For many years, Arnoud Vrolijk has been the curator of Oriental manuscripts and rare books at Leiden University Libraries. His title of Interpres Legati Warneriani refers to the role of keeper of the manuscripts bequeathed to the Library of the University of Leiden by Levinus Warner in 1665. Warner’s manuscripts and printed books continuing to contribute to the Leiden collection’s international reputation until the present day. The scholars and students attracted to Leiden by its Arabic, Turkish, Persian manuscripts and printed works over the years – both the ‘core collections’ of Scaliger, Golius, Warner, and others, as well as more recent additions to its holdings – came to know Arnoud as an erudite colleague, whose many interests inevitably coincides with theirs. All remember his friendly disposition and Arnoud’s willingness to help has enriched the research of innumerable visitors to the Special Collections in his care.
Arnoud is also a scholar in his own right and the author of books, journal articles, and other contributions that either furthered scholarship or made it more accessible beyond the ivory towers of Academia proper. Both the manuscript tradition of Muslim societies, and early printed works from the region have been central to Arnoud’s research, which also extended to the history of Western scholarship about the East.
The problem with someone as learned as Arnoud Vrolijk, is that a Festschrift for him is unlikely accurately to reflect his many interest and activities. We have tried, nevertheless, hoping that both Arnoud, and other readers of this collected volume, will forgive us for its unequal coverage of the topics discussed in it.
This volume consists of five parts; the first offers two contributions about print culture in the Netherlands, both relevant to oriental scholarship in the early modern period. The second grouping (‘Manuscripts’) offers reflections on handwritten texts from the Islamic world – predominantly but not exclusively kept in Leiden – from various genres, covering not just Arabic, but also Persian. Part 3, on scholars and travellers, consists of four chapters that deal with Western collectors of manuscripts and other artefacts (including coins) who travelled to the Muslim world between the seventeenth and the early twentieth centuries. The first two contributions to the fourth section on artefacts and visual culture could just as easily have been grouped under Part 2, but these chapters have a slightly different perspective, the first discussing the preservation of manuscripts, the second chasing the history of one particular seal impression in Islamic manuscripts. A chapter about the nature of ephemera and their place in the Special Collections of the Leiden University Libraries is followed by two chapters on early photography, one in nineteenth-century Persia, the other in the Arabian Peninsula. The fifth and final part, ‘Literature’, offers two contributions, one about an eighteenth-century Dutch novel about the prophet Muhammad, the other about the use of Arabic poetry in modern music from the Arab world.
Each of these contributions touches upon at least one of the fields that Arnoud is interested in, has worked on, or both. All also deal with the collection of knowledge, and how it has been brought together, been preserved, and has been – and is being – disseminated in East and West.
The first contribution, by Paul Hoftijzer, sheds light on printing from stereotype plates in Leiden in the final years of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. This invention was the work of the Lutheran minister Johannes Müller, working with the metal founder Philip van der Meij, and the publishers Jordaan Luchtmans and Cornelis Boutesteyn. In 1700 Müller and Luchtmans set up a separate company aimed at commercial printing books from stereotype plates, bringing in Boutesteyn in 1709, but this enterprise was short-lived. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Luchtmans publishing house continued to use this technology, but they did not manage to set a trend. Their technological innovation would eventually be reinvented in both England and France and then have a major impact on the pre-modern publishing industry.
In the second chapter of Part 1, the collection of Oriental books of the Court of Holland is studied. Discovered in an attic in The Hague by Janus Dousa in 1594, these volumes, previously a reference collection for the lawyers of the Court of Holland, also included many other books written in Hebrew, Chaldean and Arabic. Efforts to transfer the almost 750 volumes to Leiden proved in vain due to legal disputes about their ownership. Based on the handlist produced by Dousa and his son, Kasper van Ommen discusses the relevance of these oriental tomes, which had once been part of the much larger library of Johannes Harius (d. 1532).
The focus of Jan Hogendijk’s contribution is the Arabic manuscript Or. 123 (2 or b) in the Leiden University Library. Due its incompleteness – the beginning of the work is missing – Fuat Sezgin initially misidentified it, but he later discovered that it is a fragment of al-Biruni’s Istiʿāb al-wujūh al-mumkina fī sanʿat al-asturlāb (The Exhaustive Comprehension of the Possible Ways to Construct the Astrolabe). The aim of this chapter is to draw attention to the fact that the Leiden library possesses two manuscripts of this important text by al-Biruni, which is generally unknown. Hogendijk describes both manuscripts on the astrolabe, paying attention also to extraordinary diagrams they include.
