My study undertakes a thick history of the function of hand-written media in the reading culture of al-Bukhari, a compilation of reports attributed to Muhammad that is the text most revered by the Sunni community after the Qur’an. Drawing on manuscript materials, chronicles, biographical dictionaries and commentaries from the Mamluk period (13th- and 15th-century Egypt and the Levant) I first show that manuscript making was deeply embedded in the culture of live performance and the politics of a competitive audience. In rich detail, these sources shine a light on how hand-written volumes of commentary on al-Bukhari were painstakingly outlined, drafted, reviewed and edited aloud in the presence of an easily divided community of students, rivals and patrons, typically over the course of several decades. In theory, when explicating and transmitting compilations of prophetic reports, commentators accorded a limited authority to texts recorded in writing relative to texts preserved through memory and recitation. In constructing the most “authoritative” reading of al-Bukhari, commentators such as Ibn Rushayd al-Sabti (d. 1321) and Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani (d. 1449) claimed to draw on their memories of traditions of oral recitation rather than manuscript sources. This emphasis on orality and memory arose, in part, out of a concern with a practice made possible with the medium of the manuscript: reading on one’s own (qira’a bi-nafsihi). In the view of these commentators, reading a written text on one’s own would be inadequate if done without also reading the document aloud in the presence of a master qualified to bring determinacy to potential ambiguities and deficiencies latent in the manuscript. In practice, however, commentators frequently consulted hand-written media outside the presence of a master to support their original arguments or to subtly undergird their interpretive authority. Ibn ?ajar, for instance, frequently resolved interpretive problems in al-Bukhari by referencing his knowledge of variations or corruptions that emerged in the text’s manuscript tradition. In concluding, I compare these Mamluk sources with commentaries on al-Bukhari from the early Modern Middle East and South Asia. In an age in which printing presses outpaced scribes and manuscript makers, 20th-century commentators on al-Bukhari, such as Anwar Shah al-Kashmiri, were at a distinct interpretive advantage if they could maintain access to unprinted sources. I thus close with the counter-intuitive suggestion — with some qualifications — that the authority of hand-written media was elevated, not diminished, for traditional commentators on al-Bukhari in the age of print.

This presentation is part of my book project that explores cultures of literacy and social practice, particularly through collecting practices, a place where historians rarely venture to study the epistemological keys of understanding the dynamics of state formation. I chart a ‘civilizing process’ in early-modern Isfahan reliant on the production and dissemination of pedagogical manuals on proper etiquette, conduct and manners to regulate social behavior and emotional expression. Manuals, created through literacy, a cultural know-how that had to be studied and embodied by refined subjects of the city of Isfahan. To be in style one spoke poetry and moved with the gestures set out in codes of adab, or etiquette. Adab literacy heightened practices of seeing, reading, writing and collecting. As Isfahanis came to cultivate adab, their distinct subjectivities and levels of literacy were shaped by these practices. It is within this context that I will consider the disciplinary work this civilizational project performed on the medium of communicating social relations.

This paper draws on my dissertation research on the large corpus of manuscripts of works attributed to the Ifriqiyan cum Cairene Sufi and putative ‘magician’ Ahmad al-Buni (d. ca. 622/1225). I examine the ‘esotericist’ ethics surrounding the early transmission and circulation of al-Buni’s works on the occult science of letters (‘ilm al-huruf), as well as the potential paradox the notion of transmitting secret knowledge in writing presents to those seeking to understand the place of al-Buni and similar writers in the wider ecology of late-medieval Islamicate thought. Drawing on a variety of paratexts from manuscripts of al-Buni’s works, including a small handful of ‘audition’ (sama’) certificates recording events at which al-Buni formally transmitted his texts, as well as evidence internal to the texts themselves—especially his use of the esotericist compositional strategy of tabdid al-‘ilm (‘the dispersion of knowledge)—I argue that al-Buni’s works were intended for, and initially circulated among, small networks of elite Sufi readers who protected its contents from ‘the vulgar’, such that the majority of his works did not find wider circulation until more than two centuries after his death. Denis Gril, in his essay on the occult science of letters in the writings of al-Buni’s famous contemporary Muhyi al-Din Ibn ‘Arabi, has suggested that al-Buni “published” elements of the science that “others either had kept under greater cover or had limited to oral transmission,” implying that al-Buni abruptly exposed a formerly secret tradition to public circulation. I argue, however, that such an understanding fails to account for the complexities of broader sociointellectual trends in this period (the 6th/12th-7th/13th centuries), a time which the historian of medieval Jewish thought Moshe Halbertal has dubbed “the age of esotericism and its disclosure.” Drawing comparisons with earlier Islamic esoteric corpora, such as the alchemical texts attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan and the Epistles of the Ikhwan al-safa’, as well as with those of some of al-Buni’s Western-Mediterranean contemporaries, including Ibn ‘Arabi and various Jewish Kabbalistic authors, I argue that al-Buni and his early transmitters sought to strike a balance between guarding powerful bodies of secret knowledge from the masses and their own efforts to bring initiatic knowledge to socioreligious elites whose spiritual integrity they felt had become perilously degraded. This paper adduces Bunian manuscript material not previously discussed in modern scholarship, and will be of interest to scholars of late-medieval intellectual history, Sufism, the occult sciences, and manuscript studies.

This contribution will examine ethical questions in cataloguing Arabic manuscripts in private collections in the Middle East, based in 10 years of experience in cataloguing private libraries of ‘ulama’ in Yemen (Zabid, on theRed Sea). As this paper explores, in the Arabian Peninsula there exist various religious pressures when it comes to buying, cataloguing or studying manuscripts, due to their content. Sometimes they are unspoken, other times they are explicit. Access to private libraries by foreigners can be limited until a trusted relationship is established, though for locals it often is totally denied for ‘ethical’ reasons, among them the desire to regulate access to knowledge, and social evaluations of the status of owners. Once inside the library, particular points of misunderstanding or tension are related to different ways local and foreign scholars classify types of books. Even the difference between manuscripts and printed books can be a point of disagreement, but this contribution will focus on the status of Qur’ans and books on occult sciences (al-‘ulum al-khafiyya). Qur’ans are a complicated question, as can be observed in different catalogues in Arabic where sometimes they appear to be books as the others and sometimes not, an issue I will also address from the point of view of local practices. Books on occult sciences are another special category of items surrounded by difficulties, where owners of the libraries are concerned to prevent the unprepared (and unprotected) reader from bringing harm upon themselves or others through exposure to what is in these books—with catalogers considered to belong this group of unprepared readers. These experiences raise numerous ethical questions for the cataloger. We can abandon our efforts, or attempt to anticipate such pressures, but if we are keen to follow them then we can be tempted not to catalogue all the books in a private library, i.e. to make a selection. From the point of view of a scientific ethic (e.g. codicological and conservational), everything that is on the shelves of a private library has to be catalogued without a single exception, including photocopies of manuscripts. Being exhaustive will allow us to have a comprehensive idea of the content of a library of a ‘alim—or that of another layer of the society—and also to map endangered collections. However, one must also take into consideration the views and concerns of owners. It is the balance between these things that this paper addresses.