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Abstract:

For centuries, scribes and users have left notes in the margins of manuscripts, paraphrasing, explaining, criticising, and supplementing the main text. This volume sheds light on such scribal practices in Arabic manuscripts, investigating diverse techniques and approaches across the vast geographical and temporal range of the Arabic manuscript age. What similarities and differences can we observe regarding place, time, and subject? And what can we learn from these annotations in the margins or between the lines? 

This volume is the first to focus specifically on the rich tradition of marginal commentaries in Arabic manuscripts and seeks to establish the study of commentary and glossing practices as an important source for the history of Arabic literature, Islamic intellectual history, and comparative manuscript studies.

 Stefanie Brinkmann is the editor of the volume and has written the introduction, conclusion and one chapter.

 Stefanie Brinkmann (ed.), Marginal Matters. Explorations into Commenting and Glossing Techniques in Arabic Manuscript Cultures, Vol. 1 of the series Bibliotheca Arabica. Towards a New History of Arabic Literatures, series editor Verena Klemm, Leiden and Berlin: Brill Publishers, 2025.

The volume is open access

Abstract

The Ahmed Fethi Paşa Foundation (Istanbul and Rhodes) published a two-volume edition on the Ottoman Hafiz Ahmed Ağa Library from Rhodes, its historical context, architectural features, and manuscript holdings. For this volume, Stefanie Brinkmann published a revised reprint of her article “Multilingualism in Ottoman Manuscripts” with manuscripts of the Hafiz Ahmed Ağa Library.

 The original version was published in Ottoman Manuscripts in Hamburg, ed. Janina Karolewski and Yavuz Köse, special issue of Manuscript Cultures, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, Hamburg, No. 9 (2016), 53-58.

Accessible online 

The revised reprint is in:

Conversation in the Library, eds. Cengiz Aktar and Tarık Tüten, Istanbul and Rhodes: Hafiz Ahmed Ağa & Ahmed Fethi Paşa Foundation, 2025, vol. 1.

Abstract

The chapter “Traces of Eager Studies” in the catalogue of the exhibition “Manuscripts & Mind” presents the densely annotated manuscript MS Dublin, Chester Beatty Library, Ar. 4326, with al-Baghawī’s hadith collection Maṣābīḥ al-sunna as main text. It illustrates the eager studies and careful transmission of the main text by analysing a number of paratextual features, such as corrections, variants, additional hadith material, and lexical and commentary glosses. Despite a first impression of “messiness”, the chapter shows that there is in fact a system of well-established scribal practices at work. Cognitive experiments, such as eye-tracking and the marking of units in the texts, showed that even non-Arabic speakers could recognise central aspects of layout, while Arabic speakers directed their attention more into the margin, too, detecting textual units of glosses.

Stefanie Brinkmann, “Traces of Eager Studies”, in Manuscripts & Mind. How we read & respond to the written word, catalogue of the homonymous exhibition, ed. Jill Uncle, Dublin: Chester Beatty Library, 2025, 66-71.

Abstract

Stefanie Brinkmann illustrates both the challenges of working with marginal commentaries and their potential, with the example of a selection of manuscripts from the seventh/thirteenth to the tenth/sixteenth century containing the post-canonical hadith collection Maṣābīḥ al-sunna by al-Ḥusayn al-Baghawī (d. 516/1122). After exemplifying the difficulties in identifying possible sources of the marginal notes, she highlights the significance of these notes, focusing on the question of which texts were used to study the Maṣābīḥ al-sunna. To this end, she classifies five possible layers of commentary and analyses the varying impact that these different commentaries have had on the study of the Maṣābīḥ al-sunna. The manuscripts of al-Baghawī's hadith collection and the marginal citations in them clearly show the importance of the Mongol and post-Mongol periods for this particular hadith tradition.

Stefanie Brinkmann: “Struggling with the Margin: Studying Marginal Commentaries in a Hadith Collection: Al-Baghawī’s Maṣābīḥ al-sunna”, in Marginal Matters. Explorations into Commenting and Glossing Techniques in Arabic Manuscript Cultures, ed. Stefanie Brinkmann, Leiden and Berlin: Brill Publishers, 2025, 343-390.

