A Medieval Muslim Scholar at Work: Ibn Tawus and His Library.

AuthorBowering, Gerhard

By Etan Kohlberg. Islamic Philosophy, Theology, and Science. Texts and Studies, 12. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992. Pp. ix + 470. HF1 210, $120.

The present volume is a classic in the bibliographical study of Islamic primary sources, especially those widely used in medieval Shi'i circles. Exhaustively and meticulously, Etan Kohlberg documents the prominent place Ibn Tawus (Radi al-Din Abu'l-Qasim Ali b. Musa b. Jafar, 589/1193-664/ 1266) and his library occupy in the literary history of Twelver Shiism. This two-part monograph provides a comprehensive picture of Ibn Tawus as a Muslim scholar in the Middle Ages. It establishes a solid foundation for the study of the intellectual world of Shiism at a time when the Mongol invasions of the Muslim world redirected the flux of Islamic literary history. Ibn Tiwus' private library cannot be compared in size to the much larger public libraries of his time or even to the private collection of the vizier Ibn al-Alqami. The vizier's collection, established in 644/1247, was probably five times as large as that of Ibn Tawus. The latter remains, however, the only one surviving the Mongol destruction at Baghdad for which substantial evidence on its composition is available today.

Part I of the monograph (pp. 1-91) disengages the life and thought of Ibn Tawus from the primary sources with skillful analysis. It carefully describes the modest significance of his prolific literary output for the history of Shilism and gathers the available information on his writings (all in Arabic and mainly on tradition, polemics and history). Finally, it offers a synthetic survey of his library, probes its composition and defines the collector's working methods and sources of reference. Part II (pp. 93-391) presents an annotated list of 669 titles to be found in Ibn Tawus' library during his lifetime (about a third of the actual total of its books) and catalogs the titles as completely as possible at the present stage of information and research. Kohlberg effectively pieces together a mosaic of titles that demonstrate that Ibn Tawus was a bibliophile who collected detailed information about a substantial number of the books that he owned or read. Besides an excellent general index and a detailed bibliography, Kohlberg also offers the reader indices of authors and subjects, as well as a chronological conspectus of the works cited as part of Ibn Tawus' library (pp. 393-470).

Much of the information on Ibn Tawus' collection, about...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT