Asian and African studies blog

Stories of the hero Rustam and his trusty steed Rakhsh, immortalized by the tenth century poet Firdawsi in his epic poem the Shahnamah (ʻBook of kingsʼ), are among the best loved in the whole of Persian literature. Not so well-known, however, are unique versions of the same story dating from the eighth and ninth centuries which are currently on display in the international exhibition The Everlasting Flame: Zoroastrianism in History and Imagination at the National Museum, Delhi (More on this exhibition in my recent post Celebrating Noruz in Delhi with new 'Everlasting Flame').

Introducing the Rustam story in the eighth century Panjikent wall paintings to Dr. Najma Heptulla, Minister of Minority Affairs, at the exhibition opening in Delhi. Photo: National Museum

Rustam's Rakhsh in Firdawsi’s Shahnamah
Rakhsh was no ordinary horse. The Shahnamah tells us how Rustam inspected the horses of Zabulistan and Kabul and finally selected a colt with the chest and shoulders of a lion, as strong as an elephant, and the colour of rose leaves scattered on a saffron background. This colt, already known as ‘Rustam’s Rakhsh’, was, it seems, pre-destined to carry the defender of the land of Iran.

Rakhsh was not only fast and strong, he was intelligent and an active protagonist. Perhaps his best-known exploit was the first of the seven ‘trials’ which Rustam underwent on the quest to liberate king Kavus from the demons of Mazandaran. Exhausted by his long journey, Rustam fell asleep. Nearby, however, hidden in the reeds was a fierce and hungry lion. The lion attacked but Rakhsh pounded the lion’s head with his hooves, bit his neck and tore the lion into pieces. When Rustam woke, the lion was dead.

Rakhsh kills a lion. From Firdawsi’s Shahnamah. Copied in 891/1486, Turkman/Timurid style (British Library Add.18188, f. 90v)

In future, Rustam ordered, Rakhsh was to wake him if an enemy drew near. However, during the third ‘trial’, Rustam, while asleep, was approached again, this time by a monstrous dragon. Twice woken by his horse Rakhsh, in the darkness of the night he failed to see any danger and went back to sleep. Woken a third time, however, Rustam finally saw the dragon and with Rakhsh’s help succeeded in killing him.

Rustam and Rakhsh in the third ‘trial’ when together they defeat a dragon, Rakhsh biting the dragon while Rustam cuts off his head. Copied in 891/1486, Turkman/Timurid style (British Library Add.18188, f 91v)

The Sogdian Rustam fragment
The Middle Persian Xwaday-namag ‘Book of kings’ (de Blois, “Epics”), one of the sources on which Firdawsi drew, was probably not a poem, but rather a prose compendium of legendary and historical traditions put together toward the end of the Sasanian empire. Although it is referred to frequently in Arabic sources, no extant copy survives as such. The name Rustam, however, began to be common at the very end of the Sasanian period, in the seventh century, no doubt reflecting the fact that by this time the Rustam legend had become widely popular in the Western Iranian lands, especially in Sogdiana (modern day Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) the homeland of the Sogdians (Sims-Williams, 2015).

The British Library is fortunate in having in its collections part of a fragment of the story written in Sogdian (an eastern Iranian language spoken by the Sogdians), which probably dates from the ninth century. It was discovered in 1907 in cave 17 at Dunhuang, China, during Stein’s second expedition to Central Asia. The upper part of the same manuscript was subsequently acquired by Paul Pelliot the following year and is now in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. Together these two fragments form the only surviving textual evidence for an early Rustam cycle, copied some 200 years before Firdawsi completed his epic poem.

Reconstruction of the two fragments of the Sogdian story of Rustam and the demons, ninth century, from Dunhuang, China. Top: Pelliot Sogdien 13, and bottom: Stein Ch. 00349 (British Library Or.8212/81)

The story described in our Sogdian fragment does not correspond with any of the episodes known from Firdawsi’s Shahnamah. It relates how Rustam and his horse Rakhsh destroyed a band of demons by pretending to flee and then attacking them while they were unprepared. The fragment begins and ends tantalisingly mid-sentence so we’ll never know exactly what happened!

[Paris fragment] ... [The demons] immediately fled towards [the city]. Rustam went in pursuit right up to the city gates. Many demons died from being trampled; only a thousand managed to enter the city. They shut the gates. Rustam returned with great renown. He went to a good pasture, stopped, took off the saddle and let his horse loose on the grass. He himself rested, ate a meal, was satisfied, spread a rug, lay down and began to sleep.

The demons stood in malevolent consultation. They said to one another: It was a great evil, a great shame on us, that we should have taken refuge in the city from a single horseman. Why should we not go out? Either let us all die and be annihilated or let us exact vengeance for our lords! The demons, who were left a meagre remnant of their former strength, began to prepare great heavy equipment with strong armour and with great ...

