The reading notes in this post will discuss the first Arabic bibliography “al-Fihrist" or "The Catalogue” by Ibn al-Nadim which I named my blog after it. It outlines the significance of “Fihrist” as the first comprehensive and detailed Arabic bibliography. This post was part of a research paper I submitted as one of the MLIS research assignments for the “History of Books, Printing and Publishing” course.
The following cited references were used in conducting this research:
Aman, Muhammad M. 1968. Analysis of terminology, form and structure of subject headings in Arabic literature and formulation of rules for Arabic subject headings / By Muh̲ammad Muh̲ammad Aman. [Pittsburgh]: Aman.
Higgins, Annie. 1990. Ibn al-Nadim's Fihrist. [NP] Middle East Studies Association of North America.
Ibn al-Nadīm, Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq, and Dodge, Bayard. 1970. The Fihrist of al-Nadīm; a tenth-century survey of Muslim culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sarton, George, Ibn al-Nadīm, and Shāri Muhammad Alī. 1933. "Review of: Al-fihrist li Ibn al-Nadīm". Isis. 20 (1): 283-285.
Sezgin, Fuat, Carl Ehrig-Eggert, E. Neubauer, and Gustav Flügel. 2005. Publications of the Institute for the History of Arabic Islamic Science. Historiography and classification of science in Islam. Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University.
Stewart, Devin. 2007. "The Structure of the Fihrist: Ibn al-Nadim as historian of Islamic legal and theological schools”. International Journal of Middle East Studies. 39 (3): 369-387.
Toorawa, Shawkat M. 2010. "Proximity, resemblance, sidebars and clusters: Ibn al-Nadīm’s organizational principles in al-Fihrist". Oriens. 38 (1/2): 217-247.
Wellisch, Hans H. 1986. The first Arab bibliography: fihrist al-ʻUlum. [Champaign]: Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
Abstract
The research will trace the history of “al-Fihrist" or "The Catalogue," the first comprehensive and detailed Arabic bibliography. The bibliography’s content, classification scheme and the author will be discussed, as well as the environment in which the Fihrist was written and its transmission. A literature review of some commentaries about the Fihrist and Ibn al-Nadim’s methodology of compiling it will be analyzed. Those commentaries are representing both an Arab and three Western authors’ views about the Fihrist. The research will include detailed discussion of the topical arrangement of the bibliography, which include language, ancient scripture, poetry, law, music, among others. The Fihrist will be also discussed in the context of the tradition of bio-bibliography. In addition, the life and character of Ibn al-Nadim, the author of the Fihrist will be discussed, along with his accomplishments as a literary critic and bibliographer.
Historical and Cultural Backgrounds
In the middle of the tenth century (the fourth according to the Muslim calendar), Baghdad was still young compared with other cities of the Near East which could look back on thousands of years of existence. The city had been founded only 200 years earlier-in AD 762-by the Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur (d. AD 775) on the west bank of the Tigris, on or near the ruins of an ancient Babylonian city and at the site of a later Persian village by the name of Baghdad (meaning God-given Garden). Its official Arabic name was Madinat al-Salam (meaning City of Peace), but the old name prevailed when, within a century of its foundation, it had become the most populous and splendid city of that age, surpassing even Constantinople, then the largest and most important European city. As the site of residence of the Caliphs it was the religious capital of Islam though it had at that time largely lost its political importance; it was the hub of far-flung network of trade routes linking East and West from China to Byzantium and to the shores of the Atlantic, and from East of Africa and Arabia to the steppes of Russia. Baghdad was a center of literature, the sciences, and the arts-inasmuch as these did not contravene the precepts of Islam.
Much of the city’s splendor was due to the efforts of the legendary Caliph Harun al-Rashid (AD 786-809) and his able ministers who built great palaces and mosques. Its importance as one of the intellectual centers of the Islamic world was largely the work of Harun’s son and successor, Abd Allah al-Ma’mun (AD 813-833). He promoted the arts and sciences, gathered at his court philosophers and poets, and wrote both poetry and astronomical treatises. The palaces and gardens of the Caliphs as well as the thousands of splendid villas of the courtiers and rich merchants of Baghdad have long since crumbled into dust, victims of the Mongols who razed the city to the ground 300 years later. But two accomplishments of those Caliphs were of much more lasting and far-reaching importance-one was the establishment of the first paper factory outside Central and East Asia in Baghdad during the reign of Harun. This factory provided first the Arabs and soon also Europe with a cheap yet durable writing material which gradually supplanted the much scarcer and therefore costly parchment and vellum. When paper reached Byzantium sometime in the eleventh century, it was called Baghdadikos, a fact which indicates that two centuries after their foundation the paper mills of Baghdad had become eponymous with their product. The other great achievement was the foundation of the Bayt al-Hikmah, the “House of Wisdom,” by Ma’mun in AD 830. This was an academy of sciences, vast library, and translation center the like of which the world had not seen since the days of the Alexandrian Museion, the Ancient Library of Alexandria.
Translation of Greek and Coptic works on medicine and chemistry into Arabic had begun on a small scale under the Umayyad Caliphs in the eighth century, but Ma’mun made an organized effort to obtain whatever was still available of Greek wisdom in Alexandria, Harran, Nisibis, and Junda-i-Shapur (the last one being a Persian center of Greek learning). Ma’mun and his successors, in order to acquire manuscripts, even sent emissaries to Constantinople, the capital of their enemies, where much of the Greek legacy was still preserved and assiduously copied. Thus, Greek works on mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and philosophy were translated into Arabic (though some of the sources were no longer in the original Greek but were themselves translations into Syriac, the eastern dialect of Aramaic (the language spoken throughout most of the Near East before the Arab conquest in the seventh century). The translators working in the House of Wisdom were Chritians (whose language was Syriac), foremost among them the physician Hunayn ibn Ishaq or Johannitius (AD 809-877) who claimed to have translated more than 100 books into Syriac and Arabic, among them the works of Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, Galen, and Ptolemy, as well as parts of the Septuagint. His son Ishaq ibn Hunayn (d. AD 910), collaborated with his father and later continued his work of rendering Aristotle and other Greek philosophers’ works into Arabic. By the end of the ninth century most of what still remained of Greek science and philosophy had been made available to the Arabic-speaking world (though not Greek poetry, drama, and epics, in which Muslims had no interest: they cherished their own poets who drew on a rich and ancient poetic tradition, whereas the tales of gods and goddesses were deeply abhorrent to Islam).
