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Medieval Arabic Lands

The Written Word in the
Discusses how the written text became accessible to
wider audiences in medieval Egypt and Syria
The Written Word
Medieval Islamic societies belonged to the most bookish cultures of their in the
period. Yet the chronological development of how and when different
sections of the population started to use the written word remains
understudied. This book argues that the uses of the written word
Medieval Arabic Lands
significantly expanded in Egypt and Syria between the eleventh and the
fifteenth centuries CE. A SOCIAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY
OF READING PRACTICES
This process of textualisation went hand in hand with a closely linked
second process, popularisation, as wider groups within society started to
participate in individual and communal reading acts. New audiences in
reading sessions, changed curricula in children’s schools, increasing
numbers of endowed libraries and the appearance of popular literature in
written form all bear witness to the profound transformation of cultural
practices and their social contexts.

Using a wide variety of documentary, narrative and normative sources, the

Konrad Hirschler
book explores the growth of reading audiences in a pre-print culture.

Konrad Hirschler is Senior Lecturer in the History of the Near and Middle
East at SOAS, University of London. He is the author of Medieval Arabic
Historiography: Authors as Actors (2006) and co-editor of Manuscript Notes as a
Documentary Source (2011).

Jacket image: Abū Zayd in a school, from Maqāmāt by al-Harīrī © Bibliothèque nationale de France

Jacket design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk 978-0-7486-4256-4

www.euppublishing.com
Konrad Hirschler
 THE WRITTEN WORD IN THE
MEDIEVAL ARABIC LANDS

A SOCIAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY OF READING PRACTICES

Konrad Hirschler

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

HIRSCHLER PRINT.indd i 14/10/2011 14:08

 © Konrad Hirschler, 2012

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh
www.euppublishing.com

Typeset in 11/13 JaghbUni Regular by

Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7486 4256 4 (hardback)

The right of Konrad Hirschler to be identified as author of this

work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

HIRSCHLER PRINT.indd ii 14/10/2011 12:14

 Contents

List of Illustrations iv
List of Tables v
Acknowledgements vi

Introduction 1
1 Reading and Writerly Culture 11
2 A City is Reading: Popular and Scholarly Reading Sessions 32
3 Learning to Read: Popularisation and the Written Word in
Children’s Schools 82
4 Local Endowed Libraries and their Readers 124
5 Popular Reading Practices 164
Conclusion 197

Bibliography 202
Index 228

HIRSCHLER PRINT.indd iii 14/10/2011 12:14

 Illustrations

Figures
3.1 Floor plan: Jawhar al-Lālā (d. 842/1438) endowment with
school 107
3.2 Floor plan: Sultan Faraj b. Barqūq endowment with school
(812/1409) 108
3.3 Floor plan: Asanbughā (d. 777/1375–6) endowment with
school 109

Plates
Situated between pages 90 and 91
1 Ashrafīya inventory (mid-7th/13th century)
2 Abū Zayd in the children’s school (619/1220?, Syria?)
3 Abū Zayd in the children’s school (634/1237)
3a Slate with first letters of alphabet
4 Abū Zayd in the children’s school (734/1334, Cairo?)
5 Abū Zayd in the children’s school (654/1256?)
6 Abū Zayd in the children’s school (second half 7th/13th century,
Damascus)
7 Abū Zayd in the children’s school (first half 7th/13th century?)
8 Layla and Majnūn in the children’s school (c. early 7th/13th
century)
8a Steps 1 and 2: reading and writing individual letters
8b Step 3: combining two letters
8c Step 4: reading and writing words
9 Layla and Majnūn in the children’s school (835/1431–2, Herat)
10 Layla and Majnūn in the children’s school (848/1445, Shiraz?)
11 Layla and Majnūn in the children’s school (899/1494–5, Herat)
12 Public fountain and school of Qāyit Bay in Salība Street (884/1480)
13 Abū Zayd in the library (634/1237)
14 Abū Zayd in the library (640s/1240s)
15 Abū Zayd in the library (first half 7th/13th century?)

