The Islamic tradition is characterized by a very high level of text reuse and more or less identical chunks of text reappear in works centuries apart. In fact, many works from the Islamic tradition, albeit clearly attributed to a specific author, contain very few words actually written by that author. In extreme cases, disregarding introductions, de facto none of the actual content was written by the individual figuring as the author. This paper focuses on pre-modern Arabic lexicographical works as an example and contends that such a high degree of text reuse is a function of how pre-modern scholarly fields collectively moved forward. On the one hand, considering that scholars worked on similar subjects independently, wrote sequels, commentaries (etc.) to each other's works, relevant knowledge inevitably ended up scattered across separate works which furthermore often circulated in different versions. This situation was periodically met with the creation of new works that attempted to force the scattered material into one new and unified context of circulation and hence effectively, and more or less temporarily, “un-scattered” the field. On the other hand, similarly reflecting practical needs, pre-modern authors often betray an interest in the intelligent organization of their material. The intelligent organization of works not only made their navigation and the retrieval of the information found in them easy, but also allowed avoiding the frustration caused by works that were hard to use. Often the purpose of one and the same work, both the attempt to bring existing material together in one place and the interest in the intelligent (re-)organization of that material require the reuse of text. This paper seeks to show how data generated by computational and algorithmic methods of text reuse detection can be used not only to visualize pre-modern efforts of “un-scattering” and intelligent (re-)organization, but also to explore which works succeeded in establishing themselves as stable vantage points for subsequent scholarly activities and thus lastingly kept textual material in circulation in a particular constellation.