During the century following Ma’mun’s reign the political power of the Caliphs declined to the point where they became mere figureheads. The real power was in the hands of Turkish soldiers, then the hands of Persian viziers who in turn were ousted by the Buwayhids-a dynasty of rulers whose origin was in the Caspian highlands and who assumed at first the title of Amir (commander or ruler) and ultimately that of Amir al-Umara (commander of all commanders or supreme ruler). While the Caliphs were at least in name the spiritual heads of Sunni Islam, the Buwayhids were Shiites. Much of their reign was marred by court intrigues, assassinations, bloody uprisings, and rampant corruption, but it so happened that for about a decade, during which the work we are about was being written, a fairly stable regime was established by Adud al-Dawlah (AD 974-983). He rivaled Ma’mun in his efforts at promoting the arts and sciences and built one of the most splendid libraries of the Islamic Empire in Shiraz Persia. This was the zenith of the Buwayhids’ reign which soon after Adud’s death disintegrated and ended in their overthrow by the Seljuk. We need not follow the history of the Caliphate any further because our story begins in the late 930s and ends shortly after Adud’s death.
Yet neither the political decline of the Caliphs nor even the temporary removal of their seat of power from Baghdad to the city of Samarrah in the later half of the ninth century seemed to have a major impact on the life of the city. The court’s patronage of poets and artists and the scholarly work performed at the House of Wisdom made Baghdad one of the centers of literary activities. It was a meeting place of hundreds of poets and writers all united by a single literary language, Arabic, which in the span of a few hundred years had grown from the vernacular of some poor nomadic tribes in the Arabian desert to a rich and flexible idiom capable of expressing the most delicate thoughts and feelings of the poets as well as the subtle reasoning of philosophers and scientists. It was the lingua franca which in its written form united a multitude of peoples from the Atlantic coast of Iberia and North Africa to Persia, Central Asia, India, and beyond, and was the unrivaled language of culture and learning in which not only Arab writers but also those of other cultures and languages (foremost among them the Persians) chose to express themselves.
An immense number of works were thus written in Arabic, treating every conceivable topic under the sun, and most of them found their way into the libraries of the Caliphs and Amirs as well as into libraries of wealthy private citizens. Scholars and collectors assembled private libraries of sometimes vast size: the judge and historian Muhammad al-Waqidi “left behind cases of books, each case a load for two men”. Such rich collections of books were made possible by the ready availability of paper; by a flourishing industry of book publishing and copying which employed large numbers of scribes and copyists producing the books that scholars needed and bibliophiles wanted; and by a well-organized market for books. Manuscripts left by collectors who had died were brought to certain place in Baghdad where they were sold at auction. Often rare manuscripts fetched high prices, the more so if they were especially beautifully executed, because Arabic calligraphy was then as always highly valued by scholars no less than by collectors of graphic art.
Thus Baghdad was also a city of booksellers. We were told by the geographer Ahmad ibn Abi Yaqub who visited the city in AD 891 that there were more than 100 of them, and a century later there were probably even more bookshops. These were located mostly on the upper floor of houses lining the narrow streets and lanes of the bazaars. That floor served also as living quarters for the bookseller’s family and as a place where professional scribes and students in need of money produced the copies of books to be sold. Occasionally it was even used as a substitute for a library’s reading room. One of these bookshops-a prestigious and probably quite large place, well stocked with great numbers of fine manuscripts on parchment and paper, and frequented by the city’s best scholars and wealthiest collectors-belonged to Abu Yaqub Ishaq al-Warraq al-Baghdadi, whose name “al-Warraq” means “manuscript seller” and “Baghdadi” indicates his residence in Baghdad was the father of Muhammad ibn Ishaq al-Nadim.
The Life of Muhammad ibn Ishaq al-Nadim
Al-Nadim was probably born before AD 935 and no later than AD 937 judging from internal evidence in his work. He was to become the man who gave the Muslim world the most comprehensive and detailed bio-bibliography of its time, the Fihrist al-Ulum-“The Index (or catalog) of the Sciences.” The word “Sciences” in the title is to be understood in its widest sense-i.e. encompassing all human knowledge. In this work al-Nadim described not only the lives of thousands of authors, listing the titles of their books and evaluating their literary merits, but he also dealt with religions, sects, and customs of his time; its scientific achievements and philosophical schools; its beliefs and superstitions; its entertainments and diversions; the languages spoken; and the scripts written throughout the vast Islamic Empire and beyond. In brief, he created a cultural encyclopedia. Yet we know almost nothing about the author. Only in a few instances did he reveal details about his life. Except for his full name, Abu al-Faraj Muhammad ibn Ali Yaqub Ishaq al-Nadim (which gives some clues to his person and family) and a few notes about him in the writings of other Arab authors, no biographical data exist about the man who devoted most of his life to the collection of biographical and literary information on the writers of his own time and of the past who wrote in Arabic or had been translated into that language. That part of his name under which he is generally known-the appellation al-Nadim (which means “court companion”) indicates that he achieved the rank of a dignitary who shared a place at the banquet table with the Amir and other courtiers. Al-Nadim added that his father was known as Abu Yaqub “al-Warraq” which indicates that his father was a bookseller. Al-Nadim’s father must have been a learned man who was well known among the scholars, poets and literati of Baghdad who frequented his shop.