HIRSCHLER PRINT.indd iv 14/10/2011 12:14

 Tables

2.1 Reading communities of the History of Damascus in Damascus,

6th/12th and 7th/13th centuries 38
2.2 Participants in selected reading communities of the History of
Damascus 42
2.3 Attendance of ʿUthmān the clay worker in readings of the
History of Damascus, community B 54
2.4 Attendance of Ibrāhīm the furrier in readings of the History of
Damascus, community B 55
2.5 Attendance of Muḥammad the carpenter in readings of the
History of Damascus, community D 56
2.6 Attendance of Yūsuf the silk trader in readings of the History
of Damascus, community B 57

HIRSCHLER PRINT.indd v 14/10/2011 12:14

 Acknowledgements

The research for this book took place while I held positions at the Seminar
für Orientalistik at the University of Kiel and the History Department,
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). I thank both institu-
tions for the support they granted, the latter especially for a sabbatical
year that allowed me to write up the book. This book would not have
been possible without financial support at different stages, namely, from
the SOAS Research Office, the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and the
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Thanks are due to many individu-
als, most importantly students and colleagues at SOAS, but also in the
wider London community. The conversations both in the classroom and
beyond have been crucial for enriching and stimulating my thinking on
the matters discussed in this book. The audiences’ questions and com-
ments at conferences and workshops where I presented parts of this book
(especially in St Andrews, Münster, Ghent, Kiel, London and Berlin)
have greatly helped me in rethinking its main arguments. I am further
indebted to various individuals who read parts of this book or helped with
access to sources, chief among them Anja Pistor-Hatam (Kiel), Yehoshua
and Miriam Frenkel (Haifa/Jerusalem), Thomas Herzog (Bern), Doris
Behrens-Abouseif (London) and Suzanne Ruggi (Reading). I should also
like to thank the two anonymous reviewers at Edinburgh University Press
for their constructive comments and especially for drawing my atten-
tion to additional sources. The different members of staff at Edinburgh
University Press who were involved in this project greatly contributed
with their good-humoured efficiency to bringing this work to publication.
Finally, I am very grateful to family and friends for their patience and
support through the years of my work on this project.

vi

HIRSCHLER PRINT.indd vi 14/10/2011 12:14

 Introduction

Societies within the Islamic world, especially those in the belt stretch-
ing from al-Andalus in the west to Persia in the east, belonged in the
medieval era to the world’s most bookish societies. The sheer number of
works that existed – Ibn al-Nadīm in fourth/tenth-century Baghdad was
already aware of several thousand titles – and the sophisticated division of
labour for producing manuscripts, including author, copyist, ‘copy editor’
(muḥarrir), calligrapher, illustrator, cutter and binder bear witness to the
central role of the written word. Reports on the lively manuscript markets,
as well as on the countless individual legacies of manuscripts bequeathed
to one’s children, colleagues or libraries suggest the extent to which the
written word remained in constant circulation in these pre-print societies.
At the same time, manuscript-books acquired, at least in some quarters,
such outstanding prestige that scholars such as the towering figure of
al-Jāḥiẓ, writing in the third/ninth century, could expend page upon page
praising their excellence. This fascination with manuscripts, as well as
their massive production and constant circulation, even led some medieval
scholars to fear the ‘over-production’ of manuscript-books.1
Modern analytical scholarship on the written word in these societies
has been characterised by a set of chronological and thematic features
that account, to some extent, for the choice of the issues that this book
explores.2 In chronological terms, most scholars focused on the ‘Classical’
or Early Period up to the fourth/tenth century. Studies such as those by
Schoeler, Günther, Toorawa and Touati, to name but the most recent,
have discussed in detail the development of a ‘writerly culture’, to borrow
Toorawa’s term, in the first four Islamic centuries, especially its interplay
with oral and aural practices. It comes as no surprise that this focus on the
Early Period is matched at the other end of the chronological spectrum
with a comparatively rich literature on literacy and publishing in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to the cluster of works around
the issue of the ‘late’ introduction of print to the Middle East, studies such
as those of Messick and Eickelman have also taken up the question of the
relationship between orality and literacy. The best and most recent over-
view of the development of the Muslim manuscript-book has reproduced

