The Medieval Arabic World of Books: A Tour of a Lost Syrian Library

In this episode we explore the contents of a remarkable medieval library: the Ashrafiya of Damascus. What makes the Ashrafiya important isn’t so much its fame in its own time, but the survival of an extraordinary document: the oldest Arabic library catalogue ever discovered. Using this as our guide, we take a tour of the library, from its location between the eighth century Umayyad mosque and the mausoleum of Saladin’s nephew to the bookshelves placed opposite the windows to avoid the risk of burning lamps. Although the Ashrafiya was far from the largest medieval Arabic library when the catalogue was written in the 1270s, it still held over 2000 books – a number that even the University of Cambridge wouldn’t reach for another century. Still more significant is the sheer variety of subjects it covered, helping us reconstruct the larger intellectual context in which Muslim religious ideas took shape. Nile Green talks to Konrad Hirschler, the author of Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), which was awarded the biennial Best Book prize by the Middle East Medievalists society. It is available open-access here: https://www.academia.edu/13464354/Medieval_Damascus_Plurality_and_Diversity_in_an_Arabic_Library_-_The_Ashrafiya_Library_Catalogue