The volume is open access

Abstract

In his chapter on partisan readers, Boris Liebrenz moves two less common aspects of marginal annotation to centre stage: the comparatively rare marginal commentaries in manuscripts containing works of history, and a personal, polemic voice writing in the margin. In the margins of a manuscript containing the historiographic work Badāʾiʿ al-umūr by the tenth/sixteenth-century Mamluk Ibn Iyās, an Ottoman reader writes annoyed replies to the negative representation of the Ottoman sultan Selim I in the central text. Arguing over the interpretation of the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517 and the depiction of the Ottoman and Mamluk rulers, such a polemical style remains unusual, reminding us that there was usually some kind of ethics at work in the margin.

 Boris Liebrenz: “Partisan Readers: Fighting over the Interpretation of History in the Margins of MS BnF, Arabe 1825”, in Marginal Matters. Explorations into Commenting and Glossing Techniques in Arabic Manuscript Cultures, ed. Stefanie Brinkmann, Leiden and Berlin: Brill Publishers, 2025, 249-265.

 The volume is open access

Abstract

In nineteenth-century India, the Ismaili scholar Muḥammad al-Hamdānī (d. 1315/1898) selected passages from previous works of various disciplines based on his interests, at times adding his own notes, and compiled his own private notebook. Verena Klemm analyses this notebook with the approach of multilayered note-taking, namely a consideration of the excerpts and notes of the central text and the annotations in the margins. Her classification of the marginalia and her analysis of their content show al-Hamdānī’s interest in tracing the transmission of works and his engagement with their content by selecting, commenting, collating, and complementing. Through these multilevel commentarial gestures of note-taking – excerpts and supplemental material in the centre and commentarial notes in the margin – the intellectual work of the scholar can be followed. 

Verena Klemm: “At the High End of Learning: Note-Taking and Commentary Practices of a Nineteenth-Century Ismaili Scholar in India,” in Marginal Matters. Explorations into Commenting and Glossing Techniques in Arabic Manuscript Cultures, ed. Stefanie Brinkmann, Leiden and Berlin: Brill Publishers, 2025, 125-148.

The volume is open access

Abstract

The often non-documentary character of marginal commentaries poses a challenge to those engaging in the exploration of the informative value of these entries. Boris Liebrenz contrasts the margin as a place of intellectual practice with the difficulty of contextualising these annotations in their historical settings. In this contextualising chapter, he presents methodological approaches for two main scenarios, signed notes and unsigned notes. An otherwise unknown signatory might come to the fore through the identification of individual hands, clues given about the annotator in other entries, or by the copyist. A possible identification of the creator of an unsigned note requires the meticulous analysis of palaeography, textual comparison, style, and scribal practices. Liebrenz exemplifies these strategies with three scholars from Constantinople, Damascus, and Cairo in the tenth/sixteenth and eleventh/seventeenth centuries.

Boris Liebrenz: “Putting Margins in Context: Some Practical Considerations”, in Marginal Matters. Explorations into Commenting and Glossing Techniques in Arabic Manuscript Cultures, ed. Stefanie Brinkmann, Leiden and Berlin: Brill Publishers, 2025, 67-94.

The volume is open access

Abstract

The introduction provides a detailed overview of commentary glosses, presenting the subject independently of specific regions and periods. As such, this chapter serves as an introduction to the individual contributions on specific regions and disciplines. At the same time, it can be read as an independent chapter introducing the subject to manuscript experts from a variety of manuscript cultures.

Stefanie Brinkmann: “Introduction: Mapping the Field”, in Marginal Matters. Explorations into Commenting and Glossing Techniques in Arabic Manuscript Cultures, ed. Stefanie Brinkmann, Leiden and Berlin: Brill Publishers, 2025, 1-64.

The volume is open access 

Access here 

Verena Klemm's article "A Library in One Volume – The Notebook of the Nineteenth-Century Ismāʿīlī Scholar Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī from Surat" recently appeared in print. 

Abstract

The focus of this article is the eminent Ismāʿīlī scholar Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī (1833–98) and his private notebook, which over time he filled with a wide variety of content, ranging across religions, history, the sciences and mathematics, literature, and the occult. The multiple-text manuscript (majmūʿa) is part of the Hamdani Manuscript Collection, now at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London (Ms. 1662). Al-Hamdānī, who is known as an important protagonist in the history of this family library, was also a “moving spirit” in the Daʿwa, the religious and political mission of the Ismāʿīlī Dāʾūdī Bohra Ṭayyibīs in Gujarat. As most of his epistles and his memoirs are not accessible and have not been researched until now, the notebook provides a preliminary testimony, opening a window to his intellectual world. In this article, this unique document is presented in its historical context and described in terms of its materiality, content and use. It is considered as a rich source of information about its owner and the literary holdings a nineteenth-century Bohra scholar could draw on. We also ask what role the personal manuscript might have played with respect to Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī’s religious commitments in the Ṭayyibī Daʿwa.