HIRSCHLER PRINT.indd 1 14/10/2011 12:14

 The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands

scholarship’s chronological profile by devoting its largest sections to these

two periods.3
For the long gap between the Early and Modern Periods – both of
which have attracted so much modern scholarly interest in the different
fields of Islamic/Middle Eastern history in general that they have shaped
its profile over the last century – the scholarly output has been rather
meagre. For the Ottoman period, at least, we have a number of detailed
studies on specific aspects of writerly culture such as Erünsal’s articles on
libraries. However, there are hardly any works that directly address the
issue of writerly culture for the Middle Period, stretching from the early
fifth/eleventh to the early tenth/sixteenth centuries. During the 1970s and
the 1980s, when the Middle Period started to be reassessed in scholarship
beyond notions of decline and degeneration, the contributions of Badawī,
Amīn and Haarmann, to name but a few, have remarked upon the quantita-
tive rise and diversification of literary production. More recent work, such
as Gully’s discussion of letter-writing, has added further dimensions to the
development of an increasingly writerly culture. Yet these studies have
not focused on the chronological development and the broader outline
of the spread of the written word in the Middle Period or the history of
reading practices. The closest we get to a study of the manuscript-book
and its consumption are those studies concerned with the transmission of
knowledge in cities such as Cairo and Damascus, most notably those by
Petry, Berkey and Chamberlain. Studies on aspects of cultural changes,
for instance, by Leder and Bauer, and some in-depth discussion of issues
such as education by Nabāhīn and libraries by al-Nashshār, supplement
this scholarship.4
The second distinct characteristic of modern scholarship has been the-
matic: namely, that the main focus in addressing writerly culture has been
on the production side, discussing issues such as authorship and the dis-
tribution of the written word. Pedersen’s work on the Arabic manuscript-
book, still seminal in its breadth, has little to say about the consumers of
the written word, while Schoeler, in his reflections on the relationship
between the written and the oral, also focuses mostly on the issue of how
written materials came into being, not so much on what happened to them
subsequently in terms of reception. The question of readership itself is
only directly in focus in Touati’s almost programmatic article on reading
in the Early Period, which tries to link the history of reading to studies
on this issue in other pre-modern world regions, especially European
medieval studies. However, the two main studies on reading in Middle
Eastern history are not concerned with the Early and Middle Periods, but
with developments in later centuries. Fortna’s study on learning to read in

HIRSCHLER PRINT.indd 2 14/10/2011 12:14

 Introduction

the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic has shown how
reading practices were transformed by the spread of educational institu-
tions, an increase in state intervention and market forces. The second
study, Hanna’s work on the cultural history of Cairo, also remarkable in
that it breaks with the standard chronological pattern, addresses the issue
of reading among what she calls the ‘middle classes’ between the tenth/
sixteenth and twelfth/eighteenth centuries.5
The present book addresses this profile of scholarship on reading by
studying the history of reading, or rather aspects of this history of reading,
during the Middle Period in the Syrian and Egyptian lands. The Middle
Period is chosen as the chronological framework for this study not only
in order to fill the gap in scholarship, but also for two further reasons. The
first is to address the idea of ‘decline’ in Arabic societies after the end of
the Classical Period; a sterile debate that is fortunately disappearing from
the academic study of Middle Eastern history. However, standard works
on the history of the book with a comparative outlook, such as Kilgour,
still assume that an all-encompassing cultural decline set in at some
point around the sixth/twelfth century. In addition, although the decline
paradigm has mostly vanished from scholarly writing its repercussions in
terms of periodisation are still evident in fields such as library studies (cf.
Chapter 4).6
The second, and more important, reason for the choice of this period
transgresses historiographical considerations and goes back to the actual
transformation of writerly culture and reading practices. Although this
period did not witness a complete break with previous eras, the diffusion
of the written word and the concomitant spread of reading skills in socie-
ties of the Middle Period allow one to speak of a distinctive transformation
of cultural practices. Taking a span of five centuries, this study offers a
broad chronological framework and a first outline of the long-term devel-
opments of this increasingly writerly culture. This outline allows, at least
tentatively, the developments in the Arabic-speaking lands to be contrasted
to other periodisations that scholarship has proposed, mainly with refer-
ence to transformations of reading practices in Latin Europe. Gauger’s six
periods of reading cultures in world history, for instance, include a deci-
sive break around 1300 with the transition from high medieval reading to
early modern reading culture that was to continue until 1800 – a periodisa-
tion that sits very uneasily with the argument advanced in the following
pages for the Arabic-speaking lands. While this book argues that the early
Middle Period was the starting point for a profound cultural transforma-
tion, this is not the case for the end of the period under consideration in the
tenth/sixteenth century. To end the discussion at this point follows above

