A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture: The Library of Ibn 'Abd al-Hadi.

• Author: Burak, Guy

A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture: The Library of Ibn 'Abd al-Hadi. By KONRAD HIRSCHLER. Edinburgh: EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2019. Pp. x + 624, illus. $130.

Like many other ubiquitous things, catalogues and finding aids of different sorts are often quite transparent. They are frequently used, but rarely get the attention of their users or are treated as complex artifacts that merit systematic study. In comparison with their modern counterparts, premodern "catalogues" and inventories have fared somewhat better as far as scholarly attention is concerned. Konrad Hirschler's A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture--the author's second major study of a medieval Damascene "catalogue" (following Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library. The Ashrafiya Library Catalogue [Edinburgh, 2016])--is an important addition to this small but steadily growing body of works devoted to inventories of premodern book collections and libraries.

This monograph is a study of the fihrist that the Damascene 'Abd al-Hadi (d. 1503) completed in 1492, before he endowed his book collection to the library of al-'Umariyya Madrasa in the ?ali?iyya quarter in the outskirts of Damascus. For twenty-first-century readers, the study of Ibn 'Abd al-Hadi's collection may seem of self-evident importance, as he has become a fairly well-known figure among historians of late Marniuk and early Ottoman Damascus and among students of Hanbali thought. But this renown is to a considerable extent the product of the publication, since the early twentieth century, of many of his works, since during his lifetime Ibn 'Abd al-Hadi was a middling, even marginal, scholarly figure; he served as a notary witness ('adl) in the judiciary in Damascus, but did not hold major teaching positions, with the exception of a teaching circle (?alqa) in al-'Umariyya. His biography is also very local: as opposed to the ideal image of the itinerant Muslim scholar, Ibn 'Abd al-Hadi spent most of his life in Damascus (he only traveled to Baalbek once), and his existence barely caught the attention of the biographers who composed the centennial biographical dictionaries. Despite his relative social and scholarly marginality, Ibn 'Abd al-Hadi had some social capital, as a member of a branch of the Hanbali Maqdisi family. Since their arrival in Damascus from Palestine in the mid-twelfth century, the family played a central role in the city's scholarly and judicial life, especially with regard to promoting "a fusion of traditionalist scholarship centered around ?adith scholarship with charismatic religious leadership" (p. 25).

Ibn 'Abd al-Hadi left a large corpus of works on a staggeringly wide range of topics, from ?adith to Hanbali fiqh to cooking. The "rediscoverers" of Ibn 'Abd al-Hadi--participants in the scholarly field that Hirschler dubs "Ibn 'Abd al-Hadiology"--have focused on these writings while paying remarkably little attention to an intriguing aspect of his scholarly work: his book collection. By the time he sat down to compile his fihrist, his collection had grown to almost 3,000 titles. Ibn 'Abd al-Hadi did not collect random titles--his collection reflects a very clear perception of himself as a custodian of a local Damascene scholarly tradition. Hirschler aptly defines his protagonist's collecting as a "monumentalisation [project] of what he [Ibn 'Abd al-Hadi]...