In ‘Manuscripts matter’, Petra Sijpesteijn examines the Arabic treatise on book-making, entitled ʿUmdat al-kuttāb wa-ʿuddat dhawī al-albāb (A Support for Scribes and a Device for learned Men). It contains detailed instructions on how to produce writing utensils, glue, black, coloured and invisible inks made with carbon, iron-gall, or metals, and includes information on how to produce paper and to bind books. The Leiden University Library holds a copy and a fragment of ʿUmdat al-kuttāb. Sijpesteijn argues that the fluid tradition of technical manuals like this, whereby texts were constantly added, removed, rearranged, combined or changed, created multiple text recensions besides the usual scribal variation within each recension. The two copies kept in Leiden appear to represent different text recensions which connect them to other manuscript copies of ʿUmdat al-kuttāb.
In the third contribution of Part 2, Remke Kruk explains what the authors of medieval Arabic texts about animals imagined a beaver (Ar. qasṭūriyūn, ‘sea dog’), which is not indigenous to the Middle East, looked like. Consulting works from the genre of manafiʿ al-ḥayawān (‘useful properties of animals’), it turns out that its testicles were considered an essential ingredient for a variety of medicaments, and being pursued for them he rips them off with his claws. Many Arab authors repeated this myth of self-castration, but some agreed with Dioscorides that this was nonsense. Kruk’s chapter includes an image of the beaver from the Arabic Dioscorides manuscript preserved in the Leiden University Library, Or. 289.
Offering another example of how difficult it can be to catalogue manuscripts accurately, Nico Kaptein discusses an astronomical treatise kept in the University of Michigan Library. Supplementing the original catalogue description, he identifies its author as Ahmad Khatib al-Minangkabawi (1860–1916), a scholar from West Sumatra who moved to Mecca in 1870 and stayed there for the rest of his life. Although the copy kept in Ann Arbor is defective, Kaptein shows that it concerns al-Jawahir al-naqiyya fi l-aʿmal al-jaybiyyah. He also discusses the short treatise bound together with Ahmad Khatib’s text, and how it came to be include in the same volume.
Gabrielle van den Berg offers a discussion of the Leiden Or. 8773, a Qajar manuscript copy of the tragic love story of Laylī-u Majnūn, but in a lesser-known version composed in 895/1489–1490 by the poet Maktabī Shīrāzī. After the famous versions authored by Niẓāmī, Amīr Khusraw, Jāmī, and Hātifī, many other Persian versions of the story of Laylī and Majnūn were composed, but many remain unpublished and exist only in manuscript form. This chapter draws attention to aspects of Qajar bookbinding and paper. In particular, it focuses on the Leiden manuscript’s painted illustrations, which show how the story was perceived in Qajar times. Van den Berg also provides an inventory of the paintings in the manuscript.
Relatively little of the correspondence of Johann Michael Wansleben (1635–1679) appears to have survived, which makes the three letters in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, written by Wansleben to Francesco Redi between 1665 and 1671, and introduced and published here by Alastair Hamilton, so valuable. They contain details about Wansleben’s life and movements not to be found elsewhere, as do the other pieces included in the appendix of this article – letters from Redi published in 1811 and the epistle dedicatory to the grand duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand II de’ Medici, in the manuscript version of Wansleben’s Relazione dello stato presente dell’Egitto in the British Library.
In his contribution, Maurits van den Boogert offers a survey of the 20 alba amicorum in which Jacobus Golius (b. 1596), the Professor of Oriental languages at the University of Leiden from 1626 until his death in 1667, wrote one or more entries. Golius’ contributions to these albums draw attention not only to his personal motto – a fragment from an Arabic poem – but also to his network of friends and colleagues. In one album he wrote a few lines from a poem that was (and still is) very popular in Morocco, but which is not well-known elsewhere. The fact that he wrote two rather lengthy and personal notes for Hottinger within a short period of time confirms earlier research that suggests that their friendship was particularly close.
In a period when few Western students of the Middle East were interested in contemporary Ottoman numismatics, the Prussian envoy to the Ottoman Sublime Porte, Heinrich Friedrich von Diez (1751–1817) was an exception. Not only did he bring home, in 1790, a collection of circa 2,000 coins, but he had also already catalogued them. On the basis of both the coins and the unpublished catalogue, which are preserved in Berlin’s Münzkabinett, Christoph Rauch’s article offers an initial survey of what we know about Diez’s collection and his numismatic knowledge. Both the catalogue as well as his collection.
