Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents in the Cambridge Genizah Collections.

AuthorConrad, Lawrence I.

The importance of documentary evidence to the study of medieval Islamic law, administration, fiscal policy, and chancery practice has been acknowledged on all sides for decades, but the integration of this material into modern scholarship has long been impeded by the lack of proper catalogues and editions. The pioneering efforts of Adolf Grohmann and S. M. Stern have more recently been pursued in valuable research by such scholars as Werner Diem, Heinz Halm, Raif-Georges Khoury, Donald Little, D. S. Richards, and perhaps most important, Geoffrey Khan, whose work has covered several collections of papyri and various parts of the Cambridge Genizah collections.

The book under review here publishes the Arabic legal and administrative documents in the Genizah collections at Cambridge University Library. A total of 159 texts are included: 69 legal documents and 90 administrative, all but one in Arabic script.(1) For each document Khan provides a physical description, an edition of the text, textual notes on questions of orthography, syntax, and various mistakes and anomalies, an English translation, and a commentary dealing with matters of historical interpretation. There are twenty-four plates illustrating some of the documents, and access to the material is facilitated by indices of Genizah documents, subjects, Arabic, Hebrew, and Coptic personal names, place names (not only of countries, provinces, and towns, but also including streets, offices, and buildings), titles and professions, and miscellaneous Arabic words.

The briefest glance at the plates and the corresponding editions will suffice to confirm the scale of Khan's achievement in this book. The standard of the editions and translation is very high, and the notes and commentaries are clear and extremely informative. In the eleven cases (nos. 50, 52, 65, 73-74, 77, 85, 88, 103-4, and 109) where documents have previously been edited by other scholars, variant readings are always clearly stated; Khan's readings almost invariably seem preferable, though the fact that none of these documents is included in the plates means that the reader cannot check this for himself. A formidable array of parallel textual evidence and secondary literature is brought to bear throughout, and serves to resolve many questions of reading and interpretation. Of particular significance are the detailed introductions provided for the most important types of material. A long discussion of sales contracts (pp...

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