He probably sent his son to an elementary school in a nearby mosque at the customary age of about five or six. There, the Qur’an was being taught to the children by rote until they knew every verse by heart and could read and write. After about four years of such preliminary study, Muhammad probably went to immerse himself in a more serious study of the Qur’an, the commentaries on it, and the Hadith (the traditions of the Prophet, PBUH), as well as the grammar of Arabic at one of the more important mosques where Islamic scholars trained young men for a career as theologians and jurists. These studies were intermingled with work in his father’s shop where the books he studied at the mosque were available in many copies-together with a multitude of other learned works on laws and traditions-and even those written by Non-Muslims in ancient times and in a far away countries, all translated into Arabic in the academies of the Caliphs. Young Muhammad was perhaps also employed in copying some of these books, and certainly he helped his father to sell them to the customers. It also stands to reason that a bookshop which bought and sold large numbers of manuscripts would keep lists at least the better known and most often bought ones because it is unlikely that a bookseller could keep all the various titles and names of authors in his head. Thus Muhammad would have seen such sales catalogs, and he was probably one of his father’s aids who compiled them from time to time. Here lay the seeds from which the mighty tree of al-Nadim’s masterwork would grow during the last years of his life.
From internal evidence in the Fihrist we know that al-Nadim was at one time the pupil of renowned jurists, poets, historians, and scientists, and experts on Hadith who gave hum special permission to quote their works. He became known as a Katib (which means literally “writer”) which may also indicate that he, in the course of time, became a secretary in a government office or, more likely, in one of the many libraries of Baghdad, perhaps even in the library of the House of Wisdom itself. Since he emphasizes in his work that he had actually seen most of the books he described or had received information on them from trustworthy persons (except for those that were already lost in his time and about which he had knowledge gleaned from books only), he must have spent a large part of his life working in or at least near a great library. It may even be the case that for some time he was in charge of a large library. Although this is only conjecture, we know for sure that al-Nadim wrote another book because we have his testimony of it. Right in the beginning of the Fihrist, in the initial chapter’s first section, he says that he dealt with the topic of writing and writing instruments “in a book which I have composed about descriptions and comparisons.” The last words of this statement are generally taken to mean the title of the book, but unfortunately that work is lost-one of the thousands which are listed in the Fihrist by author and title but have perished, most of them in the destruction of the palaces, mosques, libraries, and bookshops of the Islamic Empire by the Mongols, culminating in the sack of Baghdad in AD 1258.
Al-Nadim seems to have spent most of his life in the city of his birth, except for a journey to the city of Mosul in northern Iraq where, according to his own account, he visited several libraries. He doesn’t seem to have travelled widely. He may, however, have made trips to some of the other centers of learning in Iraq, especially to Basra and Kufa, or perhaps to Aleppo, where at that time literature and science flourished under Sayf al-Dawlah (the head of the Hamdanid dynasty ruling Suria) but there is no certain evidence of this. Thus al-Nadim’s knowledge about foreign countries, their languages, scripts, customs, and political institutions was not the fruit of first-hand observation but rather an armchair traveler in Baghdad, where he read voraciously the books written about distant lands and where he had an opportunity to meet frequently with the many travelers and merchants passing through the city. He specifically mentions a Nestorian missionary returning from the Far East who gave him extensive information on China and Korea, while other sources provided him with knowledge about India, Russia, and other countries and peoples both in and outside of the Islamic Empire. Nestorians and Christians of other sects and denominations, Jewish rabbis and adherents of heretical Muslim sects were also his personal friends and the sources of his reports on the sacred scriptures and religious customs of various faiths. As of his own religious convictions, al-Nadim left no doubt: he was a Shiite. In various parts of his work he praises Shiites writers and sages while disparaging orthodox Sunni Muslims as ignorant and superstitious. A large part of the fifth chapter of the Fihrist is devoted to the rationalist theological school of the Mutazilah, some of whose teachings were quite close to those of the Shiites and had been adopted by the Caliph Ma’mun toward the end of his life. Al-Nadim was probably an adherent of this school. Since the members of the ruling Buwayhid dynasty were Shiites, it is not surprising that al-Nadim, an outspoken Shiite, obtained a position at their court, probably during the reign of the Amir Muizz al-Dawlah (AD 945-967) or that of his son Izz al-Dawlah (AD 967-977), though we know nothing about the circumstances of his service in the palace of the Amirs beyond the fact that the author of the Fihrist became known as “al-Nadim,” “the court companion”.
Although he does not tell us anything about his methods of work, he must have collected slips of paper on authors, their biographical data, the titles of their books, and the subjects dealt with them for about 30 years or so, neatly classifying them by subject and arranging them in chronological order. When he was about 50 years old-by the standards of that time, an old man-he finally decided to transform his vast collection of slips into a book. In the first two chapters of the Fihrist he states that they were written in the year AH 377 (the year of the Muslim Calendar) that is AD 987/988. It took him about two years to write the entire work although he did not quite complete it. In many instances he left blank spaces for data to be filled in that he did not have at the time of writing, and he implored his readers to provide him with more information. Thus, in one instance he states, when dealing with the books of Hasan ibn Ali, a follower of the Shiite sect Zaydiyah, “he wrote hundreds of books, but we have not seen them. If some observer does see any of them while we are writing [this book], I will add it in its proper place.” Like many compilers of reference books after him, he evidently hoped to be able to fill in the lacunae in his work as time went on. It is even possible that the last six chapters of the book (in which such lacunae are most frequently found) are only a draft despite the fact that the author wrote a colophon declaring the “completion” of the work. But al-Nadim survived the writings of his Fihrist only by about two years. The most likely date of his death is November AD 990 although later dates are also mentioned by various authors.
