The World in a Book

Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition

Elias Muhanna

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400887859
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di letteratura comparata

A groundbreaking study of one of the greatest encyclopedias of the medieval Islamic world—al-Nuwayri's The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri was a fourteenth-century Egyptian polymath and the author of one of the greatest encyclopedias of the medieval Islamic world—a thirty-one-volume work entitled The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition. A storehouse of knowledge, this enormous book brought together materials on nearly every conceivable subject, from cosmology, zoology, and botany to philosophy, poetry, ethics, statecraft, and history. Composed in Cairo during the golden age of Islamic encyclopedic activity, the Ultimate Ambition was one of hundreds of large-scale compendia, literary anthologies, dictionaries, and chronicles produced at this time—an effort that was instrumental in organizing the archive of medieval Islamic thought.In the first study of this landmark work in a European language, Elias Muhanna explores its structure and contents, sources and influences, and reception and impact in the Islamic world and Europe. He sheds new light on the rise of encyclopedic literature in the learned cities of the Mamluk Empire and situates this intellectual movement alongside other encyclopedic traditions in the ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment periods. He also uncovers al-Nuwayri's world: a scene of bustling colleges, imperial chanceries, crowded libraries, and religious politics.Based on award-winning scholarship, The World in a Book opens up new areas in the comparative study of encyclopedic production and the transmission of knowledge.

CHAPTER ONE

ENCYCLOPEDISM IN
THE MAMLUK EMPIRE

IN A CHAPTER ABOUT WINE and its afflictions in his vast compendium of knowledge, Shihāb al-Dīn al-Nuwayrī noted that among the beverage’s many evils was its smell, which lingered on one’s breath for days and required the drinker who feared scandal to remain at home until it dissipated. After exploring the legal dimensions of the Islamic prohibition on alcohol, al-Nuwayrī curiously offered his reader a recipe for a special tonic that cleared up the traces of wine on the drinker’s breath. A compound of colocynth, fennel, galingale, elecampane, cloves, gum arabic, and rosewater, the tonic’s intricate recipe seemed to promise results, and al-Nuwayrī himself vouched for its efficacy, remarking: “Indeed, it eliminates the smell of alcohol from one’s mouth, just as they claim.”¹

Like much of al-Nuwayrī’s book, the recipe for this concoction was copied from an older text and interpolated among the thousands of excerpts, quotations, and observations that formed his work, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition. A reader unfamiliar with one of the recipe’s ingredients would find, in other corners of the book, discussions devoted to its beneficial properties drawn from Galenic and Avicennan humoral medicine, as well as examples of Arabic poetry describing its color or smell, and perhaps an ancient magical-agronomical technique for cultivating it in one’s garden. Splicing together materials of diverse antiquity and provenance, the Ultimate Ambition was a textual cabinet of curiosities, a paper museum containing literary artifacts from a huge archive of sources.

The gathering of knowledge from different disciplines and discourses within a single book was not al-Nuwayrī’s innovation. The Egyptian and Syrian territories of the Mamluk Empire witnessed the production of encyclopedic texts on a scale unprecedented in Islamic history. In addition to the Ultimate Ambition were other compendia by figures such as Jamāl al-Dīn al-Waṭwāṭ, Ibn Faḍl Allāh al-ʿUmarī, and Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī al-Qalqashandī, whose books spanned many volumes and contained material on diverse subjects, from history and geography to astronomy and zoology. Similarly comprehensive in outlook yet more modest in size, books on the classification of the sciences outlined a curriculum of study for the novice, while single-subject reference works provided targeted access to specialized information. In traditional genres as well as some new ones, a vogue for collection and classification reigned.

This backdrop of bookish activity helps to make some sense of al-Nuwayrī’s decision to retire from a successful career in the upper echelons of the imperial government in order to spend the rest of his life writing an encyclopedia. Mamluk Cairo was a city of colleges, with hundreds of educational institutions catering to a population of local and itinerant scholars and students. Booksellers did brisk business in didactic texts, primers, epitomes, commentaries, and other types of works offering shortcuts to navigating the accumulated archive of Islamic thought. A learned individual like al-Nuwayrī, possessed of fine penmanship, bookmaking skills, and a good knowledge of classical texts could earn a respectable living copying sought-after manuscripts and producing compilations that curated the canon in different ways.