They opened the city gates. Many archers, many charioteers, many riding elephants, many riding monsters, many riding pigs, many riding foxes, many riding dogs, many riding on snakes and on lizards, many on foot, many who went flying like vultures and ..., many upside-down, the head downwards and the feet upwards: they all bellowed out a roar, they raised a mighty storm, rain, snow, hail, [lightning] and thunder, they opened their evil mouths and spouted fire, flame and smoke. They departed in search of the valiant Rustam.

Then the observant Rakhsh came and woke Rustam. Rustam arose from his sleep, quickly donned his leopard-skin garment, tied on his bow-case, mounted Rakhsh and hastened towards the demons. When Rustam saw from afar the army of the demons, he said to Rakhsh [beginning of the London fragment]: Come, sir, run away little [by little]; let us perform [a trick] so that the demons [pursue us] to the flat [plain ...]. Rakhsh agreed. Immediately Rustam turned back. When the demons saw, at once both the cavalry and the infantry quickly hurled themselves forward. They said to one another: Now the chief’s hope has been crushed; no longer is he prepared to do battle with us. By no means let him escape! Do not kill him either, but take him alive so that we may show him evil punishment and harsh torture! The demons encouraged one another greatly; they all howled and departed in pursuit of Rustam. Then Rustam turned round and attacked the demons like a fierce lion attacking a deer or a hyena attacking a flock or herd, like a falcon attacking a [hare or] a porcupine attacking a snake, and he began [to destroy] them ...

(translation N. Sims-Williams)

The murals of Panjikent
Additional archaeological evidence for an early Rustam cycle is to be found in wall-paintings discovered by the archaeologist B. Stavisky in 1956-7 in a two storeyed house in the south east of medieval Panjikent, Tajikistan.

The Rustam frieze from Panjikent, Room 41/VI now on display in the State Hermitage Museum St Petersburg. Photo: Ursula Sims-Williams

Reconstruction of the Rustam frieze, made at the time of excavation by artists Gremyachinskaya and Nikitin, now in the Museum of History of Culture of Panjikent, Tajikistan. Photo: Ursula Sims-Williams

The friezes are attributed to the first half of the eighth century and depict a series of episodes in which Rustam and Rakhsh are engaged in battle with demons. While identifications with known episodes in the Shahnamah are difficult it is tempting to think that one of the scenes may correspond to that described in the Sogdian fragment discovered at Dunhuang.

Currently on display in the National Museum Delhi: Rustam, mounted on Rakhsh, fights an adversary. Wall-painting on dry loess plaster from Panjikent, Tajikistan, c. 740 AD (The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, SA-16223). Photo: Ursula Sims-Williams

Further reading
Firdawsi, Shahnameh: the Persian book of kings; tr. Dick Davis. New York: Penguin Books, 2007.
Nicholas Sims-Williams, “The Sogdian Fragments of the British Library,” Indo-Iranian Journal 18, 1976, pp. 43-82. Transcription and edition of Paris and BL fragments on pp. 54-61.
Nicholas and Ursula Sims-Williams, “Rustam and his zīn-i palang.” In: From Aṣl to Zāʼid: Essays in Honour of Éva M. Jeremiaś, ed. I. Szánto. Piliscsaba: Avicenna Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, 2015, pp. 249-58.
Guitty Azarpay and others, Sogdian Painting: The Pictorial Epic in Oriental Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
Boris I. Marshak, and V. A. Livshits, Legends, Tales, and Fables in the Art of Sogdiana. New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2002, especially pp. 25-54.
Boris I. Marshak, “Panjikant”, Encyclopaedia Iranica online.

Ursula Sims-Williams, Asian and African Studies

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The British Library holds a small but significant collection of manuscripts from West Africa. As part of his PhD research, Paul Naylor is cataloguing the collection and identifying its contents for the first time. Here, he introduces the collection and gives his preliminary results.

The British Library’s West African manuscripts collection
The British Library’s collection consists of eight bound volumes of written material and five Qur’ans, numbering some 3,000 manuscript pages altogether. Most of these items date from the mid-19th century, and were acquired by the British Museum Library (the forerunner of the British Library) between 1895 and 1917. In addition, two of the Qur’ans were acquired in the 1970s, and two other manuscripts have been purchased since 2000.

The manuscripts were paginated and bound in leather, and have remained largely undisturbed ever since. That they were not seen as important is shown by the brief, vague and sometimes shockingly dismissive handwritten records of acquisition: an 1895 entry, for example, uses the phrase: ‘Muslim catechisms prayers and charms in a barbarous African style of writing’.

Thankfully, scholarship has moved on from this view, and manuscripts from West Africa, as from any other part of the world where manuscripts in the Arabic language are created and studied, are now seen as valuable in their own right and important for the study of the societies that produced them. One of the aims of my research project is to facilitate the study of these manuscripts by providing detailed catalogue records and search terms for the collection, so that it will be easily searchable through the British Library’s online catalogue.