HIRSCHLER PRINT.indd 3 14/10/2011 12:14

 The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands

all the periodisation of political history, that is, the advent of the Ottoman
Empire in the Arabic-speaking lands. It might be that new factors, such as
the linguistic change at the elite level to Ottoman Turkish, had repercus-
sions on reading practices, but this assumption remains purely speculative
and requires as in so many other fields further work that will transcend the
divide between the Middle Period and the Ottoman era.7
This study focuses on Egypt and Syria as these two regions constituted
the hub of cultural activities in the Middle East during the centuries under
discussion. In the course of the sixth/twelfth century Syria and its cities
emerged as one of the main centres of Arabic literary life, scholarship and
manuscript production that increasingly rivalled and ultimately replaced
Iraq and especially Baghdad in this role. In this period, the ‘Syrian
Century’ from the mid-sixth/twelfth to the mid-seventh/thirteenth century,
under the Zangid and the Ayyubid dynasties the Syrian lands achieved a
large degree of autonomy from the dominance of neighbouring regions,
especially Egypt. This unusual degree of autonomy was to disappear only
in the centuries to come under the Mamluk Empire, when the Syrian cities
were subordinate to the political centre in Egypt. Egypt emerged at this
point in the seventh/thirteenth century not only as the leading political, but
also as the main cultural region in the Arabic-speaking Middle East and
was to remain in this position for the following centuries.
However, the book does not completely follow this shift as it continues
to refer to Syrian developments as far as they are traceable in order to
rebalance the strong focus on Egypt that has so decisively characterised
scholarship on the later Middle Period. The long-term development of
most aspects of writerly culture and the history of reading during the
Middle Period did not directly depend on processes of political regionali-
sation or centralisation. For instance, the spread of libraries in Egypt and
Syria was not a consequence of the regionalisation of political control as
it was the case for the rise of new libraries in the Abbasid Empire during
the fourth/tenth century.8 Here, the dwindling authority of central rule in
Baghdad was instrumental in the rise of cultural activities in the former
provinces and new regional centres. In Syria and Egypt, by contrast, a
process of intense centralisation, which concentrated political authority,
military might and economic capital in Cairo, accompanied the spread
of libraries in the Middle Period. This process of centralisation, starting
with the dynastic change from the Ayyubids to the Mamluks in the mid-
seventh/thirteenth century, thus did not entail an all-compassing decline
of cultural activities in those regions that had become little more than
provinces of the centralised Mamluk Empire.
In its approach, the book stands in the tradition of the aforementioned

HIRSCHLER PRINT.indd 4 14/10/2011 12:14

 Introduction

works by Berkey, Chamberlain, Leder and Petry that have decisively

contributed to making the combination of cultural and social history a
standard feature for studying this period. In order to address these two
themes, the book asks, on the one hand, how the spread of the written word
affected cultural practices over the course of the Middle Period, including
issues such as collective and individual reading, places of reading and
times of reading. On the other hand, it addresses the social background of
those groups that were instrumental in these changes as they had increas-
ing access to written texts and started to participate in reading practices.
The study’s central concern is thus to trace the effects that the spread of
written texts in the Middle Period had on the social contexts and cultural
practices of consuming and receiving the written word. Reading will
thereby be considered mainly in relation to scholarly and literary texts
and to the exclusion of pragmatic literacy, that is, the role of the written
word in fields such as administration, business life and legal proceedings.
Also excluded from this study is Koran recitation as the sacralisation of
the Koranic word engendered specific recitation and reading practices that
constitute a field apart. On the basis of these assumptions and limitations,
it is the book’s central argument that the Egyptian and Syrian societies
underwent a drastic reconfiguration of cultural practices during the Middle
Period where the role of the written word significantly increased, a process
referred to in the following as ‘textualisation’. This went hand-in-hand
with a fundamental transformation of the social contexts in which these
practices took place, the process of ‘popularisation’, as the spread of the
written word enabled non-elite groups in society to play a more active role
in the reception and ultimately in the production of the written word.
Reading practices are notoriously difficult to grasp as reading, in con-
trast to writing, leaves fewer traces in the historical record. However, this
study proposes that at least for the Middle Period we have a sufficient
array of narrative, normative and documentary textual sources as well as
illustrations that allow the study of such reading practices in some detail.
The narrative sources are in the first place the standard chronicles, bio-
graphical dictionaries, travel accounts, autobiographies and topographical
works that have been widely used for the period, such as al-Maqrīzī’s
topographical overview of Cairo, his Khiṭaṭ; Ibn al-ʿAdīm’s Bughyat;
the collection of biographies of scholars in Aleppo; and Ibn Ṭulūn’s
Damascus-focused chronicle, the Qalāʾid. Among the normative sources,
manuals for market inspectors, fatwā collections and pedagogical treatises
are of particular importance. Starting with Ibn Saḥnūn’s (d. 256/870)
Book of the Teachers’ Right Conduct the later genre witnessed a constant
stream of works in the following centuries that provide some insights into