The renowned Arabist, Islamicist, and Africanist Eugen Mittwoch (1876–1942) undertook two extended trips to the Near East and Egypt, in 1899 and in 1907, travelling to Constantinople, Syria, and Palestine on a mission organized by the Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden to investigate education among Jews in these locations. Upon his return, Mittwoch published extensively about his experiences, and he also gave public lectures. Sabine Schmidtke here offers a critical annotated edition of the manuscript of one such lecture, preserved in the Eugen Mittwoch Archive at the National Library of Israel, that offers insights into his personal encounters on his travels.
In the first chapter of Part 4, Karin Scheper addresses the tension between the practice of collecting manuscripts for study, their actual handling by scholars and students, and the ambition to preserve the manuscripts as precious artefacts in their own right. For each manuscript, curators and conservators work with a documentation system, in which various aspects of the artefacts condition prior to treatment are recorded. The conservation report which is then made includes information about the reason(s) for intervention, the choices made, and condition and appearance of the manuscript post treatment. Based on her own extensive work on manuscripts from the collections for which Arnoud was the curator, Scheper here shares four case studies that illustrate – also literally – her interactions with manuscripts, why they were necessary, and how treatment changes their appearance.
On a mission to catalogue documentary manuscript notes of owners, readers, and endowers in manuscripts from the Arab world, Boris Liebrenz came across a seal impression left in a manuscript now kept in Leiden by a man called Muhammad ʿAli al-munajjim, who must have lived sometime between the middle of the tenth/sixteenth century and the early eleventh/seventeenth century in Istanbul. It was the seal’s picture of a bird of prey descending on a snake that caught Liebrenz’ eye. Arguing that this seemingly unique seal imprint actually represents a marginal tradition, this illustrated contribution also makes us aware of just how little we know about the production and use of seals in the Middle East.
In ‘Trash or Treasure?’ Birte Kristiansen explores some of the Leiden University Libraries’ collections of ephemera relating to the Middle East. She draws attention to larger collections like the photographs made and collected by Albertus Hotz (1855–1930), a Dutch entrepreneur who lived and travelled through Iran; the holdings brought together under the auspices of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM), and institute that no longer exists, but the collections of which remain relevant; and to smaller collections like the Egyptian film posters Arnoud Vrolijk acquired for Leiden in 2016.
Hendrik Dunlop (1867–1944) was a Dutch businessman in Qajar Persia, whose activities there have so far remained in the shadow of those of Hotz, Dunlop’s employer. In addition to leaving extensive travel accounts, parts of Dunlop’s collection of early photographs have also survived. In Tehran he also acquired manuscripts of Bábi and Baháʾí texts, and through both his writings and his photographs, he was the first to spread knowledge about the Baháʾí religion in the Netherlands. Based on these written and visual sources, Corien Vuurman’s contribution gives Dunlop the attention he deserves.
Another valuable photographic collection, here studied by Luit Mols, was produced by the Leiden Arabist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936) and the Meccan physician Sayyid ʿAbd al-Ghaffār ibn ʿAbd al-Rahmān al-Baghdādī (died ca. 1902). From their experiments with photographic equipment in improvised studios in Mecca and Jeddah between 1884 and 1889, more than 400 portraits have survived in the Special Collections of the Leiden University Libraries. Preserving the images of both Arabian Bedouins and local Sharifs and European diplomats and merchants and Ottoman officers – sometimes even depicting women – this collection of portraits offers a unique late-nineteenth-century visual archive of Western Arabian society.
Although the rise of the historical novel as a literary genre is usually situated in the beginning of the nineteenth century, Richard van Leeuwen discusses the Dutch novel Mohammed, of de hervorming van de Arabieren (‘Muhammad, or the reformation of the Arabs’) by the Dutch playwright Johannes Nomsz, which was published already in 1780. Now largely forgotten, the book is an interesting example of the Dutch Protestant view of Islam and Muhammad, while at the same time representing a new discursive and literary form, combining historical evidence with narrative techniques. Furthermore, Nomsz’ novel reflects both eighteenth-century debates in the fields of religion and scholarship, and shows traces of literary orientalism in the artistic sense.
The volume’s last contribution focuses on the singing of fine poetry, a prominent tradition in Arab culture for centuries that continues to be relevant today. Based on the compositions performed by artists of various Arab backgrounds in the Netherlands over the past two decades, Anne van Oostrum discusses two case studies: the Moroccan-Belgium group Qayna – the name referring to the singing enslaved girls who sometimes accompanied reciting poets in the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula – and Moroccan singer Walid Ben Selim, who, during interviews, shed light on their choice of lyrics and compositions. The chapter includes descriptions of songs that illustrate the intriguing interplay between heritage (al-turath) and ‘new music’ (al-musiqa-l-jadida) which is also open to non-Arab(ic) influences.
Maurits van den Boogert
Kasper van Ommen