Ahmed El Shamsy - Rediscovering the Islamic Classics

It was the late summer of my second year in graduate school, and my train was speeding away from the urban moloch of Cairo toward Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast, cutting through the Nile delta, whose lush greenery was sprinkled with the white of the first cotton buds of the season. I was taking some time off from the neatly printed books of Harvards Widener Library to explore Arabic manuscripts at the Egyptian National Library in Cairo. After it had closed for the day, I had spent a few hours book shopping around the Azhar mosque, one of the oldest still functioning institutions of learning in the world, and was now on my way back to my temporary home.

I was exhausted and had clearly gotten too much sun, but I was making an effort to review the notes I had taken that day. My haphazard stabs at the National Librarys large manuscript collection, at the time housed in a dingy concrete block in Cairos Bulaq district, had yielded a surprising find: a work on Islamic law, written 1,200 years earlier by an Egyptian named Ab Yaqb al-Buway, which recent academic publications had declared extinct. Sitting at the microfilm reader that morning (the library did not allow access to the manuscript itself) and realizing what I was looking at, I had scrolled frantically through the text, scribbling notes as I went. The work appeared to be a complete treatment of the principal areas of Islamic law, and it included a methodological discussion on how to read and interpret scriptureone of the oldest such discussions to be found. I had immediately requested a copy of the manuscript, but this would not be ready until the following week, so for now all I had were my hastily jotted notes. The last thing I had written in my notebook was the name of the copyista certain Abd al-Raf from Kazan, the Tartar Muslim city on the Volga Riverand the year in which the manuscript had been copied: 1325. That year fell in the Mamluk period, when Egypt and Syria were the intellectual centers of the Muslim world. But revisiting my notes, I frowned: why had I written only 1325, without its Hijri counterpart? The Islamic Hijri calendar is more than six centuries behind the Gregorian calendar, though the gap shrinks by about eleven days each year, as the Hijri calendar tracks lunar rather than solar years. When I wrote down the date, I reasoned, I must have automatically converted it into its Gregorian equivalent, but why had I not made a note of the original Hijri date also? I was too worn out to ruminate on the matter further that day, but when I awoke the following day with my headache gone, the answer struck me: 1325 was not the Common Era date; it was the Hijri date. This meant that the manuscript of al-Buways book had been copied as recently as in 1907 CE. No wonder I had, in my groggy exhaustion after a long day of work, misread my own notes. Why would a hugely important work have been copied by hand in the twentieth century, even as it remained unknown in the published literature?