HIRSCHLER PRINT.indd 5 14/10/2011 12:14

 The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands

the realm of teaching and learning. However, the use of such normative
sources has been limited in this study due to the obvious limitations of
texts that were generally intended to depict what was understood to be the
ideal. Even a cursory reading of a text such as the Madkhal by Ibn al-Ḥājj
(d. 737/1336) – to take one of the most blatant examples of this issue –
alerts one to the author’s constant attempts to depict his present age as
one of decay in contrast to what he understood to be the correct course of
affairs.
Consequently, this study employs to a large extent documentary
sources, some of which are well-established in scholarship such as endow-
ment deeds and some of which have received less attention such as reading
certificates (samāʿ) and library catalogues. Although reading certificates
have been studied for decades, their full implications for social and cul-
tural history have only recently been understood, particularly in studies
such as those by Leder (cf. Chapter 2). These certificates are one of the few
pre-ninth/fifteenth-century documentary sources that are available in sig-
nificant numbers for the Arabic-speaking lands. They provide historians of
the region with a unique source genre for a variety of issues, including the
history of textual reception, which is not available to the same extent for
other world regions. Scholars issued these certificates mainly for readings
of ḥadīth works, but it can be assumed that the practices reflected in them
were not limited to this field. Ḥadīth studies had a paradigmatic function
for other fields of learning in that authors often wrote, for example, peda-
gogical treatises as introductions to studying this field, although the texts
obviously had implications for other fields of learning as well. The wider
remit of the certificates is further evident from the works that straddled the
borderline between ḥadīth and other fields such as the main case study in
Chapter 2 that is positioned somewhere between ḥadīth and history.
While the reading certificates are a source genre that is practically
unique to the region’s history, library catalogues are a quasi-universal
source genre. Scholarship has shown the potential of inventories and cata-
logues for gaining insights into the history of reception and reading, espe-
cially for Latin Europe in the Middle Ages.9 For the pre-Ottoman Middle
East, by contrast, research on libraries and book collections has tradi-
tionally relied on anecdotal evidence from narrative sources with some
additions from endowment records. This study uses a set of documentary
sources that provide more detailed evidence of the history of libraries and
their organisation, most importantly the earliest surviving catalogue of a
library in the Arabic-speaking lands that dates to the seventh/thirteenth
century.
The final major group of sources for this study are illustrations in liter-

HIRSCHLER PRINT.indd 6 14/10/2011 12:14

 Introduction

ary texts, which yield a fair amount of material – though far less than the
textual sources – as their producers delighted in depicting their own world
of scholarship and learning. While some might argue that their sole func-
tion was to elucidate the literary texts, this book regards them as a source
that provides evidence of actual reading practices. When tracing the devel-
opment of such illustrations over various regions and periods it clearly
emerges that the illustrators also reacted to changing cultural practices in
their non-textual environment. The most important group of illustrations
for the history of reading features in the thirteen illustrated manuscripts
of the Maqāmāt by al-Ḥarīrī (d. 516/1122), one of the rare pre-modern
Arabic texts that has brought forth a considerable number of images.
The Maqāmāt’s illustrated manuscripts date to the seventh/thirteenth and
early eighth/fourteenth centuries and they were produced in Egypt and
Syria, with some possibly originating in Iraq. References in the Maqāmāt
to a children’s school resulted in six relevant illustrations (Plates 2–7),
and those to a library in three relevant illustrations (Plates 13–15).10 The
production of illustrated manuscripts of al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt suddenly
stopped in the eighth/fourteenth century and no further Arabic work has
produced a comparable set of material. Chapter 3 fills this gap with a set of
illustrations (Plates 8–11) that were produced in the eastern Islamic world,
including Iraq, for the romantic epic of Layla and Majnūn in the version of
Niẓāmī Ganjawī (fl. seventh/thirteenth century). Due to their origin in the
eastern lands they cannot serve as main primary sources for this study, but
they allow the Maqāmāt’s images to be profiled in a comparative perspec-
tive, especially as both groups have some regional overlap in Iraq and with
Plate 8 some periodical overlap in the early seventh/thirteenth century.
On the basis of this source material Chapter 1 introduces the issues of
literacy, orality and aurality in pre-print Middle Eastern societies with a
special focus on the Middle Period. It provides an overview of the long-
term development of writerly culture and discusses the interplay between
cultural and social history with regard to ‘popular’ cultural practices. The
subsequent chapters progress chronologically, starting in the sixth/twelfth
century with Chapter 2 and in the late seventh/thirteenth century with
Chapters 3 and 4. The discussion in the latter two chapters leads up to
the end of the Middle Period, which is also the focus of Chapter 5. At the
same time, the chapters reflect the book’s geographical shift, with Chapter
2 being mainly placed in Damascus and the following chapters being
increasingly located in Cairo.
Chapter 2 focuses in particular on the issue of popularisation and dis-
cusses communal reading sessions with the large audiences that accom-
panied and followed the ‘publication’ of scholarly works. While these