Verena Klemm, "A Library in One Volume – The Notebook of the Nineteenth-Century Ismāʿīlī Scholar Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī from Surat," Die Welt des Islams International Journal for the Study of Modern Islam 65, no. 4 (2025), 381–414. 

The article is also available open access on the website of Die Welt des Islams. 

Boris Liebrenz: “The Arabic Aristotle in Byzantine Constantinople,” in: Medieval Encounters 31 (2025), pp. 339-61. https://brill.com/view/journals/me/31/4/article-p339_3.xml 

Abstract

The reception of classical Greek authors such as Aristotle into Arabic literature through translations is well known. The presence of Arabic literature in the Byzantine capital is much less attested, nor is it widely expected. Could Aristotle have returned to the center of Greek culture in Arab garb? Who would have been the audience of this translation? Who would have brought it there and for what purpose? A famous manuscript now preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris shows that, indeed, at least one Anatolian Muslim scholar studied his Arabic Aristotle in Constantinople long before it was conquered by the Ottomans. The article uses minute manuscript notes as a means to provide surprising context for the literature that scholars tend to study as disembodied texts.

Stefanie Brinkmann has published an article entitled “Hadith Scholarship in Mongol Baghdad: al-Qazwīnī’s transmission of al-Baghawī’s Maṣābīḥ al-sunna”, in: Löhr, Nadine and Bruno De Nicola (eds.): The Mongols’ Baghdad - Knowledge Transmission Through Manuscript Cultures Before and After the Conquest, special issue of Medieval Worlds: Comparative & Interdisciplinary Studies, no. 22 (2025), pp. 68-102.

This article reconstructs al-Qazwīnī’s transmission of al-Baghawī’s Maṣābīḥ al-sunna in Mongol Baghdad by analysing his Mashyakha and reading sessions (qirā’a) in two manuscripts from the Mongol period.

Link to the online edition 

Im Besitz der Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen (UBT) befinden sich zweiundvierzig ismailitische Handschriften, die in den Jahren 1970 bis 1972 erworben wurden. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt ging die UBT davon aus, dass es sich bei dem Erwerb um eine korrekte und unbedenkliche Transaktion handelte. Wie sich in den folgenden Jahren herausstellte, war dies jedoch ein Irrtum. Mehr als fünfzig Jahre nach diesen Ereignissen möchte ich nun einige Mosaiksteinchen zusammensetzen und die Geschichte der verschleppten Manuskripte von ihrem Ursprungsort Surat über Beirut bis zu ihrem endgültigen Bestimmungsort Tübingen nachverfolgen.

View the full article (open access) here: 

https://od-portal.hypotheses.org/3672

Boris Liebrenz: “From Whom and for Whom? The Audience and Provenance of al-Jazzār’s Manuscripts,” in The Library of Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār. Book Culture in Late Ottoman Palestine, eds. Said Aljoumani, Guy Burak, and Konrad Hirschler (Leiden: Brill, 2025), 71-88.

Boris Liebrenz: “The Endowment Seals,” in The Library of Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār. Book Culture in Late Ottoman Palestine, eds. Said Aljoumani, Guy Burak, and Konrad Hirschler (Leiden: Brill, 2025), 207-218.

Boris Liebrenz: “The Stars in Leiden: Listening to the Stories of Islamic Manuscripts,” in Prophets, Poets, and Scholars: The Collections of the Middle Eastern Library of Leiden University (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2024), 76-85.

