Matthew L. Keegan
Beautifully illustrated and illuminated books are the sort of marvels that delight museum-goers with their craftsmanship. There is no shortage of these kinds of manuscripts in the Islamic manuscript tradition. The examples below attest to the beauty of illustrated and illuminated manuscripts from the pre-modern period.
[Top: al-Ḥarīrī, al-Maqāmāt, Bibliothèque Nationale de France MS Arabe 5847. Bottom: al-Jazūlī, Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt, Chester Beatty Library MS 4240.]
However, the vast majority of Islamic manuscripts were not intended to be aesthetic marvels. Scholars used these books to transmit and study texts about Islamic law, Quranic exegesis, theology, and literature. These “scholarly” manuscripts were not luxury items like the illustrated and illuminated manuscripts. Instead, they were practical tools for reading and engaging with the Islamic literary-religious tradition.
As a result, many Islamic manuscripts are filled with hand-written notes that tell the story of that manuscript. Messy-looking manuscripts tell a story about how that manuscript moved through the world, about who read that manuscript, and about how the manuscript was bought and sold. For example, a collection of biographies about Muslim scholars in Upper Egypt (below left) contains a certificate attesting to an event in which the text was read aloud in the presence of the author himself. In other manuscripts, readers left behind notes in the margins to amplify, contest, and explicate the text, as we can see in a copy of a legal compendium by the 13th-century scholar Ibn Qudāma (below, bottom image).
[Top: Kitāb al-Ṭāliʿ al-saʿīd by Kamāl al-Dīn al-Udfuwī, Chester Beatty Ar3102. Bottom: al-Muqniʿ fī al-Fiqh by Ibn Qudāma, Chester Beatty 3043.]
These certificates and marginalia tell modern scholars about the history of these manuscripts, but they were also significant to medieval scholars who encountered these books. Scholars sought to enhance their reputation by leaving behind attestations to their scholarly activities, and these books became more valuable because they had been in the hands of prominent people. This phenomenon is not, of course, particular to the Islamic world, even if the precise logics of manuscript and book culture might vary from place to place.
Consider, for example, a copy Shakespeare’s complete works that was circulated by political prisoners on Robben Island during South African apartheid. The book circulated surreptitiously amongst the political prisoners there, and each one was asked to mark his favorite passage. Nelson Mandela, who was held at Robben Island for the majority of his 27-year imprisonment, marked the following passage from Julius Caesar in 1977: “Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once.” Seeing Mandela’s name in the margins of this book and reading the passage he chose gives me goosebumps, but it also inflects our understanding of Mandela, the physical copy of the book, the passage from Julius Caesar, and the connections between all three.
My project seeks to understand the social lives of manuscripts through the certificates and marginalia that scholars left behind with particular attention to the ways in which these paratexts can enhance the prestige and meaning of a particular manuscript. By paying attention to these messy manuscripts, we can appreciate how significant certificates and marginalia could be for later readers, who saw these layers of annotation as guides to understanding the significance of a book and its past.