The Transmission of the Fihrist
Whereas al-Nadim’s first book, the one in which he dealt with writing materials, shared the fate of the thousands of others whose authors and titles we know thanks only to his indefatigable endeavors but which are irretrievably lost, the Fihrist itself miraculously survived even though just barely and not in one piece. It seems probable that al-Nadim deposited his original manuscript in the Caliph’s library because at least one later author, Yaqut-the famous geographer and compiler of a biographical dictionary who lived in Baghad at the beginnings of the thirteenth century-states expressly that he made use of the original exemplar of the Fihrist (also he relied on a later edition). If al-Nadim’s holograph was available to a scholar 200 years after it had been written, it was probably kept in a great library. Several copies seem to have been made from the holograph during the last years of the author’s life and perhaps under his supervision, closely following not only the text but also the calligraphy of the original and even leaving blank spaces for future additions where al-Nadim had done so. On the title pages of every chapter (except the first one in the two oldest surviving manuscripts) a note indicates that the writing is an “imitation of the author’s handwriting,” including even a facsimile of his signature, and the word “compared” (i.e. with the original) appears on every tenth page.
A new edition of the Fihrist, in which some data missing from the original were apparently inserted in some of the blank spaces, was made by Husayn ibn Ali al-Maghribi, the son of the vizier at the court of the Caliph al-Hakim in Egypt, early in the eleventh century. Though this edition did not survive, we know about it because it was quoted by the chronicler of Shiite literature Abu Jafar Muhammad al-Tusi who even used the same title for his own bibliography, namely Fihrist Kutub al-Shiah. The addition of names and dates in al-Maghribi’s edition may explain why some of the extant later copies contain such data not found in the two oldest manuscripts. The historian Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi (AD 1364-1442) who owned at one time what was probably one of the earliest copies of the Fihrist said in a note on the title page that “nobody quoted” al-Nadim, but that meant only that he had no followers or students. Actually the Fihrist was extensively used and quoted not only by al-Tusi but also by various other Muslim scholars, among them the lexicographer al-Saghani, the biographers Ibn Abi Usaybiah and Jamal al-Din al-Qifti (all in the early or mid-thirteenth century), al-Maqrizi himself, and the biographer Ibn Hajar (d. AD 1448). Even as late as the middle of the seventeenth century, the Turkish historian and bibliographer Haji Khalifah (d. AD 1658) still relied extensively on the Fihrist. Thus, within the orbit of Islam, the Fihrist enjoyed a reputation that lasted for more than 700 years-a rare phenomenon in the realm of historical literature in general and a unique one for a bibliography.
But in the West the work remained unknown until the late seventeenth century, when a manuscript dating from the thirteenth century and containing the first four chapters was brought to Paris from Cairo, and another manuscript, containing the last four chapters, was acquired by the University of Leiden. Two other partial copies found their way to Vienna, and yet another copy made from a manuscript in Istanbul for the French Orientalist W.H. de Slane was also deposited in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. But no attempt was made to edit or translate the work until the middle of the nineteenth century when the German Arabist Gustav Flügel edited the Fihrist based on the then available copies and fragments which, as it turned out, were partially defective copies of two much older and more reliable manuscripts. Flügel worked on his edition for 25 years but died in 1870 before he could see the fruits of his labor in print. In his first report and extensive summary of the work he said that it was “the book everybody is talking about and nobody knows.”
Between the publication of Flügel’s edition in 1872 and the 1950s, translations of certain parts were made in German, French, and English, but no full translation was attempted. The great historian of science George Sarton, in his discussion of the Fihrist said: “The scholar who would undertake a complete and annotated translation would be sure to win the gratitude of the whole Republic of letters.” The Western world had to wait for such a scholar until 1970, when Bayard Dodge, an accomplished Arabist and historian at the American University of Beirut, published his complete and annotated English translation. He relied to some extent on Flügel’s edition but drew primarily on more recent historical research and above all on two manuscripts that came to light only a few decades ago. One is known as the Chester Beatty manuscript (after the library of that collector in Dublin where it is listed as MS 3315). This is probably one of the copies made toward the end of al-Nadim’s lifetime from the original, containing the first four chapters and the first part of the fifth with only a few pages missing. It seems that this manuscript was carefully preserved for almost a millennium-probably in the private libraries of learned men-until it became the property of al-Maqrizi who indicated in a note written on the title page that he owned the book in Damascus in AH 825 (AD 1423). The removal of the work from Baghdad at some time before the thirteenth century to Syria saved it from the destruction that befell other copies in the libraries of that city at the hand of the Mongols in AD 1258. It surfaced again some 400 years later when it belonged to the library of the great mosque built by Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar in Acre. After al-Jazzar’s death in 1804 the book was stolen, and the thieves probably divided it into two parts (perhaps in the hope to get a higher price for two ancient manuscripts than for one). A local dealer in antiquities sold the first part to Sir Chester Beatty who added it to his famous collection.
The other manuscript, which is quite likely the other half of the one stolen from the Acre mosque, was discovered by the German Arabist Hellmut Ritter in the Sulaymaniyah mosque in Istanbul. It is in the same handwriting, the paper is the same size and color, and the same notes on comparison with the original are found on every tenth page, exactly as in the Chester Beatty manuscript; even grammatical errors in the naming of al-Nadim’s father occur in both sources in the same form. The Istanbul manuscript, known as MS 1934, contains the rest of chapter 5 and all the following chapters through the tenth and the author’s colophon. The text of few pages missing from these two sources could be restored from other manuscripts.