Illuminated pages from a loose leaf Qur’an, kept in a leather bag, on display in the British Library’s exhibition ‘West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song’ (16.10.15-16.2.16). Late 18th/19th century  (British Library Or.16,751)

Work on the West African manuscripts to date suggests that these items can play a part in removing some of the myths and stereotypes about pre-colonial West Africa. They show that the region was very much connected with the rest of the world, and a place in which education and the written word had a high value. The collection shows a real desire to widen horizons and expand knowledge, and gives us a very personal glimpse of the individuals at the forefront of this movement, to which they dedicated their lives. It is for this reason that it is so satisfying to re-examine and bring to light this rich collection, which should now gain the recognition and scholarly attention it deserves.

Language and script in the manuscript culture of West Africa
Before the colonial period, ‘Arabic was the Latin of Africa’, in the words of the distinguished Africanist scholar John Hunwick[1]. Islam and Arabic learning first reached the West African region between the 9th and 13th centuries. Muslims must recite the Qur’an and the five daily prayers in Arabic, and therefore in West Africa, like anywhere else, to be a Muslim means at least learning to read Arabic script. Religious education in West Africa is and was in Arabic, although the teacher may in some cases explain the reading material in the local language. In 19th century West Africa, a place with more than a thousand regional languages but a remarkably uniform Arabic education system, Arabic was the means of written communication between educated people.

Almost all the West African material in the British Library’s collection is in Arabic. However, while the main body of text is always in Arabic, copyists and authors often include extensive notation in their own language transcribed in Arabic script (ajami) in the margins. In our collection we have established so far the presence of two West African languages, Soninke and Fulfulde.

Page from the ‘Middle Creed’ of Yusuf al-Sanusi, a text arguing for the existence of one God. The larger text is in Arabic, the smaller text a gloss in the Soninke language (British Library Or.6473, f.214r)

The type of Arabic script used by West African copyists can broadly be classified as ‘Maghrebi’, that is, Arabic in the style written in historical Andalusia and North Africa. It was from these regions that Arabic learning first reached West Africa. Although the French ethnographer Octave Houdas first described Arabic calligraphy south of the Sahara as a unique category in 1886, it was not given much attention. In the 2000s, several Arabic scholars with an interest in West Africa begun to note the wide variety of regional West African calligraphic styles, tentatively classifying features unique to each centre of manuscript production such as Hausaland, Bornu and Masina (Mali)[2]. Much work remains to be done in this field however, and neither the number of distinct styles of West African calligraphy nor the terms to designate them have been fixed. Making the British Library collection more accessible may provide significant contributions to a field that is still in its infancy.

The book in West Africa
Historically, books in West Africa were rare and expensive items and were normally held in small private libraries and passed between scholars, who copied them by hand for their own use. These scholars were teachers and sometimes copyists and scribes as well; many travelled extensively in the West African region, taking their books with them. Manuscripts were generally unbound, and none of the West African works in the British Library collection were originally bound. A century ago, the practice of the British Museum was to bind them upon acquisition, which means that there can be up to 150 separate works in a single volume.

Paper in West Africa was expensive, imported from Europe via North Africa and later the Atlantic coast. As a result it is very rare to find a blank or sparsely covered sheet of paper in the collection. Every scrap of paper was utilised.

One of the really spectacular finds in this collection is a letter from a Muhammad al-Amin Suwaré in Touba (probably in the Senegambian region) to his son, living nearby. Muhammad complains that a scholar to whom he had lent one of his books to copy had not given it back, and had even demanded payment for its return. Muhammad al-Amin asks his son to get this book back to him ‘quickly, quickly, quickly’, angrily remarking ‘I would never agree to buy my own book!’

Letter from Muhammad al-Amin to his son, with words underlined in red ink by the indignant scholar (British Library Or.6473, f. 190r)

As well as capturing the importance of books and book ownership in 19th century West Africa, the letter is wonderfully personal. Muhammad fumes against the scholar in question, saying he is a man of no religion, before adding in a rather embarrassed note that this scholar could not really have stolen the book, ‘because he is a god-fearing man of faith and learning’. Muhammad also highlights some expressions in the letter as good examples of Arabic grammar for his son, giving their explanation with notes linked by arrows to the main text.

Identifying the collection
Before I started work on the collection, there was very little information about what kind of material it contained, where in ‘West Africa’ it may have come from and how old the works might be. The main task was to look at each work in detail and glean as much information about it as possible. What is the subject area? Does the work have a title? Do we know the identity of the author? Can we get any information about the person who copied it? Where might they have lived, and when?

In a pre-printing age, the only way to reproduce written texts was to copy them out by hand. As a result, almost all the works in this collection are copies of earlier, well-established works. It was not common practice to record the date a work was copied, although strangely the copyist often notes the day and time the copy was finished, ‘on Friday, after the midday prayer’, for example. The best way to estimate the earliest date the copy could have been made is therefore to find out the dates of the individual who created the original work.

