I have previously dealt with the authorship and transmission of Ibn Sa?d’s ?abaq?t from the 3rd and up to the 9th Islamic centuries. I showed that the life of this book had four pivotal moments: its conception in the 3rd, its re-compilation in the 4th, its popularization in the 5th, and its migration to Damascus in the 6th. This paper is an attempt at explaining these four pivotal moments; which constitutes a social history of the book as conceived of by Robert Darnton. I attempt to answer the following: Why did Ibn Sa?d writehis ?abaq?t? Why did all recensions disappear from the market and only a 4th century re-compilation survive? Why did al-Kha??b al-Baghd?d? popularize the book in the 5th? And why did Ibn ?As?kir (6th) depend so heavily on it for the writing of his T?r?kh Dimashq? Based on organizational difference between Ibn Sa?d’s abridgement of the ?abaq?t (still in manuscript) and the full version of the book, I attempt to answer the conception question. Ibn Sa?d lived during al-Ma’m?n’s Mi?na which was mainly directed at the Baghd?d? ?ad?th transmitters. It is no surprise that the ?abaq?t is a biographical dictionary of ?ad?th transmitters. I argue the deep involvement of Ibn Sa?d in the Mi?na, to which the writing of the ?abaq?t was a response. The increasing Sunn? orientation of the ?Abbasid Caliphs following the end of the Mi?na during the reign of al-Mutawakkil (c. 237 AH) will serve as the point of departure for my answer to the fourth century re-compilation of the ?abaq?t. Furthermore, if M. Q?sim Zam?n (Religion and Politics under the Early Abbasids) considered the mu?addith?n of the third century as proto-Sunn?s, it is clear that by the fourth century, especially during the Buyid period, they were at the heart of Sunnism. It is during this period that we see the recompilation of the ?abaq?t and its popularization, as a confirmation, I argue, of the mu?addith?n’s central role in defining Sunnism and countering the influence of Sh??ism. Finally, the migration of the ?abaq?t to Damascus on the hands of Ibn ?As?kir is a part, I argue, of his implementation of N?r al-D?n Zeng?’s policy of Jih?d against the Crusaders; the central piece of which was the establishment of ?ad?th houses and the sanctification of Syria by linking it to Mu?ammad’s companions.

I will examine the translation of medieval Arabic literature into Persian to explore the complimentary roles of Arabic and Persian in premodern Middle Eastern societies. After the emergence of written literary Persian after 900 CE, both Arabic and Persian served as lingua franca for religion and law, as well as for culture and trade. Both languages were included in one's education, because a text’s literary genre determined its language of composition, as is, for example, documented by the Arabic poetry by the renowned satirist ‘Ubayd-i Zakani (d. c.1370), and the Persian world history by the Shafi‘ite theologian Baydawi (d. 1316?). Most manuscripts of medieval translations of Arabic or Persian literature still await cataloguing and publication. Yet there is nonetheless sufficient codicological evidence to examine the origin and the reception of a few representative cases by analyzing the material evidence of their manuscripts and printed books, together with indirect evidence of their circulation in written sources, such as the «Kashf al-zunun» by Katip Celebi (1609-1657). My examples will juxtapose adab literature – the didactic animal fables of «Kalila wa-Dimna» of Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ (d. c.756) and the poetic anthology «Muhadarat al-udaba’» by Raghib (d. after 1050) – with reference literature – Raghib’s Quran dictionary «Mufradat fi gharib al-Qur’an» and the pharmacological treatise «Kitab al-abniya ‘an haqa’iq al-adwiya» by Abu Mansur al-Harawi (fl. 980-990). I argue that the nineteenth-century concept of a nation state with a single national language has made the complimentary uses of Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman in premodern Middle Eastern societies seem less relevant, as well as more difficult to conceptualize. Even medievalists tend to write the history of the book in the Middle East as the history of the Arabic book (e.g., J. Pedersen, Den arabiske bok, 1946; A. Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts, 2009), while giving short shrift to books written in Persian, Ottoman, and other languages. Consequently, specialists of Arabic and Persian manuscripts rarely compare notes (cf. articles by W. al-Qadi and I. Afshar in: Theoretical Approaches to the Transmission of Knowledge, eds. J. Pfeiffer and M. Kropp, 2007). My paper will explore whether the heuristic concepts of the 'Islamic book' - popular among art historians - and the 'manuscript in Arabic script' - preferred by paleologists – can lead to approaches that can successfully replace the reigning nationalist paradigms for research on the intellectual history of medieval Middle Eastern societies.

The private manuscript libraries of Yemen, estimated at 50,000 codices, constitutes the largest and most important set of unexamined Arabic manuscripts in the world today. Until recently, these sources were unavailable to anyone outside the Zaydi community in Northern Yemen. Now, due to the efforts of the Imam Zaid bin ‘Ali Cultural Foundation, The Yemeni Manuscript Digitization Initiative (ymdi.uoregon.edu) and its partner institutions Princeton University Library and Free University, Berlin, for the first time, manuscripts from three private libraries in Sanaa, Yemen will be freely available on the web through the Princeton University Digital Library (http://pudl.princeton.edu/collections/pudl0079). In this talk I will describe the status of the project to this point, the challenges the current situation in Yemen presents, and the potential for scholarship the dissemination of this new knowledge presents.