Based on evidence in other manuscripts of the Fihrist-some of which were also discovered by Ritter in Istanbul-he hypothesized that the work was originally issued in two different versions, both of which were published in the same year, namely AH 377 (AD 987/988): a shorter one, containing only the first four chapters and a brief introduction, was issued first; the complete version, containing all ten chapters and a much longer introduction and summary, was published somewhat later though with the last six chapters still being in draft form as indicated by the numerous blank spaces (sometimes only a line or two for missing dates of birth or death of an author, sometimes a much larger space for the addition of the titles of his works). Some missing dates were indeed filled in after al-Nadim’s death, the last one being AH 405 (AD 1015), but whether Ritter’s theory is consistent with the facts of the Fihrist’s publication will probably remain an unsolved question.
The Structure of the Fihrist
Ibn al-Nadim’s work contains ten large divisions, each termed maqala, divided into subdivisions, each termed fann. (In the following discussion, I will use the term “book” to indicate maqala and “chapter” to indicate fann.)
The ten books of Ibn al-Nadim’s work are the following:
1. Book I: Language, Jewish and Christian Scriptures, the Quran
2. Book II: Arabic Grammar
3. Book III: History, Genealogy, and so forth
4. Book IV: Poetry
5. Book V: Theology
6. Book VI: Law
7. Book VII: Greek Sciences: Philosophy, Mathematics, Medicine
8. Book VIII: Stories, Fables, Entertainment Literature
9. Book IX: Other Religions
10. Book X: Alchemy
In scholarly writing to date, only limited attention has been paid to the structure of the Fihrist and the historical and ideological information that the structure conveys. Holger Preissler makes the important observation that, when the author does not state his principles of organization, one is forced to deduce them from the material, which could lead to faulty hypothetical reconstructions. He also adds that we are not likely to find one single principle, but rather several principles that are interwoven according to a hierarchy of sorts. The principles undergirding the Fihrist’s organization include person, topic, geography, and chronology. The basic building blocks of the Fihrist are book lists, which fall into two categories: lists of books by a single author, which dominate the work, and lists of books in a specific genre. The latter are found, for example, in part of the chapter on Qur’anic studies (maqala I, fann 3), which gives lists of works on exegesis, variant readings, pointing of the text, abrogating and abrogated verses, the legal verses of the Qur’an, and so on. Geography occasionally appears as an organizational principle, as in the section devoted to works on the number of verses in the Qur’an, which is subdivided into lists of works by the inhabitants of Medina, Mecca, Kufa, Basra, and Syria.
In the Fihrist as a whole, chronology is a fundamental ordering principle, operating at four distinct levels: the internal order of lists of works within a single genre; the internal order of the chapter, or fann; the internal order of the maqala, that is, the order of the chapters or fanns within an individual maqala; and the order of the book as a whole, that is, the order of the maqalas within the Fihrist. An understanding of these four chronological principles helps to interpret the work and the ideas behind it. Using them, the investigator may retrieve information from the work that has eluded investigators to date and also gain insight into Ibn al-Nadim’s method of composition, ideology, and historical analyses. Dimitry Frolow’s brilliant analysis of Ibn al-Nadim’s list of works on Qur’anic exegesis brings out the use of chronology at the first level above, within an individual genre.7 Skipping over the second level of chronological arrangement for the moment, one finds that maqala IV, on poetry, provides a clear example of the chronological arrangement of the chapters, or fanns, within one book. It contains two chapters: the first devoted to ancient poets—essentially pre-Islamic and Umayyad poets—and the second devoted to modern poets—Abbasid poets. Maqala I includes three chapters placed in apparent chronological order: the first on various world scripts known to Ibn al-Nadim, and the second and third chapters on scriptures, first the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, then the Qur’an. The arrangement here seems based on the notion that script and scripture are inextricably linked and that the sacred texts necessarily postdated the invention of writing. Regarding the fourth level of chronology, that of the order of maqalas in the work as a whole, the fact that maqala V, Islamic theology, occurs before maqala VI, Islamic law, suggests an underlying point about the historical development of the two fields. According to Ibn al-Nadim’s view, Islamic theology became an established field or reached an advanced state before Islamic law did. This assessment may be related to his Mutazili ideology and based on the idea that theology takes precedence over law and is the more important field for Islam in general.
Ibn al-Nadim’s reliance on chronology at the level of the internal order of the fann has been stressed by several scholars but has been questioned by Valeriy Polosin.
Ibn al-Nadim, Preissler argues, seeks the origin, the first appearance of each science, and then follows it up until his own time, following the tabaqat model, which was a predominant form of historiography in Ibn al-Nadim’s era. Polosin, however, had earlier criticized many authors for stating that Ibn al-Nadim follows a more or less chronological order in the chapters of the Fihrist, holding that the text itself does not support this conclusion. Despite significant breaks and exceptions, many chapters of the Fihrist do in fact follow chronological order, and this clearly reflects Ibn al-Nadim’s intentions, so that the modern researcher can use this feature of the text to make other deductions about the material. Ibn al-Nadim does not, however, adhere to chronology at all times. In most cases when he breaks chronological arrangement, though, he does so for a discernible reason. Here one must disagree with Polosin, who takes Ibn al-Nadim’s departures from such order as evidence of the lack of an overall systematic approach.
When Ibn al-Nadim arranges authors in chronological order, he apparently thinks first and foremost in terms of death dates, rather than birth dates or dates of activity or authorship.