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 The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands

reading sessions were a long-standing cultural practice for the purpose of

transmitting knowledge and had always attracted non-scholarly audiences,
documents started to systematically record the participation of these indi-
viduals only in the earlier parts of the Middle Period. The case study of The
History of Damascus allows the social background of individual partici-
pants from a wide variety of walks of life, including craftsmen and traders,
to be traced in detail. These non-scholarly groups attended reading ses-
sions that closely resembled the standard scholarly sessions of the learned.
Yet the ‘popular’ sessions that these groups attended had a distinct profile
with regard to issues such as preferred weekdays and places of reading.
While the popularisation of reading sessions transformed the social context
of this cultural practice, its mostly aural character remained unchanged.
By contrast, Chapter 3 specifically addresses the close link between
popularisation and textualisation by turning to the transformation of
primary education and to the impact this transformation had on modes
of reading acquisition. The spectacular spread of endowed institutions of
learning and teaching that started to gain pace in Egypt and Syria during
the seventh/thirteenth century entailed a significant rise in the provision of
free schooling for children. Consequently, wider groups in society started
to acquire at least a basic level of reading skills that enabled them to play
a more active role as individual readers, and not only as participants in
communal reading practices. This quantitative expansion of primary edu-
cation was accompanied by qualitative changes in the curriculum. The
written word increasingly played a central role in the teaching practices
of children’s schools to the detriment of mnemotechnical skills that had
previously been dominant. These qualitative changes were ultimately to
engender the first pedagogical reflections in Arabic on how to introduce
children to the written word.
Chapter 4 returns to the spread of endowed institutions and traces the
emergence of a new type of library: the local endowed library. These
libraries replaced the central-ruler libraries of previous centuries and
patrons from a wide variety of walks of life set them up. The increasing
number of such libraries in cities and towns ensured that the written word
was widely available even to those who could not afford to or did not
want to purchase manuscripts. Documentary evidence of such collections
shows that they had a thematic profile that was distinct from collections
held by individual scholars and that they arguably catered for reading
audiences beyond the scholarly world as well. The chapter concludes
with a discussion of the organisation of the earliest extant Arabic library
catalogue, which shows that cataloguers took care to make the collections
accessible to non-specialists.

HIRSCHLER PRINT.indd 8 14/10/2011 12:14

 Introduction

In Chapter 5 the argument turns away from the mostly scholarly set-
tings of reading sessions, children’s schools and libraries to discuss the
emergence of distinct popular practices of reading. From the sixth/twelfth
century onwards sources increasingly mentioned readings of popular
epics, such as the Sīrat ʿAntar, and scholarly authors strove to distance
themselves from these reading practices. However, the scholarly criti-
cism of these readings resulted not only from the content of the texts, but
also from the fact that these written texts circulated in spatial and social
settings that were beyond the scholarly world. The chapter traces how
the emergence of these epics as written texts induced scholarly authors
to criticise what they perceived as a challenge to their control over the
transmission of authoritative knowledge. Finally, the chapter turns to
popular works authored by individuals from those groups in society that
were gaining more and more access to the written word during the Middle
Period. At this point, these new readers started to appear not only as con-
sumers, but also as producers of books who started to turn their literary
skills into authorship with works that catered for the expanding popular
realms of reading.