Boris Liebrenz: Review of Ahmed El Shamsy, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics. How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020) in Midéo 29 (2024), http://journals.openedition.org/mideo/9193

Abstract 

The focus of this article is the eminent Ismāʿīlī scholar Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī (1833–98) and his private notebook, which over time he filled with a wide variety of content, ranging across religions, history, the sciences and mathematics, literature, and the occult. The multiple-text manuscript (majmūʿa) is part of the Hamdani Manuscript Collection, now at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London (Ms. 1662). Al-Hamdānī, who is known as an important protagonist in the history of this family library, was also a “moving spirit” in the Daʿwa, the religious and political mission of the Ismāʿīlī Dāʾūdī Bohra Ṭayyibīs in Gujarat. As most of his epistles and his memoirs are not accessible and have not been researched until now, the notebook provides a preliminary testimony, opening a window to his intellectual world. In this article, this unique document is presented in its historical context and described in terms of its materiality, content and use. It is considered as a rich source of information about its owner and the literary holdings a nineteenth-century Bohra scholar could draw on. We also ask what role the personal manuscript might have played with respect to Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī’s religious commitments in the Ṭayyibī Daʿwa. 

View the full article (open access) here: 

https://brill.com/view/journals/wdi/aop/article-10.1163-15700607-20240025/article-10.1163-15700607-20240025.xml

Abstract

The article is written in the framework of provenance research and focuses on the special, mostly precarious situation of Ismaili manuscripts. It sheds light on the history of a group of 42 Ismaili manuscripts, some of them stolen from the famous Hamdani Collection in Surat/Gujarat, India, and the circumstances of their acquisition by the University Library Tübingen between 1970 and 1972. When the manuscripts were acquired, the true origins and disposition of these manuscripts were still completely shrouded in darkness. More than fifty years after these events, I would like to put some pieces of the mosaic together and follow the history of the displaced manuscripts from their place of origin in Surat via Beirut to their final destination, Tübingen. My sources are: Archival material from Tübingen University Archive, dispersed documents, oral and written accounts of contemporary witnesses, further informants—and last not least, the manuscripts themselves.

Verena Klemm. "The Ismaʿili Manuscripts in University Library Tübingen: An Inquiry into Provenance." Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 15 (2024) 324–52, doi:10.1163/1878464X-01502002. 

https://globalcommentary.utoronto.ca/?p=2651

In this blogpost, Prof. Klemm browses through a unique personal manuscript belonging to the eminent Ismaʿili scholar Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī (1249–1315 AH / 1833–1898 CE).

Stefanie Brinkmann published a chapter on Persian manuscript culture in the catalogue of the exhibition “Exit Allowed – Iranian Artists meet Iranian Manuscripts” (24 April – 21 July 2024, Leipzig University Library). The catalogue was edited by Christoph Mackert (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, April 2924). Verena Klemm, Beate Wiesmüller, and Stefanie Brinkmann helped preparing the exhibition by selecting and describing Persian manuscripts from the Leipzig University Library that served as a pool for the Iranian artists who develop their own art objects as a reaction to chosen manuscripts.

Further information:

https://www.ub.uni-leipzig.de/aktuelle-ausstellungen/exit-allowed-iranian-artists-meet-iranian-manuscripts-iranische-kuenstlerinnen-begegnen-persischen-handschriften/katalog/

https://www.univerlag-leipzig.de/catalog/bookstore/article/2297-Exit_allowed

   Off the Record: On Studying Lost Arabic Books and their Networks (2.25 MB)

S.  219 - 245
doi:10.1553/medievalworlds_no18_2023s219
Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften

Abstract:
In this paper we discuss the notion of Arabic literary works which, to the best of our knowledge, have been lost over the course of history. We examine factors contributing to the likelihood of transmission, address current interdisciplinary debates, and discuss digital tools applied to estimating the loss of literary heritage or to retrieving information on lost works. Our aim is to highlight the potential that bio-bibliographical works hold for the study of lost texts and manuscripts. Three possibilities are presented for studying lost books mentioned in Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa’s History of Physicians (ʿUyūn al-anbā ̉ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbā ̉), and these include the identification of lost works in bio-bibliografical reference works, the encoding of attestations for manuscripts written by the authors themselves, and the reconstruction of scholarly networks which contributed to a certain lost work. The examples discussed demonstrate the advantages prosopographical networks can offer if they include works and manuscripts. Therefore, we put a particular focus on the use of machine-readable assertions which involves encoding the claims and statements from primary sources in a format that enables computer systems to process and analyse them.

Daniel Kinitz/Thomas Efer (2023): Towards a Dynamic Knowledge Graph of a Non-Western Book Tradition
in: Baillot, A. / Scholger, W. / Tasovac, T. / Vogeler, G. / Raunig, E. / Scholger, M. / Steiner, E. (eds.). Digital Humanities 2023: Book of Abstracts. Graz 2023. DOI: 10.5281, https://zenodo.org/record/7961822, pp.216-217.