The collection has copies of the works of many authors who were writing around the middle of the 19th century. Judging also by the paper – and in West Africa paper has an especially short lifespan - these manuscripts were probably written around the same time. However, many works in the collection were originally composed as long ago as the 12th or 13th centuries, so these manuscripts may well be older than the mid-19th century.

While it is sometimes possible to identify the authors of these works, more often than not the copyist is more elusive, providing no name or often ‘signing’ the copy only with pious epithets such as ‘I have completed it, may God forgive my sins’. However, many works in the collection have colophons, that is, statements at the end of a work giving the name of the copyist, the owner and sometimes additional information. The colophon was also the occasion for the copyist to show off his drawing skills and many colophons in the collection have colourful or geometric designs.

Colophon marking the end of a series of commentaries on lines of poetry by Sheikh Abdullah ibn Ali, who also made this copy (British Library Or.6880, f. 236r)

Most names given for the copyists are so common as to be untraceable, although one, the family name Suwaré, occurs ten times across two manuscripts in the collection. The Suwaré were a family based around the town of Toubacuta in present-day Guinea, founded in 1824[3].

Part 2 of this blog will take an in-depth look at some of the items in the British Library’s West African manuscript collection.

Further reading
Blair, S. S., ‘Arabic calligraphy in West Africa’ in Shamil Jeppie and Suleymane Bachir Diagne (eds), The meanings of Timbuktu (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008), pp. 59-75.
Brigaglia, A., ‘Central Sudanic Arabic scripts (Part 1): The popularization of the Kanawī script’, Islamic Africa, 2.2 (2011), pp. 51-85.
Brigaglia, A., and M. Nobili, ‘Central Sudanic Arabic scripts (Part 2): Barnāwī’, Islamic Africa, 4.2 (2013), pp. 195-223.
Nobili, M., ‘Arabic scripts in West African manuscripts: a tentative classification from the de Gironcourt collection’, Islamic Africa, 2.1 (2011), pp. 105-133.

Paul Naylor, British Library Collaborative Doctoral Student, Asian and African Studies

[1] John Hunwick, West Africa, Islam, and the Arab World: Studies in Honor of Basil Davidson (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2006).
[2] See ‘Further reading’ below for more information on this subject.
[3] L. Sanneh, ‘Futa Jallon and the Jakhanke Clerical Tradition. Part II: Karamokho Ba of Touba in Guinea’, Journal of Religion in Africa 12, 2 (1981), 105-126.

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With a long-standing interest in ancient Iranian languages and culture, I was especially excited when the possibility was raised of bringing the SOAS 2013 exhibition 'The Everlasting Flame: Zoroastrianism in History and Imagination' to the National Museum, Delhi. After months of tireless preparation the big night came just in time to celebrate the New Year festival Noruz. For the British Library, this was a double first: we had never lent original items to India before and it was the first time we were collaborating with the National Museum, Delhi.

Dr. Najma Heptulla, Minister of Minority Affairs, speaks at the inaugural ceremony. Also on the platform: Baroness Blackstone, Chairman of the British Library Board and Baroness Amos, Director of SOAS.

Held originally at the Brunei Gallery SOAS, October 2013 – December 2013, 'The Everlasting Flame' at Delhi is curated jointly by 6 curators: Sarah Stewart in the lead with Firoza Punthakey Mistree, Almut Hintze, Pheroza Godrej, Shernaz Cama and myself.

The Delhi team: KK Sharma, myself, Joyoti Roy, Ruchira Verma, Sarah Stewart and Firoza Mistry

The exhibition comprises over 300 objects with loans from the British Library, British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, State Hermitage, National Museum of Iran, National Museum of India and many smaller institutions and private lenders. While the exhibition is basically the same as in 2013, it also includes 77 new items. Some of these are substitutions for exhibits which were unavailable but others are completely new such as the Sasanian silverware from Iran, the 7th century wall paintings from Panjikent, Tajikistan, a gold plaque from the Oxus treasure (5th-4th century BC) and a beautiful 13th century enamelled reliquary casket from Limoges which depicts the three Magi, the biblical ‘wise men’ from the East.

In 2013 I wrote several posts featuring some of the British Library loans: The Everlasting Flame: Zoroastrianism in History and Imagination; New exhibition opens on Zoroastrianism; Ovum Zoroastræum: ‘Zoroaster’s egg’; and Zoroastrian visions of heaven and hell

The Zoroastrian prayer book, Khordeh Avesta (‘Small Avesta’), contains Avestan prayers, hymns and invocations recited by priests and lay people in daily worship. This copy belonged to the famous orientalist Thomas Hyde (1636–1703) whose History of the Persian Religion was the first comprehensive work to be written on Zoroastrianism (British Library Reg.16.B.6, folio 1r)

New items from the British Library which were especially selected for Delhi include a copy of the Shahnameh which was illustrated by leading Mughal artists around 1616 in the workshop of ‘Abd al-Rahim Khankhanan and a copy of the Dasatir-i asmani by the charismatic 16^th century theologian and philosopher Azar Kayvani whose neo-Zoroastrian interpretations sought to reconcile the pre-Islamic past with Islamic philosophy.

