Umayyad Clientage and Egyptian Historical Knowledge: A First Look at the Affiliations of a Local Egyptian Historiography, delivered at 'Arabs, mawlas and dhimmis: Scribal practices and the social construction of knowledge in Late Antiquity and Medieval Islam’, Warburg Institute, December 2013. (original) (raw)
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" History begins with writing, " because writing is the most important and reliable tool for transmitting knowledge to future generations. It has made use of various materials for this very purpose for centuries and one of these materials is paper. The transmission of paper to the Islamic world and its subsequent vast production allowed books to become widespread and made paper the most important medium for written transmissions. We do not have a great deal of first-hand information on how books were prepared other than the compilation process which we know due to the presence of some compilers' anecdotes regarding the characteristics of the compilation which is an aspect of its meaning. However, producing a book as a commodity is just as important as compilation in the sense of reproduction and circulation of knowledge. This article introduces the accounts of ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Tirmidhī, a copyist who was fully engaged in the copying stage of book production. The intellectual and scientific life of the period will be discussed based on his list, which was recorded on the last page of a copy of the Mathnawī written in Samarqand in 1417. Several questions will also be raised for future studies.
Notes sur la littérature médiévale chrétienne d’expression arabe
Collectanea Christiana Orientalia
Spurred by a recent American work offering an overview of the intellectual life and literary output of the Christians in the Land of Islam during the middle ages, we propose to revisit the question from a broader basis and a differently structured perspective.