One would expect this from what is known of other Islamic works throughout the medieval period, particularly biographical dictionaries, which share significant features with the Fihrist and regularly include death dates in individual entries, often without giving any other significant dates regarding the subject of the biographical notice. More importantly, it is clear that Ibn al-Nadim provides death dates or, in cases where the year is itself missing, intended to provide death dates much more frequently than birth dates, which appear only occasionally. As an example of the internal order of a fann, one may consider the chapter on Dawudi or Zahiri jurists, the fourth chapter of the sixth book, which is devoted to Islamic law. This chapter includes entries on eleven jurists, beginning with Dawud b. Khalaf himself and ending with Abu al-Hasan al-Kharazi, a contemporary of Ibn al-Nadim. The entries are evidently placed in chronological order, even though Ibn al-Nadim provides death dates for only two of the jurists, Dawud and Ibn al-Mughallis. In cases where the individual jurists are little knownfrom other sources, something true of nearly allZahiri jurists, a result of this fascinating school of thought’s early demise, Ibn al-Nadim’s arrangement gives a good idea of their relative chronology and may help fix their dates within a narrow range. One may deduce from Ibn al-Nadim’s articulation of this chapter that, at least according to his assessment, Zahiri jurists numbers five to nine, about whom little is known from other sources, died between 936 and 969, and approximately in the order in which they are presented. The chronological pattern appears to hold, and its recognition provides useful results. Individual entries within a chapter do not always appear in chronological order, but there is usually a discernible reason for departure from a chronological arrangement. Ibn al-Nadim explains the main reason for such departures in the third chapter of the third book: “When I mention a certain author, I follow him with mention of someone who is close to him and similar to him, even if his dates [mudda] are later than [the dates] of those whom I mention13 after them. This is my method in the entire book—may God provide assistance through His generosity and bounty.”14 For an example of this principle, one may examine the chapter devoted to Shafii jurists, the third fann of the sixth maqala, where Ibn al-Nadim interrupts a chronological list of al-Shafii’s disciples in order to group the disciples of Abu Thawr (d. 854) together, immediately following the entry on Abu Thawr himself. After presenting four jurists who studied with Abu Thawr—Ibn al-Junayd (d. ?), Ubayd b. Khalaf al-Bazzaz (d.? ), al-_Iyali (d. ?), and Mansur b. Ismail al-Misri (d. 918–19)—he returns to list disciples of al-Shafii. Other similar examples occur in the chapter on jurists of the Ashab al-Hadith, the sixth fann of the sixth maqala. The entry on Ahmad b. Hanbal is followed immediately by jurists whom Ibn al-Nadim considers his disciples, rather than other jurists whose deaths occurred soon after his. These Hanbali jurists are Abu Bakr Ahmad b. Muhammad b. Hani, known as al-Athram (d. 886–87?), Ahmad b. Muhammad b. al-Hajjaj al-Marwazi (d. 888), and Ishaq b. Rahawayh (d. 853?). This is in addition to Ahmad b. Hanbal’s sons Abd Allah (d. 903) and Salih (d. 880?), as well as his grandson Zuhayr b. Salih (d. 915–16), all mentioned in the entry on Ahmad b. Hanbal himself.16 These entries on Hanbalis are followed by another case, where the entries on a father, son, and grandson are grouped together: Abu Khaythama Zuhayr b. Harb (d. 849), Ahmad Ibn Abi Khaythama (d. 892–93), and the latter’s son Abu Abd Allah Muhammad (d. ?). Many examples provide explicit evidence that Ibn al-Nadim was concerned with chronological order within the individual chapter. At the end of the fifth chapter of the sixth book, on Shiite legal scholarship, Ibn al-Nadim gives an entry on the Shiites scholars of the Al Yaqtin and informs the reader that these entries should be inserted in the proper place, earlier in the chapter—a confirmation that he is endeavoring to stick to a chronological presentation within each chapter. He reports that Ali b. Yaqtin died in Baghdad in 798–99 and that his father, Yaqtin, died later, in 801. He clearly intends that they should be inserted in the proper passage according to chronological order based on their death dates.18 A similar remark occurs in the chapter devoted to jurists of the Ashab al-Hadith. The heading of the entry on Ali b. al-Madini is followed by the phrase qabla hadha al-mawdi (“before this spot”). The intention behind it is to indicate that this entry, devoted to an author who died in 872, is out of place according to chronological sequence and should be placed earlier in the chapter instead of where it is now, following the entry on Muslim b. al-Hajjaj, who died in 875. An example showing Ibn al-Nadim’s efforts to figure out correct chronological order even when information is limited occurs in the second chapter, on mathematics, in the seventh book, devoted to the Greek sciences. Ibn al-Nadim places the entry on Menelaus just before that of Ptolemy, author of the famous Almagest, and introduces him as follows: “Before Ptolemy, because he [Ptolemy] mentioned him in the book the Almagest.” Ibn al-Nadim thus uses the information available to him to determine chronological order, even when he does not have specific dates.
The Classification System of the Fihrist
When al-Nadim began to collect material for his work, the universe of knowledge (which is what he meant by “the sciences”) as seen through Muslim eyes was generally divided into three parts: the first-known as “the sciences of Islam”-consisted of the Qur’an, Hadith (“tradition”), Fiqh (religious law), philology, and history; the second-“the pre-Islamic sciences”-were those that existed before the coming of the Prophet, PBUH and developed further afterward-mainly poetry and oratory; and the third consisted of the sciences not previously known to Arabs but transmitted to them by the way of translation from the Greek and other languages-i.e., medicine, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, alchemy, and the philosophical writings of Aristotle and the Neo-Platonists. This traditional tripartite division of the universe of knowledge formed the basis of the classification schemes devised individually by the great Muslim polymaths, al-Kindi (d. AD 873), al-Farabi (d. AD 951), and al-Khwarizmi (d. AD 997) for their encyclopedic works.
Al-Nadim could therefore build on existing classificatory traditions, especially on that of the contemporary of his youth, al-Farabi, who divided his Ihsa al-Ulum (Enumeration of sciences) into eight main classes beginning with Philosophy (including grammar, writing, and poetry). Yet al-Nadim’s classification scheme, while preserving the classical order of the “sciences of Islam,” broke new ground. He divided the universe of knowledge into ten main classes, to each of which he devoted a maqala or chapter. The parallel with Melvil Dewey’s ten main classes is obvious, though there is of course no other similarity between the two systems except the fact that the decimal system of reckoning is common to the Arabic and the Western culture that latter having received the system of ten digits from the Arabs who in turn had learned it from the Indians. The first section of the first class, devoted to languages, writing systems, and writing implements, while particularly similar to al-Farabi’s first class, is probably unique among bibliographic classification schemes. Al-Nadim was evidently much interested in this topic: he had written a book about it and intended to write another one. He thought quite logically that a work devoted to a complete listing of all known books ought to begin at the very beginning-the origins of writing-and how this wondrous invention of mankind manifested itself in various parts of the known world.
