Descriptive Catalog of The Garrett Collection of Arabic Manuscripts in the Princeton University Library pdf download

Descriptive Catalog of The Garrett Collection of Arabic Manuscripts in the Princeton University Library

By Philip K. Hitti – Nabih Amin Faris – Butrus Abd-Al-Malik

Descriptive Catalog of The Garrett Collection of Arabic Manuscripts in the Princeton University Library

History The Garrett Collection of Arabic Manuscripts, consisting of over 4,500 titles, belongs to

Mr. Robert Garrett, of Baltimore, a trustee of Princeton University. It comprises five units purchased at different times on the recommendation of scholars.

 The first and largest unit, entered in this Catalog under the numbers 11 to 11711, is commonly referred to as the Houtsma manuscripts, after the Dutch orientalist Dr. M. Th. Houtsma, who published a list catalog of it entitled Catalogue d’une collection de manuscrits arabes et turcs appartenant à la maison E. J. Brill à Leyden (Leyden, 1889).

This group was acquired in 1900 from the well-known publishing house in Holland. Brill had purchased most of it from a Medinese scholar Amin ibn-Hasan al-Hul wāni al-Madani al-Hanafi, who brought them to Amsterdam in 1883 on the occasion of the Colonial Exposition.

The purchase was made on the recommendation of the Swedish Arabist Count Landberg. In 1904 the second unit also was acquired from Brill and belonged in the main library of the same Medinese scholar.

The rest of this Hulwāni library was sold by Brill to Leyden University and to the Royal Library in Berlin. Like the first, this group was deposited in the Princeton University Library and a list of its Arabic MSS was published by Dr. Enno Littmann, then of Prince- ton and now of Tübingen University, under the title A List of Arabic Manuscripts in Princeton University Library (Princeton and Leipzig, 1904).

Both units included a few Turkish, Persiana, Syriac, and other MSS in sundry languages which do not fall within the scope of this Catalog. Members of the second unit are entered in our Catalog under numbers 11 to 355L.

The third unit, entered under numbers 18 to 420B, was purchased by Mr. Robert Garrett in 1925 from the estate of Murād Bey Bārūdi, a graduate in pharmacy from the American University of Beirut. Mr. Bārūdi had exercised unusual care in the choice he made of MSS for his library which, with few exceptions, consisted solely of Arabic works.

The purchase was made on the recommendation of Professor Hitti.

In the same year in which the Bārūdi unit was acquired, there was also bought from Professor Alban C. Widgery of Cambridge, England, his library of Moslem MSS. Only sixteen of this library, indicated in the Catalog by w, are in Arabic and constitute the fourth unit in our Collection.

The rest are chiefly in Persian. All of these MSS had been procured by Widgery from Ahmadābād and neighboring towns of Moslem India. A fifth unit is a miscellaneous group acquired at different times and places.

It is entered in the Catalog under numbers 16 to 55G and includes some exquisite codices of the Koran and Kūfic fragments.

Contents The value of the Collection, the largest of its kind in America, lies not so much in its size as in its contents. It has specimens representative of alınost all Moslem lands, scripts, and disciplines.

The authors comprise Spanish Moslems, Berbers, Egyptians, Syrians, Arabians, and others of Persian, Turkish, and Malay origin. Almost all are Moslems; a few are Christians and Druses from Syria and Lebanon.

 One is a Samaritan. Almost all the luminaries of the first magnitude in the intellectual firmament of Islam, such as ibn-Sina (Avicenna), ibn Rushd (Averroës), al-Fārābi, al-Rāzi (Rhazes), al-Ghazzāli (Algazel), are represented by one or more works.

The dates of composition range from the eighth to the nineteenth century and the provenience from Andalusia and Morocco to Burma. Certain copies are in the handwriting of the authors themselves, several are rare and valuable, some are unique and hitherto undescribed and unpublished. Islam Works dealing with religion, theology, jurisprudence (fiqh), and tradition (hadīth) form, as and would be expected, the largest group.

Of these, we may single out koranic fragments auxiliary in Kūfi (No. 1139) whose conjectured date is the eighth century. These are the oldest sciences items in the Collection.

A tenth-century Kūfic fragment (No. 1146) gives a variant read- ing from the accepted version of the Koran. The codices of the Koran will be discussed under illumination and illustration.

 The Collection has two clear copies (No. 1479, No. 1481) of al-Thyā’, the magnum opus of al-Ghazzāli”, executed in the fourteenth century.

An idea of the esteem in which this work has been held throughout the ages may be gained from a declaration by the seventeenth-century Turkish encyclopedist Hājji Khalifah”, “If all the other books of Islam should perish, the Ihya’, if spared, would suffice.”

Next to the Thyā’the Qūt al-Qulüb of al-Makki ( + 996), of which we have a superb and partly vocalized twelfth-century copy (No. 1570) is considered the classic of Şüfi literature.

“By some, the work is described as one without equal in its field”.6 Another Șūfi treatise, dealing with the Illuministic School, was composed by abu-al-Mawāhib ( + 1477/8) and copied in 1646 (No. 1583).?

 Language Next to religion the language and belles-lettres group composes the largest number of MSS in the Collection. Of these attention may be called to al-Qurțubi’s lexicon (No. 265), a unique work so far as we have been able to ascertain.

Poetical compositions are especially plentiful. One of the rare diwāns is a copy of the poems of ibn-Jurayj al-Rūmi (No. 19), a ninth-century poet of Greek origin, and an autograph collection of original poems (No. 109) written in Egypt by ‘A’ishah bint-al-Bāʻūni + 1523.

Science in science we have excellent samples of those fields in which the Arabs made original contributions, or carried on and preserved for medieval Europe the researches of Greek and Roman scholars: medicine, astronomy, mathematics, and philosophy.

 Outstan ng among these is a voluminous translation of Galen’s works on anatomy and medicine by the Nestorian Hunayn ibn- Ishāq (Latinized Joannitius + 873), dean of translators from Greek (No. 1075). Though the major part of our copy was written in AD. 1176, it is well preserved and antedates any Greek or Latin MSS extant.

It contains sections not yet edited or translated into any modern European tongue. Another valuable medical treatise (No. 1076) was modeled by al-Rāzi ( + 923) on the aphorisms ascribed to Hippocrates.

This work was translated into Hebrew in the Middle Ages, and a Latin translation of it was printed in Bologna (1489) and in Lyons (1510). Our copy, made in 1282, is probably unique.