Elise Franssen

What was there in a Mamlūk amīr’s library? Evidence from a 15th-century manuscript

The image of the Mamluks as coarse barely islamicized brutes who were only interested in archery and horses has been invalidated for several years now. We know that some, in all layers of society, were learned and had an interest in various scholarly disciplines ranging from the noble religious sciences, to court poetry, and the more popular adab works.1 Some were even book collectors.2 This contribution to the fascinating question of the education and cultural level of the Mamluks, which is one of Prof. Levanoni’s concerns, discusses a manuscript intended for a Mamluk amīr. It aims at being holistic and thus will not only deal with the text, but also with its container: the manuscript is described here as an archeological object that will be subjected to a thorough codicological analysis, and as a text whose content, language and history will be analyzed. Precise descriptions of dated and localized manuscripts are required to make advances in codicology, and for our practical knowledge of books. The library of the University of Liège, Belgium, possesses nearly 500 manuscripts in Arabic.3 One of these is the small Mamluk codex that constitutes the subject of this article.4 The manuscript is a majmūʿ containing two texts,5 and consequently two title pages, on ff. 1 and 157. F. 1 is very damaged (Figure 15.1). One reads there, on 5 lines, the first two in red ink, the next ones in black ink:

A maġribī copy of the Kitāb al-Faraj baʿd aš-Šidda, by the ʿIrāqī qāḍī at-Tanūḫī. Study of a Manuscript of Liège University (Belgium)

Author introduces the Arabic manuscript collection in Liege, Belgium, which is not as widely known as it deserves to be. She singles out one particular manuscript, an 11/16th century copy of the well-known work Kitāb al-Faraj bad as-Sidda , by the Irāqī qāī at-Tanūī (327-384/939-994). She describes the manuscript and places her detailed description within the framework of the modern scholarly and bibliographical references on Abbasid literature in general and on recent developments in codicology and paleography in particular. She also discusses the relationship of the Liege manuscript with some of the printed editions of the Kitāb al-Faraj bad as-Sidda .