While the sequence of the next five main classes follows closely the traditional ones, the division of the latter part of the Fihrist may seem somewhat incoherent to modern and especially to non-Muslim eyes: the separation of light popular literature from poetry and other literary works; the treatment of non-Islamic religions far removed from Islam, Judaism and Christianity; the chapter on alchemy separated by that on foreign religions and customs from the conceptually related chapter on medicine and the natural sciences. But this order must have made sense not only to its designer, who certainly gave much thought to the way in which he would arrange his work before putting his voluminous notes in the order in which he presented them, but also to his readers-the community of Muslim scholars. It was based on broad contemporary consensus as mirrored in current encyclopedic works and almost certainly in the arrangement of the scholarly libraries of Baghdad and of those that al-Nadim visited elsewhere. In any event, it is known that most of the great Muslim libraries during the following centuries adopted al-Nadim’s classification for the arrangement of their books. The Fihrist thus became, in addition to its bibliographic objective, also the first generally acknowledged Arab library classification scheme.
Each main class (except the last one) is further subdivided into sections which, according to the varying scope of the class, number from two to eight and range from a few to many dozens of pages. The sections are often broad chronological divisions into “old” and “new” (i.e. Muslim) writings, or they follow a traditional subdivision of a topic as in the chapter on Islamic law which is arranged by schools of famous commentators and their pupils and adherents; in the seventh chapter-the one on philosophy and science-the division is by discipline. Within each section or subdivision the arrangement is generally chronological by date of death of a writer, following a tripartite pattern: (1) name and genealogy of an author; (2) his life, including stories and anecdotes told about him or reported by other authors, and a critical evaluation such as “he was eloquent and a master of literary style” but also “he was a bad writer”; and (3) a listing of the titles of his works, apparently also in chronological order. If the writer was the founder of a school and had pupils and followers, their names were listed immediately thereafter in order to keep conceptually or ideologically related works together, thus disregarding strict chronological order where this would have interfered with the coherent exposition of a subject or trend as discussed in the previous section in details.
Literature Review of Selected Commentaries about the Fihrist
Valeriy Polosin accuses Ibn al-Nadim of “compositional chaos.” From his viewpoint, the apparent order found in some chapters of the Fihrist actually results from Ibn al-Nadim’s having lifted or paraphrased entire sections of text from earlier sources that did in fact adhere to stricter principles of order, such as al-Sirafi’s (d. 979) Akhbar al-Nahwiyin al-Basriyyin. The method that Ibn al-Nadim followed in composing the work—mapping out books, chapters, or sections in his codex of blank folios and gradually filling in the blank areas—resulted in the random placement of certain entries; Ibn al-Nadim simply placed them in the blank space that remained available.58 Although this accurately describes Ibn al-Nadim’s method of composition to a degree, it is nevertheless an unfair and exaggerated assessment. The elements of order evident in the Fihrist are not mere exceptions, nor do sections that appear at first glance to be arranged cogently turn out to be hopelessly muddled upon closer examination. Ibn al-Nadim endeavored to follow chronological order in many individual chapters and sections within chapters but lacked sufficient information to do this perfectly and was constrained by the method of filling
in the blanks just described. Polosin’s view holds for certain limited parts of the work. For example, at the end of the chapter on Shafii jurists, the chronological order is quite a bit disturbed, so that Ibn Khayran (d. 932) appears last, after Ibn Abi Hurayrah (d. 956) and al-Qaffal al-Shashi (d. 976), in contrast to many other passages from the book on law, such as the
chapter on Zahiri jurists. This suggests that when Ibn al-Nadim was unsure of particular
authors’ placement as he recorded additional entries, he tended to put them at the end
of the chapter in question. His intent may have been to finish recording the necessary
information and then perhaps create a new redaction of the entire work at a later date.
In any case, these occasional elements of disorder in the text do not negate the fact that
the Fihrist is on the whole constructed with a great deal of thought and care.
It is unlikely that the elements of order in the Fihrist are all derivative, as Polosin argues. Although Ibn al-Nadim was certainly influenced by the sources, both acknowledged and unacknowledged, on which he drew, he shows originality of thought, something that is particularly clear in the many cases where he exhibits a willingness to ignore rigid doctrinal considerations. Polosin claims that Ibn al-Nadim was decidedly not a scholar and did not belong to academic circles per se, but, like other warraqs (booksellers), earned a living on their periphery. Although this may be true in a general sense, it does not mean that Ibn al-Nadim was devoid of scholarly insights. As this study has endeavored to demonstrate, Ibn al-Nadim drew a great deal on his personal insight and ability to weigh the evidence available in composing the chapters and books of his magnum opus.
Wellisch stated al-Nadim revealed much about himself by the scope of his work, the way in which he compiled it, and the manner in which he dealt with subjects. Wellisch further stated that first of all, we know from al-Nadim’s own statements about scholars he had known and from evidence in the works of later writers that he studied under eminent teachers, some of whom gave him permission to quote their works and teachings, an indication that they considered him to be their peer and a scholar in his own right who would not distort or falsify what had been transmitted to him. Al-Nadim’s work also clearly indicates that he loved books also as precious and beautiful objects and was keenly interested in their physical aspects-their writings, calligraphy, binding, and decoration, and not least the care and preservation of old and precious manuscripts. This is quite clear from many examples in the Fihrist that indicated the author’s bibliophilic interests. Al-Nadim knew that he was creating a reference work of lasting value, and he endeavored to make it as reliable as possible. Time and again he emphasizes that he had personally seen the books he describes, or that the information on them had come to him from persons on whose judgment he could rely. If he had the slightest doubts about the actual existence of a work or about the veracity of statements made in them he expressed this in no uncertain terms.
