A Ninth Century Bookman in Baghdad.

• Position: Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur and Arabic Writerly Culture: A Ninth Century Bookman in Baghdad - Book review

Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur and Arabic Writerly Culture: A Ninth Century Bookman in Baghdad. By SHAWKAT M. TOORAWA. Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures. London: ROUTLEDGE-CURZON, 2005. Pp. xiii + 214. 6180.

The question of how knowledge was transmitted and recorded during the first few centuries of Islam has long been a subject of scholarly interest. The matter is controversial, and the medieval authors' habit of paying tribute to the oral tradition, even if their sources were books, has considerably muddied the water for the modern researcher. It is hard to find a classical Arabic author who is not conflicted, at least outwardly, about using written material as a source for information. Even Abu Bakr al-Suli (d. 335/947). famously a bibliophile and possibly the first owner of a color-coded library, cannot resist a jibe at Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur for being a sahafi, one who relies on the written word, as the book under review notes on p. 22. Nevertheless, by the third/ninth century it had become virtually impossible, as well as impractical, not to rely on books, even for the staunchest of muhaddithun, the category that hung on to oral transmission for the longest time. In the fifth/eleventh century, al-Khatib al-Baghdadi makes a good attempt at demolishing al-Suli's reputation in his biographical notice in Ta'rikh Baghdad (Cairo, 1349/1931, 3: 42ff.), highlighting his unreliability as a traditionist due to his despicable reliance on books (Toorawa, p. 24); still, despite all of al-Suli's shortcomings, his biography in Ta'rikh Baghdad is quite long and includes samples of his poetry as well as a few entertaining stories, providing an implicit acknowledgment of his importance as a scholar.

Toorawa's monograph contributes to the strand of research outlined above by seeking to capture the moment when two mentalities, which the author names the writerly and the oral/aural one, met and struggled for supremacy, before the definitive victory--in practice if not in theory--of the former over the latter. Toorawa opens up a new line of investigation, choosing as the model and illustration of his subject matter not one of the great intellectuals of the age, but the mediocre--in the sense of average--figure of Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur (d. 280/893), author of the Kitab Baghdad and of several other works of poetry and prose, only a few of which have come down to us. The reasons for Toorawa's choice are stated in the introduction, where he remarks that there has been a "disproportionate emphasis ... on such figures as Ibn al-Muqaffa' (d. after 139/757), al-Jahiz (d. 255/868) and Ibn Qutaybah (d. 276/889)," but "[t]here have in fact been very few attempts to describe larger literary or cultural phenomena" (p. 1). Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur is, in other words, only one, medium-sized example of the type of intellectual generated by writerly culture, which...