The execution of the 6th century Iranian heretic and social reformer Mazdak depicted in Firdawsi’s epic the Shahnamah (‘Book of Kings’). Mazdak’s followers are seen beneath the gallows, buried alive upside down. This copy of the Shahnamah probably originates from the 15th century but was refurbished around 1613 in the studio of the Mughal statesman Khankhanan ʻAbd al-Rahim. The artist of this painting was the well known Mughal painter Banwari (British Library Add.5600, folio 452v)

An extra bonus is that all the exhibited manuscripts have now been digitized and if not already on our digitized manuscripts site they will be available in the near future. I'll be writing more about them and individual items in the exhibition over the next two months.

Noruz mubarak!

Ursula Sims-WIlliams, Asian and African Studies

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Our followers and readers will be delighted to learn that over 760 Hebrew manuscripts have now been uploaded to the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts. Generously funded by The Polonsky Foundation, the Hebrew Manuscripts Digitisation Project aims at digitising and providing free on-line access to well over 1250 Hebrew handwritten books from the Library’s collection. The project, which began in 2013 is due for completion in June 2016, when the full complement of manuscripts will be available to a global audience.


Festival prayer book,  Mahzor, according to the rite of Provence. Opening of the morning prayer (Shaharit). Sephardic (Provencal) vocalised square and semi-cursive script of the 17th century. (Or. 5466, f. 7r) 

The host of digitized surrogates released to-date, represents the vast geographical expanse of Hebrew manuscript production, and offers many interesting examples of handwriting styles. Hebrew and other Jewish languages such as Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Spanish, Yiddish and others, use an alphabet consisting of 22 consonantal letters, 5 of which are shaped differently when used at the end of words. These are known as otiyot sofiyot, literally, ‘final letters’. The Hebrew alphabet which lacks case letters and is written from right left, evolved from the Phoenician alphabet. Its ancient form (c. 10th to 6th century BCE)  was known as the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet or script.  Around the 6th century BCE, it was replaced by a square form of lettering known as ‘Ashuri’ (a stylized form of Aramaic script) that had allegedly originated in Assyria and has survived to this day. The vowels system (nikud in Hebrew) was developed between the 8th and 10th centuries CE in Tiberias (city located on the western shore of the Sea of  Galilee in the Holy Land), by scholars known as the Masoretes and has been used since then. Initially devised to facilitate the correct pronunciation and transmission of the Masoretic Bible, the Tiberian vocalization system was subsequently extended to other Hebrew texts and writings.

The main modes of Hebrew styles of script distinguishable in manuscripts are: square, semi-cursive and cursive. The semi-cursive mode is also known as rabbinic, a misleading term coined by Christian scholars in the 16^th century. The principal difference between the three modes lies essentially in the number of strokes required to form the shape of a single letter. The amount of strokes needed to create square letters is higher than that required for semi-cursive characters, decreasing virtually to a single stroke when cursive letters are executed. The speed of writing can also very often determine how many strokes or serifs are needed to create a particular style of script.

Developed in the Orient, most probably before the 10^th century CE, square lettering has been formally used for copying the text of the Hebrew Bible, for liturgical works, as well as for Torah scrolls, mezuzot (singular mezuzah - parchment scroll containing Deuteronomy 6: 4-9 & 11: 13-21, placed in a case and affixed to a door post) and tefilin (phylacteries). 


Page from the Duke of Sussex's Portuguese Pentateuch. Lisbon, Portugal, 1480-1490 CE (Add MS 15283, f. 42r)

The three major modes of Hebrew script were used in most geo-cultural zones associated with medieval Hebrew book production, namely Ashkenazic (Franco-German lands), Byzantine, Italian, Oriental, and Sephardic (Iberian peninsula). Each zone had its own characteristic types and sub-types of scripts that were strongly influenced by trends prevalent in the host environment. For example, Jewish scribal practices that developed in Oriental and Sephardic territories under Muslim rule (i.e. Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Yemen, as well as Spain from 711 to 1491 CE, Provence), show great affinity with Arabic calligraphy. Likewise, types of Hebrew script that crystalized in the Ashkenazic geo-cultural entity where Christianity was the dominant religion (England, France, Germany, Italy, post-1492 Spain) display similarities with archetypes of Latin script that were prevalent in those areas. A very good example of how Gothic handwriting affected the Hebrew square script is found in this codex made in Germany:


Festival prayer book, Mahzor , according to the Askenazi rite. Askenazic 'Gothic' square script, Germany, 1st half of the 14th century (Add MS 26896, f. 337v)

The influence of early Arabic cursive writing is clearly noticeable in this 14th century hand-copied book in which the text was penned in a Sephardic current cursive script. The shapes of the Hebrew letters, the order and direction of the strokes, and the general layout of the calligraphic text bear remarkable similarities with Arabic script. Half down the page, a word was written diagonally. This scribal practice intended to keep the left margins aligned, was most probably borrowed from Muslim copyists, and became a fashionable decorative device particularly in Hebrew manuscripts copied in the Yemen.