Wellisch further illustrates al-Nadim objectivity as although al-Nadim lived in turbulent times when violent clashes between both political and religious factions were the order of the day, al-Nadim exhibits a large measure of objectivity, the more remarkable since he himself was a member of a dissident religious minority, a condition generally not conducive to objectivity and tolerance. Yet he dealt equally with the literature of orthodox Islamic religious tradition and with that of a number of dissident and heretical sects, presenting their doctrines, scriptures, and teachings on an equal footing, citing the names of authors, the titles of their works, and describing their contents as impartially as possible, leaving it to the reader to draw conclusions and only very seldom expressing his own approval or disapproval in rather moderate terms. This is represented in his detailed account of Islamic factions such as the Mutazilah, the dissident sects of the Ismailiyah and many others. He could well have simply excluded such controversial writings from his bibliography and most of his readers would not have found fault with him for such omissions; perhaps rather the opposite: they may have thought that he had no business dealing with heretical and subversive teachings. But that was not al-Nadim’s notion of historical and bibliographic accuracy and reliability, and later historians of the religious and political events and movements in the Islamic Empire must be grateful to him. Last but not least, al-Nadim had a wry sense of humor. While he necessarily had to compress a sometimes large amount of information on the more well-known and celebrated writers to bring them within the framework of a self-imposed concise format of brief description of the salient facts in a man’s life, he evidently relished funny anecdotes and incidents and did not consider them to be seemingly irrelevant in a scholarly work as more pedantic and pedestrian author may have done.
Al-Nadim as Literary Critic and Bibliographer
The Fihrist is in many respects unique among major bibliographic works. It was the first universal bio-bibliography of Arabic works and remains the only conceived and executed on such a vast scale. It listed not only works of acknowledged fame and value, nor only those pertaining to specific field of knowledge, but practically anything and everything that had ever been written by Arab or had been rendered in the Arabic language until almost to the end of the tenth century. Nothing, not even the most trivial and ephemeral writings of obscure and sometimes unknown authors, was deemed to be unworthy of being included: the loftiest thoughts of philosophers, the revelations of the founders and prophets of great and small religious movements as well as those of their foes and persecutors, the sublime verses of great poets and great historical works share the pages of the Fihrist with the scribbling of jesters and buffoons, old wives’ tales, cookbooks, trivial romances, and superstitious drivel. Yet despite this apparent lack of discrimination, al-Nadim had high standards of literary criticism and never hesitated to give his candid opinion on the literary merit of certain authors, the authenticity of their works, or the quality of certain translations. To cite only one example: when dealing with one of the most highly respected essayists and scholars of Arabic literature, known as al-Jahiz, who lived about a century before al-Nadim he approvingly cited a remark made by the Caliph Ma’mun implying that the author was “glorifying himself and honoring his [own] compositions” and he also distinguished on stylistic grounds between the authentic and the spurious works of the same author stating that The camel, a book ascribed to him, “was not in the style of al-Jahiz and did not resemble it.”
The Fihrist in the Tradition of Bio-Bibliography
Although the Fihrist was a novel and highly original work in its time and place, this is not to say that al-Nadim created it without any knowledge of other and much older bibliographic works. As mentioned earlier, he grew up in his father’s bookshop where sales catalogs were compiled from time to time for the convenience of customers, and it is very likely that he himself was employed as a young man in the compilation of such lists. Library catalogs also existed because without them large collections of books would have been useless. At various points the Fihrist mentions catalogs compiled by authors or for collectors of large private libraries: thus, a certain Ibn al-Muallim, a Shiite leader who had a large private library, is said to have had also a “well-known and annotated catalog” which may imply that it was being used not only by the owner himself but was also available to other scholars. Thus, the making of sales catalogs for bookshops, the compilation of library catalogs, and the listing of poems in anthologies were not only fairly common but had already attained a certain level of bibliographic sophistication, as witness the alphabetical arrangement of poets’ names. A more difficult question is the degree to which Fihrist was modeled on earlier bio-bibliographies compiled since Hellenistic times. These had their origin in the Pinakes, the vast bio-bibliographic catalog of the Alexandrian library, compiled in the third century BC by the poet and librarian Callimachus. Dodge mentions that it is possible that al-Nadim learned about Greek and Byzantium bio-bibliographies from his friends in the Christian community with whom he discussed philosophical and literary issues. It is therefore not unlikely that al-Nadim had at least some vague idea about the existence of works of a bio-bibliographic character even though he had never seen them and would not have been able to read them. This idea and his familiarity with already existing catalogs may well have been the source of inspiration for the compilation of the Fihrist which, as all great works, had to be built on foundations laid by others. Seen in this perspective as a link in a long chain of bibliographic tradition, al-Nadim’s Fihrist is only one of the outstanding works of its own time but an enduring monument to the efforts of bibliographers throughout the ages toward the preservation of mankind’s spiritual heritage.
Conclusion
Despite widespread recognition of the tremendous importance of the Fihrist itself, Ibn al-Nadim has been underestimated in modern scholarship. Many have viewed him as a bumbling bookshop owner who, as a hobby, collected lists of old books in a cluttered office at the back of his shop. He may have been a connoisseur of book lore and trivia, but he was not himself a serious scholar, merely reporting what he had read or what others had told him. This view must change. Ibn al-Nadim should be taken seriously as a substantial thinker in his own right, an intellectual historian who, like his erudite and more touted colleagues, carefully crafted original interpretations of the past, and in some cases may be equally if not more insightful than they are.
