets this exchange of the caliph’s name as an effort to provoke Sunni readership by denigrating the second caliph.
Goodman and McGregor (eds. and trans.): Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, Epistle 22, p. 264 (pp. 217–218 of the edition).
Moulin: “Rand und Band”, p. 58.
As mentioned in footnote 35.
Bauden: “Maqriziana II”, p. 52. See also Bauden: “Data Overload”, pp. 33–84.
Décultot: “Zur Einführung”, p. 8: “[…] jene Etage […] die zwischen dem Lesen und Schreiben liegt, in der Lektüren verwaltet, gespeichert und bearbeiten werden, um sie in für den Auftritt in ‘eigenen Texten’ vor- und aufzubereiten”.
As I examine in more detail in Klemm: “A Library in One Volume”.
Moulin: “Rand und Band”, p. 23.
See Décultot: “Zur Einführung”, p. 8. The sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) worked with a very complex and highly systematised box of notes. It grew over time and he understood it as “Zweitgedächtnis” (second memory) and “Arbeits- und Denkwerkzeug” (work and think tool); see Schmidt: “Der Zettelkasten Niklas Luhmanns”.
Cf. Décultot: “Zur Einführung”, pp. 8–10. The entangled worlds of excerpting, note-taking, commenting, etc. have already been intensively researched, in particular in German medieval, English Renaissance, and European early modern and Enlightenment studies.
For the early modern period, see Bauden: “Maqriziana II” and Décultot and others, e.g., in Décultot (ed.): Lesen, Kopieren, Schreiben. For the medieval period, see Moulin: “Glossieren”, p. 343. Ann M. Blair provides a comprehensive approach to scholarly reading, note-taking, and text creation; see Blair: Too Much to Know.
All his rasāʾil directly concern his activism in the Dāʾūdī-Ṭayyibī daʿwa, see above pp. 129–130. According to Poonawala, Biobibliography, pp. 227–228, no manuscript of them is known.
See Hamdani, A.: “History of the Hamdani Collection”, p. xxix.