Notes
1. Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist. Al-Jāḥiẓ: Günther (2006b). Overproduction: Rosenthal
(1995).
2. ‘Analytical’ by contrast with descriptive works that basically summarise
primary sources such as Ḥabashī (1982), Tritton (1957) and Shalaby (1954).
3. Schoeler (2009); Günther (2006b); Toorawa (2005); Touati (2003).
Introduction of print: cf., for instance, Kunt (2008); Messick (1993);
Eickelman (1978). Overview: Roper (2010).
4. Erünsal (1987), (1989), (2007); Badawī (1979); Amīn (1980); Haarmann
(1971); Gully (2008); Petry (1981); Berkey (1992); Chamberlain (1994);
Leder (2003); Bauer (2003); Nabāhīn (1981); al-Nashshār (1993).
5. Pedersen (1984); Schoeler (2009); Touati (2007); Fortna (2011); Hanna
(2003).
6. Kilgour (1998).
7. Gauger (1994).
8. Ḥammāda (1970).
9. Cf., for instance, Lapidge (2006); Sharpe (2008).
10. Non-textual environment: cf. Guthrie (1995); Contadini (2007); on illustra-
tions of readers in Latin Europe cf. Nies (1991); Alexandre-Bidon (1989).
Maqāmāt: Grabar (1984); cf. Haldane (1978) for illustrated manuscripts of
the Mamluk period. Baer (2001) discusses illustrations of Islamic children’s
schools, but does so in isolation from most other relevant sources. Seventh/
thirteenth-century manuscripts: MSS. Paris, BnF, arabe 3929, 5847 and

HIRSCHLER PRINT.indd 9 14/10/2011 12:14

 The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands

6094; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Esad Efendi 2961; London, BL, or. 1200; St
Petersburg, Academy of Sciences, C. 23. Eighth/fourth-century manuscripts:
London, BL, or. 9718, or. ad. 7293 and 22114; Wien, Nationalbibliothek,
A.F. 9; Oxford, Bodleian, Marsh 458. On dates and origins cf. Grabar (1984),
7–19 and Rice (1959), 213–19; on individual manuscripts cf. Buchthal
(1940); Grabar (1963); Haldane (1985); Bolshakov (1997). Some of the
manuscripts have two – generally quite similar – illustrations of the school
scene. London, BL, or. add. 22114 has eight additional illustrations on fols
85, 85v, 86, 168, 168v, 169, 169v and 170 that each show just one pupil with
the two protagonists. The illustrations in the manuscripts Paris, BnF, MS
arabe 5847, fol. 148v, Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Esad Efendi 2961, fol. 192 and
Oxford, Bodleian, Marsh 458, fol. 116v do not provide additional material
for the present discussion. Additional illustrations on the second maqāma do
not focus on the library (Paris, BnF, arabe 5847, fol. 4v; London, BL, or. add.
22114, fol. 6v.; Wien, Nationalbibliothek, A.F. 9, fol. 8v; Paris, BnF, arabe
5847, fol. 6v.). The illustrations in London, BL, or. 9718, fol. 9 and or. 1200,
fol. 6v depict the library scene, but do not include additional information.

10

HIRSCHLER PRINT.indd 10 14/10/2011 12:14

 1

Reading and Writerly Culture

The history of reading of any period, particularly any pre-modern period,

is intrinsically linked to the relationship between orality and literacy.
What effects did the spread of the written word have on oral forms of
communication? How did the textualisation of cultural practices interact
with long-standing oral modes of transmitting knowledge? In what ways
were competing notions of authority associated with orality and literacy
renegotiated in the light of changing modes for safeguarding informa-
tion? Questions such as these have preoccupied scholarship on the Early
Period of Islamic history just as they have occupied scholars of medi-
eval Europe and other world regions. For Islamic history such questions
gained particular importance as they were, rightly or wrongly, closely
bound to the key issue of the authenticity of information on the genesis
and development of early Islamic societies. Consequently, the work of
scholars such as Goldziher, Schacht, Sezgin, Kister, Cook, Crone and
many others have directly or indirectly taken up the way in which infor-
mation came to be seen as authoritative within the interplay of orality
and literacy.
In addition, this subject has been virtually unavoidable in the study
of the Early Period because it was not only the Koran, the foundational
text of the emerging Muslim community, that was to be read and, more
importantly, to be recited and heard. These different modes of preserving,
transmitting and consuming the text also characterised the nascent com-
munity’s second defining genre, ḥadīth. Some early scholars feared that a
written tradition would endanger the unique status of the Koran and, fur-
thermore, might lead to erroneous transmission and falsification. Such dis-
cussions on the validity and reliability of written information in the field of
ḥadīth subsequently spread to other fields of knowledge such as grammar,
philosophy and medicine. Even dictionaries such as al-Azharī’s (d.
370/980) Tahdhīb al-lugha and earlier works reflected the long-standing
primacy of the non-written word as they were not organised alphabetically
but according to a phonetic system that differentiated between guttural and
labial sounds.1

11

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 The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands

