X893.7 Ab92, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York (Photo: E. Kropf, 2017)

This information alone would have been enough for me to speculate a bit on the manuscript’s origins. But since Evyn was kind enough to send me a few photos, there is a lot more to be said! First thing’s first, this is not a copy of Abū Zakarīyā’s Kitāb al-sīra. 

At least, not exactly. 

Instead, someone has mistakenly identified (and this happens a lot) Abū Zakarīyā as the author because it was his book that was being revised a couple of centuries later by the compiler of this text: Abū l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. Saʿīd al-Darjīnī (d.670/1271). Al-Darjīnī edited and revised the Kitāb al-sīra, rearranging a lot of the language and adding poetry and new anecdotes. He also added an entire second volume of biographies to the work, arranged chronologically in 50-year increments (ṭabaqāt). The final product comprises its own independent manuscript tradition under the title Kitāb ṭabaqāt al-mashāyikh [bi-maghrib]. Indeed, the shelf-mark sticker on the exterior of the binding identifies it as a copy of the “Kitāb al-ṭabaqāt.“

The colophon also deserves mention. Firstly,  it gives the date of transcription as 6 jumādā al-ūlā 1303 AH, which would make it February 1886 CE rather than 1885 as it appears in the catalog. The second thing worth mentioning is that the copyist, Ibrāhīm b. Sulaymān al-Shammākhī (d. late-19th c.) [1], certainly could be the copyist but this same date and copyist are listed for a copy of the Kitāb al-sīra held in the Dār al-Kutub in Cairo, Egypt (MS 9030 ḥāʾ). 

Indeed, this is the standard date associated with his copying of the text but it shows up in manuscript copies from much later. It is a good reminder that copyists often reproduced colophons from their exemplar and so other clues for dating must be combined with the colophon to come up with a reliable date range for the manuscript.

Speaking of other clues…there is another very cool thing about this particular manuscript: its handsome red-orange full leather binding (see photo). Although I have not examined it in person or seen a full facsimile of the manuscript, I can use this additional photo of Evyn’s to offer some details of its history.

X893.7 Ab92, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York (Photo: E. Kropf, 2017)

A handful of manuscripts with very similar binding styles and leather are today held in the Special Collections Library at the Ivan Franko National University in Lviv, Ukraine. For example, Lviv MS 992 II is a copy of the Kitāb al-marḍiyya fī sīrat khabar al-bariyya by Abū l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad al-Ḥātimi (see photo). The colophon gives the date of 28 April 1887 and the copyist is the same Ibrāhīm b. Sulaymān al-Shammākhī given in Columbia RBML MS X893.7. A late-19th century date is further suggested by the two principal  watermarks it carries: a “BNC” mark and the three moon faces mark. [2]

These manuscripts in Lviv not only have bindings that are remarkably similar  to the Columbia manuscript, they also bear the same collection sticker with a shelf-mark written in the same hand.

Ivan Franko MS 992 II Kitāb al-akhbār al-marḍiyya (Photo: P. Love, 2015)

These manuscripts, which date to the the same period, were purchased by Polish Orientalist Zygmunt Smogorzewski (d.1931) during a trip to northern Africa in the first decades of the 20th century before returning with them to Lviv (at the time Lwów). He deposited these manuscripts, which originally number over 40 volumes, in the library of the Jean-Casimir University [3].

Now, I am inclined to think that the Columbia manuscript was purchased from Eastern Europe and that it and the other manuscripts with similar bindings and stickers were bound at an earlier stage in their lives by the same individual in the Mzab valley. According to Evyn, the binding of the Columbia manuscript was applied upside down, suggesting it was rebound in the Mzab but not necessarily copied there. This leads me to think about a couple of other problems that I will need to work out:

(1) The copyist (if he is indeed the copyist and the colophon was not simply reproduced), Ibrāhīm al-Shammākhī, spent most of his life in the Jebel Nafusa in Libya. He was a prolific copyist of manuscripts in the 1880s and did spend some time in Algeria but it would be important to know if either of these texts are in his hand and whether he copied them in Libya, Algeria, or even Egypt. 

 
(2) This is last suggestion stems from Smogorzewski’s having purchased many of the manuscripts, as he mentioned in his bibliographic essay on Ibadi texts, from the well-known printer Muḥammad al-Bārūnī in Egypt [4]. This leads me to wonder whether the Columbia manuscript and the Lviv manuscripts came not from the Mzab directly but via Cairo.

The solution to many of these issues lies, I suspect, in the accumulation of a lot more data and many more exemplars from the same collection (not to mention the purchasing records of both institutions). If the shelf-marks on these manuscripts represent a system based on the number of volumes, there were over 400 works in the original library. One of the ways in which this and similar late-19th century libraries could be reconstructed would be through what Lisa Fagin Davis has called “digital fragmentology.” In her work on reconstructing medieval European manuscripts, she has pioneered the use of digital tools for identifying folios that originally belonged to the same manuscript. It would be fascinating to attempt this same sort of project with this library.

Notes

[1] See “Ibrāhīm b. Sulaymān al-Shammākhī” in the Muʿjam aʿlām al-ibāḍiyya, online here from Jamʿiyyat al-turāth: http://www.tourath.org/ar/content/view/193/41/

 

[4] Smogorzewski, “Essai,” 50.