Tariq Yousef/ Daniel Kinitz (2023): Similarity-Based Clustering of Pre-Modern Arabic Names
in: Baillot, A. / Scholger, W. / Tasovac, T. / Vogeler, G. / Raunig, E. / Scholger, M. / Steiner, E. (eds.). Digital Humanities 2023: Book of Abstracts. Graz 2023. DOI: 10.5281, https://zenodo.org/record/7961822, pp.194-195.

Hadith commentary has been a central site of Islamic intellectual life for more than a millennium, across diverse periods, regions and sects. This is the first volume of scholarly essays ever collected on the key texts and critical themes of hadith commentary. The book unfolds chronologically from the early centuries of Islam to the modern period, and readers will discover continuities and changes as a group of international experts offer illuminating studies of Sunnis, Shi‘i and Sufis who interpret and debate the meaning of hadith that spans a wide terrain: Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, India, and further. The volume also models a variety of methodological approaches, including social history, intellectual history, the study of religion, and digital history. By highlighting both differences and commonalities as the practice of hadith commentary circulated across distant eras and lands, this volume sheds new light on the way Muslims have historically understood the meaning of Muhammad’s example.

Link to EUP:
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-hadith-commentary.html

In her chapter on gharīb al-ḥadīth, Stefanie Brinkmann explores this genre as nucleus for the coming multi-thematic hadith commentary, describes its oscillation between lexicography and hadith sciences, traces its production in history, and presents formal structures of the different works.

Klemm, Verena: Hidden Literary History. Ismaʿili Tradition in Syria. In: Hakan Özkan und Nefeli Papoutsakis (eds.), Doing Justice to a Wronged Literature. Essays on Arabic Literature and Rhetoric of the 12th–18th Centuries in Honour of Thomas Bauer Leiden, Brill Publishers, 2022, pp. 190-210 (Islamic History and Civilizations).

Link to Brill

"Verena Klemm explores the special manuscript culture that the Syrian Ismaʿilis, a relatively isolated and secretive Shiite community, practised in their mountainous retreat in Jabal Bahrāʾ, not far from Hama, over the centuries. There, away from the cultural centres of the region, religious experts compiled various texts of interest to the community in composite manuscripts (majmūʿāt) that were and are even today kept in private collections inaccessible to research. As an example, she presents a few manuscripts containing, among other things, Manāqib al-mawlā Rāshid al-Dīn, a collection of hagiographic tales about Rāshid al-Dīn Sinān (d. ca. 589/1193), the leader of the community at the time of Saladin. The tales, which were initially transmitted orally, were written down at the time of Hama’s efflorescence under al-Malik al-Muʾayyad (r. 710–31/1310–31) and sharply contrast with the literary high culture that thrived at his court." (Introduction by Hakan Özkan and Nefeli Papoutsakis)

An illustrated cosmographical and geographical manuscript at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, known as the Book of Curiosities, has recently seen a rare confluence of public and scholarly attention. It is widely regarded as one of the outstanding Arabic works of geography, with stylistically idiosyncratic maps and a text that can be traced back to Egypt in the Fatimid period. However, few concrete facts are known about the history of this unique artefact. This article will identify and analyse the traces left by some of its previous owners and thus unlock the Ottoman history of this Fatimid work. By placing it in a concrete temporal and geographical context, we are better able to envisage the intellectual, social, and political environment in which this book could make sense to its owners and readers.

Today, the Ṭawq al-ḥamāma is not only the most famous work by the Andalusian scholar Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456 / 1064), it has become a nearly ubiquitous text: in the Arabic-speaking world, it is found in school-curricula and widely read; on a global scale it has been translated into numerous languages; and it has sparked not only much scholarship, but also inspired modern literary adaptations. It is considered a quintessential guide to the theme of love in Arabic literature. Yet this modern popularity is in stark contrast to its perilous transmission. How could it be that a text so fundamental today could be transmitted to us on the feeble thread of a single manuscript, now held in Leiden? Its singularity, however, does not mean a lack of interest in the book between its inception and re-discovery in the 19th century. The manuscript bears many traces of former possessors and readers, traces that have hitherto not been analyzed. This contribution proposes to chart the way of this manuscript in the East, explain how it ended up in Leiden, and finally how it was first edited and popularized in the 19th and early 20th century.