On the face of it, the Ultimate Ambition does not seem to have been a book designed to sell widely. The scale of the work suggests that it could hardly have served the same function as many other popular compilations—as a practical textbook, for instance, or a compact anthology of entertaining anecdotes. The pagination of the autograph manuscript—many volumes of which are preserved in Leiden and Paris—puts the entire work in thirty-one volumes, the size of a worthy personal library, hardly a vade mecum.² On the other hand, the Ultimate Ambition was not unique in its elephantine proportions. Cairo’s book markets contained works of all sizes, from the tiniest Qurans and collections of devotional prayers designed for portability, to enormous chronicles probably destined for library use. These latter works were exorbitantly expensive but, like any luxury good, the prices for manuscripts fluctuated and occasionally collapsed in times of economic hardship and ecological disaster. Reports of personal and institutional libraries containing many hundreds or thousands of volumes are not uncommon.

What was al-Nuwayrī’s purpose in composing the Ultimate Ambition? This is the main preoccupation of this chapter. Did he aim to produce a manual for fellow scribes? Or was he seized by a fear that the Mongol armies would soon ravage the colleges and libraries of the Mamluk Empire and lay waste to the intellectual heritage of Islam? Evidence for a variety of motivations may be marshaled from such a voluminous text, but the subtle calculus underlying an author’s decision to compose a particular book is rarely straightforward to ascertain. Beyond the immediate level of prefatory remarks and other authorial confidences, there are the circumstances of educational and professional experiences to ponder, the cultural cachet attached to certain types of intellectual activity at this time, along with narrower questions of compositional models, access to sources, and intended readerships.

In the case of the Ultimate Ambition and other contemporary works examined here, there is a further interpretive challenge to address, which has to do with the problem of genre. Texts recognizable as “encyclopedic” in one way or another are attested in nearly every discipline and textual category in Arabic literature, including lexicons, poetry anthologies, biographical dictionaries, historical chronicles, collections of legal responsa, miscellanies, pharmacopeias, and more. Despite growing interest in such texts, a theoretical framework for the study of Islamic encyclopedism has yet to be elaborated.³ In a sense, this is the larger enterprise to which this book seeks to contribute. However, it is also a problem to be confronted at the outset of the discussion.

For the present purposes, exploring the matter of why al-Nuwayrī and his contemporaries produced the kinds of works they did requires attending to several deceptively simple questions. What exactly is meant by the term “encyclopedia” in the study of Mamluk literature? Does it presuppose the existence of a genre, or rather a set of compositional features shared by different texts and intellectual traditions? In either case, what are its distinguishing traits and what sets it apart from earlier varieties of encyclopedic writing in the Arabic-Islamic tradition? This chapter will begin to address these questions in the course of situating al-Nuwayrī and his Ultimate Ambition within the literary landscape of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

DEFINITIONS

While the history of encyclopedic writing in the medieval European tradition has been well charted from its origins in Isidore of Seville’s seventh-century Etymologiae to the massive thirteenth-century Speculum maius of Vincent de Beauvais and beyond, the history of Islamic encyclopedism remains comparatively obscure. In a 1966 article about encyclopedias in the Arab world, the French scholar Charles Pellat claimed that, to his knowledge, no such studies had ever been written on the subject.⁴ In fact, Pellat had been scooped over a hundred years earlier by the Austrian orientalist Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall, who produced an initial survey of encyclopedias written in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish drawn principally from the great seventeenth-century bibliographical compendium by Kâtip Çelebi (d. 1067/1657), Resolving the Doubts Concerning the Names of Books and Disciplines (Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī al-kutub wa-l-funūn).⁵

Combing through this catalog of fifteen thousand books, Hammer-Purgstall assembled a list of 132 encyclopedic texts written over the course of a millennium. The topical range of his list was expansive but centered on the Arabic classifications of the sciences and propaedeutic texts that began to appear in profusion in the tenth century. Heterogeneous in form and character, these works included systematic curricula of the disciplines such as The Enumeration of the Sciences (Iḥṣāʾ al-ʿulūm) by the philosopher al-Fārābī (d. 339/950) and dictionaries of technical terms such as The Keys to the Sciences (Mafātīḥ al-ʿulūm) by Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Khwārizmī (fl. 366/976). Also of interest to Hammer-Purgstall were programs for the integration of the rational and religious sciences and bibliographic works that cataloged the basic texts of different disciplines. Among the latter was the masterwork of Kâtip Çelebi himself, whom Hammer-Purgstall described as “the Hermes Trismegistus of the new Oriental sciences: the Diderot, Bacon, and Meusel” of the Islamic world.⁶

The history of encyclopedism elaborated by Pellat a century and a half later was rooted in a different sphere: the tradition of adab, a body of literary works containing entertaining and edifying discussions on a great array of social, political, ethical, and natural historical topics. One of the oldest genres in classical Arabic literature, the earliest sense of adab was connected with the idea of habit or custom, a standard of conduct within Bedouin Arab society based on ancestral precedent.⁷ With the emergence of urban polities following the Islamic conquests, adab came to be associated with the refined culture of the city. To possess good adab meant to be well mannered, well dressed, well spoken, and well rounded. The model litterateur (adīb) was—if not a walking encyclopedia—certainly an individual who had something apposite and witty to say about nearly any topic.