Moses Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed in the Hebrew translation of Samuel ibn Tibbun. Spain, c. 14th century (Royal MS 16 A XI, f. 187v)

Local trends determined also the type of writing instruments medieval Jewish scribes adopted for plying their trade. Thus, the quill was the popular implement for copying books in Christian territories, while in Muslim lands the reed was the scribes’ preferred tool. The former tended to produce tapered serifs, the latter more homogenous strokes.

The Persian and Yemenite square and semi-cursive sub-types are exemplified in two 15^th century biblical manuscripts, as seen in the images below. It is important to mention that the semi-cursive and cursive modes failed to properly develop in medieval Yemen.


The Pentateuch, Haftarot (reading from the Prophets) and Psalms in Persian vocalised semi-cursive script. Hebrew & Judeo-Persian. Qom, Persia, 1483 CE (Or. 2451, f. 204v)

The Former Prophets penned in square, vocalised Yemenite script. Yemen, 1460 CE (Or. 2370, f. 53r)

The Italian Hebrew writing, like its Latin counterpart, appears to have preserved the Caroline style (a Latin calligraphic script used in Europe in the early Middle Ages and during the Renaissance). The rounded shape of the Italian Latin scripts is equally noticeable in the Hebrew scripts from that area, particularly in the semi-cursive style of writing. Our first example comes from a sidur (daily prayer book) written by the well-known scribe, scholar and geographer, Abraham ben Mordechai Farissol (1451-1526). He penned the text in a fine square hand. The letters are vocalised and slightly tilted. Note the flourishes shaped as question marks which were added after the Divine name represented by two ‘yod’ letters.

Decorated daily prayer book according to the Italian rite. Opening of the Shema, the central prayer in Judaism, declaring the faith in one God. Scribe: Abraham ben Mordechai Farissol.
Ferrara, Italy, 1478 (Add MS 18692, f.37v)

The second example is taken from an autograph manuscript written by the Italian rabbi Mordechai ben Judah Dato (1527-1585), and shows Italian Hebrew cursive script at its best. The rotundity of the characters is particularly evident here.

Collection of liturgical poems with a commentary by Mordechai Dato. Scribe: Mordechai ben Judah Dato. Italy, 1575-1599 (Add MS 27096, f. 3v)

Our next blog will cover further significant items from the Library’s Hebrew manuscript collection which have been digitised since 2013.

Further reading

Ada Yardeni. The Book of Hebrew script: history, palaeography, script styles, calligraphy and design. Newcastle: Oak Knoll Press, 2002

Malachi Beit-Arié. The Making of the Medieval Hebrew Book: Studies in Palaeography and Codicology. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993.

Ilana Tahan, Lead Curator, Hebrew and Christian Orient Studies

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Blogger and novelist Fadi Zaghmout, together with translator Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, recently visited the British Library. His debut novel, ‘Arūs ʻAmmān (ʻThe bride of Amman’), deals with the various struggles facing young Jordanians, including sexual orientation and gender identity. With this subject in mind, we looked at different sources – both historical and contemporary – for LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer) history in the British Library’s Arabic collections. Some of those are presented here to mark LGBT History Month, which has been taking place throughout the month of February.

Publications from Helem
Helem, which means dream in Arabic and is also the acronym for Ḥimāyah Lubnānīyah lil-Mithlīyīn, is a Lebanese non-profit organisation working on improving the legal and social status of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. The British Library has two publications by Helem in its Arabic collection.
 
Ruhāb al-mithlīyah: mawāqif wa-shahādāt, Beirut: Helem, 2006 (British Library YP.2007.a.2531)

The first, entitled Ruhāb al-mithlīyah: mawāqif wa-shahādāt, (ʻHomophobia: views and opinions’), edited by ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Ayyās, was published in Beirut in 2006 with support from the Heinrich Böll Foundation. It is a collection of essays by prominent individuals - such as Hanan al-Shaykh, Marie-Rose Zalzal, Rabih Alameddine, Tarek el-Ariss and Omar Nashabe - dealing critically with homophobia from various perspectives: literary, sociological, psychological, legal and so on.

Front cover of issue 6 of Barrā (December 2012) with examples of articles on news and health.

The second is Barrā (ʻOut’). Initially published between 2005 and 2006, it was hailed as the region’s first LGBTQ magazine. It was subsequently re-launched in 2012 and the British Library has four copies. The magazine contains articles in both Arabic and English, and includes news, special features, opinion pieces, interviews, horoscopes and cartoons, as well as articles on health, arts and lifestyle.

Trans memoir
In 2010, Beirut publisher Dar al-Saqi released Mudhakkirāt Randā al-Trāns, a memoir by an Algerian trans woman named Randa and co-authored with Hazem Saghieh, political editor of the London-based Arab newspaper al-Hayat. As reported in the Independent in July 2010, the book “unflinchingly details Randa's life from childhood” including her first sexual experiences and “the consequences of her choice to live as a male-to-female transsexual”.

