Arabic Manuscripts in the Libraries of McGill University.

AuthorBowering, Gerhard

The Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and Urdu manuscripts preserved in various libraries of McGill University, Montreal, number about 650 volumes and belong to the Osler, Blacker Wood, Islamic Studies and Rare Books collections. Some specimens in the Osler deposit were donated by Dr. M. Sa id of Hamadan (Iran) in 1913, but the bulk was originally collected by W. Ivanow (1886-1970) and M. Meyerhof (1874-1945). The Blacker Wood collection includes 238 volumes, most of them collected by W. Ivanow in 1926-27 (and tabulated in his handwritten list with separate pages of annotation). A roughly equal number of mainly Persian manuscripts, obtained from a wide variety of sources, constitutes the Islamic Studies and Rare Books collections.

Almost half of the manuscripts (280 codices representing 275 individual compositions which correspond to 265 entries) are Arabic manuscripts covering the whole spectrum of Islamic disciplines. For the first time Adam Gacek offers an excellent inventory of these Arabic codices in the present scholarly handlist. The most numerous and valuable specimens of the collection are the medical codices of the Osler collection. Among the manuscripts dealing with hadith, law and theology the proportion of Shi ite texts is relatively high. About fifty entries are commentaries, glosses and super-glosses. The earliest dated codices are late 12th and early 13th century C.E., while the vast majority of all volumes dates from the 17th to...

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