Acknowledgements
The groundwork for this book was established between 2016 and 2019, when I was a member of the research group “Arabic Philology and Textual Practices in the Early Modern Period” at Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. I thank my supervisors, Prof. Islam Dayeh and Prof. Beatrice Gruendler, for rightly assuming my interest in Arabic lexicography, supporting me in pursuing this topic, and helping me develop a passion for it. Prof. Gruendler kindly suggested including this book in Brill’s Global Arabic Literary Cultures series. I thank the anonymous readers for their valuable suggestions.
Between 2020 and 2023, while working in the DFG-funded project Orient-Digital at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, where I entered the metadata of German oriental manuscript collections into the Qalamos database, I was able to develop and test some of my hypotheses. I thank the head of the Oriental Manuscripts Department, Christoph Rauch, and the subject specialist for Arabic, Islamic, and Ottoman Studies, Dr Thoralf Hanstein, for their inspiring enthusiasm and the opportunity to freely browse manuscripts.
I am fortunate to be working as a postdoctoral fellow in the ERC-funded project “KNOW: Polymathy and Interdisciplinarity in Premodern Islamic Epistemic Cultures” at Ghent University, and I thank the project and its principal investigator, Prof. Islam Dayeh, for their support of my research. Open access publication of this book was made possible through generous financial support from the Ghent University Special Research Fund (BOF) and the Open Access Fund for Monographs and Edited Volumes of Freie Universität Berlin. I am also grateful to the Ernst-Reuter-Gesellschaft der Freunde, Förderer und Ehemaligen der Freien Universität Berlin e.V. for awarding me a grant to cover part of the copy-editing costs.
This book began as a Ph.D. dissertation, and whether I would complete it was never entirely certain—at least not to me. I am grateful to all colleagues and friends who listened to my laments, read chapters, and offered kind words and literature suggestions. I especially thank Dr Ahmed Badawi (fī thanāya l-qalbi manziluhū), Laurenz Kern, Katharina Kloss, Rossella De Luca, Dr Benedikt Reier, my sister and personal cheerleader Johanna Josten, my partner Dr Torsten Wollina, and my daughter Franka Lindermann for their unwavering support.