Mudhakkirāt Randā al-Trāns, Beirut: Dār al-Sāqī, 2010

Some reports have stated that this is the first such memoir in Arabic, but WorldCat lists a book entitled Iʻtirāfāt Sayyid: al-qiṣṣah al-muthīrah li-ṭālib al-ṭibb alladhī taḥawwala ilá imraʼah, the biography of a transsexual Al-Azhar University medical student named Sally, published in 1991 in Alexandria, Egypt.

Randa’s memoir was quickly translated into Italian under the title Dillo alla luna (ʻTell the moon’) by Alessandro Buontempo and published by Edizioni Piemme in 2011. In addition, a documentary entitled Meanwhile in Beirut was released in 2015 by Swiss director Felipe Monroy and aired at last year's Fringe! Queer Film and Arts Fest in London. The protagonist is Lea, a 30 year old Lebanese trans woman, and the film shows domestic scenes of love, friendship, and sex work in contemporary Beirut.

Bareed mista3jil: true stories, Beirut: Meem, 2009 (British Library YP.2015.a.7033)

‘Mail in a hurry’
The final item highlighted here is entitled Bareed mista3jil (‘Express Mail’) by the organisation Meem (Majmū‘ah Muʼāzarat lil-Marʼah al-Mithlīyah), a Lebanese LBTQ women’s group founded in August 2007. The book, published in 2009 and also supported by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, is a collection of forty-one narratives about Lebanese lesbian, bisexual, queer, and questioning and transgender people. Regarding the title, the introduction to the book notes:

‘Barred Mista3jil’ has a very close meaning to ‘Express Mail,’ but a better translation would be ‘Mail in a Hurry.’ It reflects both the urgency of getting these stories across and also the private nature of the stories – like letters written, sealed and sent out to the world.

Publicity video for Bareed mista3jil by Lebanese feminist collective, Nasawiya (25 May 2009)

The British Library’s collections of Arabic manuscripts, printed books, newspapers, periodicals, ephemera and sound recordings provide an interesting source (in addition to those in the region, such as the Jafet Library at the American University of Beirut) for the history of sexual orientation and gender identity. We aim to support this through our current selection and acquisitions, particularly that of out-of-print publications, and the acceptance of donated material. Yet, with more and more Arabic LGBTQ publications being published electronically, interesting challenges arise for archiving, preserving and providing access to this material.

Daniel Lowe, Curator of Arabic Collections, British Library
Twitter: @dan_a_lowe


Items mentioned
‘Abd al-Raḥmān Ayyās (ed.), Ruhāb al-mithlīyah: mawāqif wa-shahādāt. Beirut: Helem, 2006 (YP.2007.a.2531)
Meem, Bareed mista3jil: true stories. Beirut: Meem, 2009 (YP.2015.a.7033)
Ḥāzim Ṣāghīyah, Mudhakkirāt Randā al-Trāns. Beirut: Dār al-Sāqī, 2010  (In the process of being catalogued)
Barrā, Beirut: Helem (In the process of being catalogued)
Fadi Zaghmout, translated Ruth Ahmedai Kemp, The bride of Amman. Hong Kong: Signal 8 Press, 2015 (YP.2015.a.6990)

Further reading
Nadia Dropkin, “Bareed Mista3jil Meem”, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 7.2 (2011): 111–114
Shereen El Feki, Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World. London: Chatto & Windus, 2013
Dina Georgis, “Thinking past pride: queer Arab shame in Bareed mista3jil”, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 45 (2013), 233-251
Samir Khalaf and and John Gagnon (eds.), Sexuality in the Arab World. London: Saqi, 2006
Pesha Magid, “On Being Transgender in Egypt”, Mada Masr (4 June 2015)
Ghassan Makarem, “The Story of HELEM”, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 7.3 (2011): 98–112––
Joseph A. Massad, Desiring Arabs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007
Sofian Merabet, Queer Beirut. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014
Ahmad Saleh, “Helem”, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 11.3 (2015): 368-370
Mohamed Jean Veneuse, “The Body of the Condemned Sally: Paths to Queering anarca-Islam”, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 1 (2010): 215-239

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Academic thought in the South

Continuing the theme set by its acclaimed recent exhibition - West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song – the British Library will be challenging preconceived ideas about Africa and the broader global South with another event. This time, in conjunction with the Academic Book of the Future project, we will be hosting the conference The Academic Book in the South on academic book production.

At the British Library we spend a lot of time dealing with the changing world of academic publications. We have extensive collections of academic books published all over the world. We acquire books from across the global South, in all major languages, and our historic and contemporary holdings are very strong. The book covers shown below give a flavour of these collections.