Exemplifying this standard of erudite civility was a repertoire of Arabic poetic, anecdotal, and proverbial materials, the study of which was essential to the formation of the adīb. The books that gathered these materials for the purpose of both instructing and delighting readers came to constitute a literary genre known by the same name as the social ideal they cultivated. Adab literature grew more expansive over time and its purview extended beyond the philological disciplines—grammar, lexicography, prosody, and rhetoric—to include a wide-ranging knowledge of ancient Arabian poetry and lore as well as the literary and philosophical heritage of the Iranian, Indian, and Hellenistic worlds.

Surveying Arabic literary history from its beginnings through its nineteenth-century renaissance, Pellat sketched the outlines of an encyclopedic canon springing from adab’s central virtue of omnivorous erudition, epitomized by the idea of “taking a little of everything” (al-akhdh min kull shayʾ bi-ṭaraf) in the words of the Iraqi polymath al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868–69) whose own oeuvre displayed enormous topical breadth and diversity.⁸ Of his extant works, The Book of Animals (Kitāb al-ḥayawān) comes closest to what we might call an encyclopedia, in spite of its author’s signature digressions that blend the treatment of his zoological theme with long excursuses on other philosophical, historical, theological, and sociological topics.⁹

Rather more systematic in form and programmatic in content than al-Jāḥiẓ’s compositions were the works of his contemporary Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/889)—especially his Quintessential Reports (ʿUyūn al-akhbār)—which inaugurated a tradition of adab compendia that aimed to provide an overview of the topics that any aspirant to a certain status of cultural literacy would be expected to know.¹⁰ These works were organized into several chapters, each dealing with a specific theme and containing an assortment of materials. For example, Quintessential Reports contained ten chapters on the topics of sovereignty, war, rulership, traits and morals, knowledge, piety, friends, achieving one’s ends, food, and women. Such wide-ranging overviews were particularly valued by the class of administrators and secretaries (kuttāb, sing. kātib) of the Abbasid Empire, whom Ibn Qutayba described in his philological manual, The Secretary’s Art (Adab al-kātib), as the descendants of a great tradition of Near Eastern secretaryship:

The Persians always used to say, “He who is not knowledgeable about diverting water into channels, digging out courses for irrigation streams and blocking up disused well-shafts; about the changes in the length of the days as they increase and decrease, the revolution of the sun, the rising-places of the stars and the state of the new moon as it begins to wax, and its subsequent phases; about the various weights in use; about the measurement of triangles, four-sided figures and polygons; about the construction of bridges and aqueducts, irrigation machines and water wheels; and about the materials used by various artisans, and the fine points of financial accounting—such a person must be considered only partly-qualified as a secretary.”¹¹

The different visions of Islamic encyclopedism presented in Hammer-Purgstall and Pellat’s accounts are a consequence of the nebulous character of the phenomenon they were investigating. The term “encyclopedia” is capacious and has been used in different ways throughout its history, beginning in the European tradition from which it derives. Of recent vintage, the word first appeared in Latin in the late fifteenth century, coined by scholars to designate an ideal of humanist education, an approach to learning that stressed the unity of all knowledge. Until the mid-twentieth century, historians, following the opinion of those who coined the term, believed that it derived from an ancient Greek word meaning the “circle of learning” (enkuklopaideia). It was later established that this word was a corruption of the Greek formulation enkuklios paideia, meaning “general knowledge” or “well-rounded education.”¹²

The association of the term “encyclopedia” with the features that define it in modern usage—e.g., objectivity, multidisciplinarity, comprehensiveness, systematic organization—did not take place until the eighteenth century, with the publication of Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia in 1710, the text that would serve as one of the inspirations for Diderot and d’Alembert’s great Encyclopédie in 1751.¹³ Between the date of its earliest appearance in the late fifteenth century and the emergence of the modern encyclopedic reference book, very few works called themselves “...