World Survey of Islamic Manuscripts.

• Author: McChesney, R.D.
• Position: 4 vols.

These four volumes are an introduction to the collections, both public and private, of Islamic manuscripts in 106 countries and the Vatican. Approximately 5,000 collections are documented, though "collection" is perhaps not quite the right word. The holdings of individual countries range from a single Islamic manuscript recorded for Slovenia to the hundreds of thousands in Turkey. The World Survey is an ambitious, well-executed undertaking that should be a revelation for even the seasoned student of Islamic manuscripts. What impresses and occasionally surprises is not only the extent of some of the collections but also the lengthy history of listing, describing and cataloguing those collections. In addition there is much information (particularly for Turkey, Syria, and Iraq) on library acquisitions and mergers.

It is important to recognize the achievement of the general editor (and contributor of several entries), Geoffrey Roper. Marshaling and managing as diverse a group of contributors as appears here, transforming what were surely widely disparate submissions into a coherent whole, while still allowing for some individuality of expression by the participants, was no small feat. In addition, the publication itself appears virtually free of typographical error.

The contributions are somewhat uneven - not surprising considering the number of people involved in the work. Those of Oleg Akimushkin, Lawrence Conrad, Stoyanka Kenderova, Arias Khalidov, Scan O'Fahey, and Geoffrey Roper should be singled out as models of informativeness.

The volumes are organized by country, each country covered by one or, in a few cases, two contributors. The countries are arranged alphabetically, although the surveys for certain countries (Algeria, Australia, Burkina Faso, Chad, China, Comoros, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Indonesia, Libya, Mauritania, and Philippines) were received too late for proper alphabetical inclusion and so appear in the fourth volume along with additional information and corrections for France, Germany, India, Iraq, Ireland, Nigeria and Palestine. Volume one begins with Afghanistan and ends with Iran, volume two covers Iraq to Russia; and volume three, Saudi Arabia to Yugoslavia (Serbia-Montenegro). Each volume has an index of languages (excluding Arabic, Persian, and Turkish) and an index of names. The fourth volume provides comprehensive name and language indexes for all the volumes and adds an index of the names of the collections.

The country entries are organized in the following fashion. First comes a listing of any union catalogues or surveys for the country (some of the entries begin with an introductory essay as well) and after that the individual collections are organized alphabetically by region or state, if applicable, and city. Within each city, union catalogues or surveys are listed first, followed by entries for each collection, again alphabetically arranged...