by Gowaart Van Den Bossche
One of the goals of the first phase of research in the MMS II project is to undertake a survey of manuscripts and publications relevant to the subject of 15th century historiography. After having surveyed manuscript collections in Leiden, Paris, Berlin and Gotha, we now turned to the holdings of two major institutions in Cairo: the Dār al-Kutub wa-l-Wathāʾiq al-Qawmiyya and the Azhar Library, both of which we — Mohamed Maslouh and Gowaart Van Den Bossche — covered over the course of five weeks from late October until the end of November 2018.
The Dār al-Kutub has two branches in Cairo — one at Bāb al-Khalq (in the magnificent neo-Mamluk palace which also houses the Islamic Museum), which mostly houses microfilm copies, and one on the Nile Corniche, next to the Conrad Hotel, where the physical manuscripts are kept. As we are not only gathering content information but also codicological data, we spent almost all our time working with the physical manuscripts in the Corniche branch. Due to preparatory work by Mohamed Maslouh, Maya Termonia, professor ʿUmar Ryad (KULeuven) and the people at the NVIC (Dutch-Flemish Institute in Cairo) during the months before our visit, we were granted access to the manuscripts immediately on our first day and examined a handful of manuscripts with four sets of eyes. Jo Van Steenbergen and Maya Termonia joined us for the first day, and afterwards we continued the work by ourselves.
Initially, a request was filed to examine about thirty relevant manuscripts which Mohamed had identified in the Khedival catalogues from the 1880s-90s. Some sections of the Dār al-Kutub have seen more recent treatment in dedicated catalogues, but this is not yet the case for historiography and related subjects (Noah Gardiner has written an excellent discussion of available catalogues as well as of the workings of the library, much of which is still true, at: http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/7355). Fortunately, the Dār al-Kutub has a useful database, which is however only accessible on-site. We were allowed to consult this database to make a new list of manuscripts to request a few days after our first visit, and while we had expected there to be a good deal of manuscripts not covered by the Khedival catalogues, we were still surprised by the great number of new items. We returned with more than a hundred new manuscripts to request for consultation.
We were in quite a rush to finish our new list in time, so we missed an important aspect which we found out only after having filed our new request list: many of the “manuscripts” in the manuscript database are not original manuscripts at all. In fact, the Dār al-Kutub has a large collection of microfilmed manuscripts copied from other libraries (in our case several Turkish libraries, Paris, Damascus, …) in the early twentieth century, and then printed, bound and filed amongst the other manuscripts of the library. These copies are not distinguished by their call numbers, so one has to consult the database to make out whether an item is an original manuscript or a microfilm copy. The database sometimes notes where the original manuscripts may be found (though usually not their call numbers). Often times it notes only that it is a microfilm copy, so consulting the printed copy would be necessary to establish the exact whereabouts of the original. Many of those microfilm copies were subsequently copied by hand by employees of the Dār al-Kutub in the 1920s-1940s. While we did not treat the microfilm copies themselves as legitimate entries for our survey, we did make entries for these late copies and we tried to establish the whereabouts of the original copies whenever possible.
We could thus dispense with several of the copies in our new list but still many were old manuscripts. Some of these are very important copies which came into the library only in the 20th century. For example, the important collection of Aḥmad Taymūr (4134 volumes, C. Vial, “Maḥmūd Taymūr”, EI2) was only donated to the Dār al-Kutub after his death in 1930. We covered several important manuscripts of well known texts such as al-Maqrīzī’s “Khiṭaṭ” and Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī’s “al-Durar al-Kāmina” but we also came across a number of texts that were unexpected finds for us and which we hope to publish some insights on in the future.
We spent most of our time in the Dār al-Kutub but also consulted digitised manuscripts in the Azhar Library, where a number of computers are available that provide good quality colour scans of most of the institute’s manuscript holdings, as well as digital copies of various manuscripts from other institutions. We spent a first day at Azhar with the four of us again, and afterwards explored part of the old city of Cairo expertly guided by Jo Van Steenbergen. While it proved much more straightforward to consult manuscripts at Azhar, at least in their digital form, it was much more difficult to gain access to the physical manuscripts. Due to the relatively short timeframe of our time in Cairo we were ultimately unsuccessful in gaining this access, but fortunately we could still consult the great majority of the relevant manuscripts in digital form. The library’s database is also helpful for gathering certain codicological data.
Though not without its share of bureaucratic difficulties (it is still Egypt, after all), we had an ultimately very rewarding, if somewhat hectic (again, it’s Egypt), research stay in Cairo.