Literacy, Orality and Aurality

The work of Schoeler has most directly addressed those issues of the Early
Period that are relevant for the present study. In a number of articles and
books he developed a broad outline of the development of literacy that
he synthesised in his 2009 monograph. He argues, in line with a number
of other scholars, that the focus of scholarship needs to move away from
the binary opposition between the written and the oral, as in the first three
Islamic centuries an inseparable mixture between both modes of com-
munication existed. The existence of hypomnema, that is, draft notes,
notebooks and written records, epitomise this close interplay between
the spoken and the written. These records did not constitute independent
manuscript-books, but were closely linked to oral forms of transmission
and served as a mnemonic aid during lectures or discussions. Actual
manuscript-books (syngramma) that writers intended for wider circula-
tion and that indicated the emergence of a distinct writerly culture started
to come into existence, according to Schoeler, only in the third/ninth
century. Scholarship has disagreed when exactly actual manuscript-books
emerged, with Elad, for instance, assuming a substantially earlier date. Yet
the main line of continuity between the Early and the Middle Period that
follows out of this debate is that the different modes of communicating
texts continued to co-exist, even after written texts had started to spread
on a large scale. In neither of the two periods did this interplay between
the oral and the written constitute a linear and unidirectional development
whereby the written would necessarily replace the oral. Ali, for instance,
has argued that the emergence of literary salons in third/ninth-century
Baghdad and their subsequent development took place in an oral/aural
environment in which written practices played hardly any role. Similar
to the modern history of the region, as discussed by Messick, and also
in medieval European history, where the works of Brantley, Green and
Reynolds, to name but a few, have discussed the issue in detail, the picture
that emerges is one where orality and literacy often not only co-existed,
but were in many cases mutually dependent.2
The second relevant theme for the present study that has emerged out of
discussion on orality and literacy in the Early Islamic Period complements
these reflections on the nature of the written material by addressing the
other side of the equation: namely, to what extent the term ‘aural’ rather
than ‘oral’ captures the main issues that were at stake. The focus on orality
implies that the specific way of preserving knowledge in memory, as
written text or in another form, was the central point of scholarly discus-
sion during the Early and the Middle Period. However, such discussions

12

HIRSCHLER PRINT.indd 12 14/10/2011 12:14

 Reading and Writerly Culture

were at least as much concerned with the aural mode of reception as they
were with the question of whether the reader or reciter activated the mate-
rial from a written text or from memory. Characteristically, given the
marginal position of issues linked to reception, scholarship has hardly
developed this theme and Schoeler, for instance, uses the term ‘aural’ in
his book’s title without discussing it in much detail. Yet numerous studies,
such as Günther’s discussion of a fourth/tenth-century historical work and
Toorawa’s discussion of third/ninth-century writerly culture, have taken
up this term and have shown its analytical usefulness.3
One main challenge when dealing with the issue of ‘aurality’ is a termi-
nological one, as the term could encompass modes that ranged from purely
aural/oral forms of transmission to forms that match modern concepts of
individual reading. This terminological fluidity resulted from the fact that
texts were often directed as much at the ear (aural reading) as they were
at the eye (visual reading). The consumption of a text could thus occur
in either form and scholars could consider, depending on the concrete
context, both modes of reception to be valid. The format, structure and
transmission of many pre-modern texts can often be understood only
against the background of this twofold reception. The classical example
for hearing texts occurred in teaching sessions where the participant
‘heard’ (samiʿa) the text. However, writers used this term irrespective
of whether an individual followed the reading in a manuscript or not.
Thus, the term ‘to hear’ by itself did not indicate in any way whether the
reception took place in a purely aural mode or a mixed aural/visual mode,
rather, it indicated that an authorised teacher transmitted the text. The
terminological breadth could even go further: although authors on the
etiquette of teaching evidently did not consider it ‘good practice’, students
sometimes read a work on their own, then acquired an authorisation of
this reading from a teacher and subsequently described this with the term
samiʿa. Again, the main claim was one of authorised transmission so that
a mode of reception that was nothing but individual reading could easily
be subsumed under this term. A similarly broad terminology is evident
from Latin Europe where contemporaries could use the terms audire
and legere as much as the Middle High German hoeren and lesen almost
interchangeably to denote the mode of reception.4
If one were to apply binary notions of orality and literacy to those two
Arabic terms that come closest to ‘reading’ in a modern sense a similar
ambivalence emerges. Ṭālaʿa is relatively unproblematic and denoted
generally in the texts of the pre-modern period as an individual and silent
reading of a text. Yet writers did not use this term often, but rather a
second term, qaraʾa, was used most frequently when they referred to the

13

HIRSCHLER PRINT.indd 13 14/10/2011 12:14

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