Left: ʻAbd al-Munʿim Mājid, Nuẓum al-Fāṭimīyīn wa-rusūmuhum fī Miṣr (Cairo: Maktabat al-Anjlū al-Miṣrīyah, 1973); Right: Luṭfī Jaʻfar Faraj ʻAbd Allāh, ʻAbd al-Muḥsin al-Saʻdūn wa-dawruhu fī tārīkh al-ʻIrāq al-siyāsī al-muʻāṣir (Baghdad: Wizārat al-Thaqāfah wa-al-Funūn, al-Jumhūrīyah al-ʻIrāqīyah, 1978)
These two 1970s texts deal respectively with the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt (973-1171) and the history and politics of modern Iraq. In Arabic 

As the publishing environment changes radically, we know that our thinking about the future of academic publications and, more broadly, effective dissemination of academic thought is incomplete without a truly global dialogue. After all, academic research is geared more than ever to tackle global challenges. This is an exciting ambition across all academic disciplines – from improving health outcomes across the world to finding new paradigms for politics, economics and culture in a fast-changing world.

If this ambition is to be realised, it has to include an effective global system to disseminate new academic ideas in all their diversity. This is why we need to build and strengthen our understanding of academic book authorship, publication and circulation, through dialogue with colleagues in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

Sabitendranātha Rāẏa, Kaleja Sṭrīṭe sattara bachara (Kalakātā: Dīpaśikhā Prakāśana, 2006-2008). A memoir on the book trade and literature in Kolkata. In Bengali

While our contacts across the world tell us that there are common challenges, there is a lot that we do not know. This is why we are pleased to host The Academic Book in the South, a two-day conference taking place at the British Library on 7th-8th March 2016. This event will investigate the current situation and future prospects of the academic book in the global South.

This event will offer a unique opportunity to hear from the speakers and participants across Africa, South Asia and the Middle East, including: Walter Bgoya, Sukanta Chaudhuri, Abhijit Gupta, Sari Hanafi, Shamil Jeppie, Akoss Ofori-Mensah, Mark Muehlhaeusler, Padmini Ray Murray and Nureldin M. Satti.  

Shamil Jeppie and Souleyman Bachir Diagne (eds), The meanings of Timbuktu (Cape Town; Senegal: HSRC Press in association with CODESRIA, 2008).
A collection of essays on the manuscript cultures of Timbuktu, Mali, and the surrounding region. In English

Will today’s ubiquitous digital technologies and open access provide us with a new environment, which will alleviate geographic inequalities in knowledge production and distribution? Will this lead to new opportunities for arts and humanities scholars to make their voices heard as we try to navigate new global complexities? Or is digital change just homogenising the world of academic publications and suppressing the diversity of academic voices?

Join us for a debate and to find out how academics, publishers and librarians in the global South perceive these issues.

This conference is organised by The British Library in collaboration with Professor Marilyn Deegan, Kings College London and Dr Caroline Davis, Oxford Brookes University.

This event is an outcome of the Academic Book of the Future research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The conference is now open for registration and full details are available on the British Library website, along with a provisional conference programme. The conference fee is £30.00 (£15.00 student rate) for the two-day event, which includes registration, lunch and refreshments.

Maja Maricevic, Head of Higher Education, British Library

In a previous post (When Good Literary Taste Was Part of a Bureaucrat’s Job Description) I introduced readers to the high-ranking courtier, poet and writer Ānand Rām Mukhliṣ (1697?-1751). Here I focus on his idiosyncratic dictionary, the Mirʾāt al-iṣt̤ilāḥ (ʻMirror of Expressionsʼ) completed in 1158/1745, which provides us with a delightful hodgepodge of cultural and social information about eighteenth-century India

Decorative shamsah followed by the opening page of Mirʾāt al-iṣt̤ilāḥ (British Library Or.1813, f. 11)

The biographical note on a certain Rājah Harīsingh from Sialkot, for example, which describes him as peerless in archery and entertaining (ʿilm-i majlis), is a little unusual in its detail but unremarkable for this book:

On dark nights he shot by torchlight at a target made from knot of horsehair. He had a servant named Gopī… [Gopī] would place a piece of candle on the tip of his finger, set a lentil on it, place a grain of rice on top, and stand facing the Rajah, and the Rajah bent his bow. First he knocked the rice then the lentil then the candle from his finger. Neither did the Rajah make a mistake nor did the unjust [sic] servant frown. Now I come to his knowledge of entertaining...
(Mukhliṣ 2013: 238, my translation).

Biography of Rājah Harīsingh from Sialkot inserted into an explanation of the phrase tīr-būtah ʻarchery rangeʼ (British Library Or.1813, f. 90r)

The account continues by explaining that the Rajah had not studied Persian but could make conversation so impressively in the language that Iranians praised him. He also recited poetry in Hindi and Persian. He was a musician himself, and kept qawwāls (Sufi singers) and dancing girls in his retinue. This was a man who clearly knew how to throw a good party.

Historians delight in such specific descriptions of particular people in history, but it is of course unusual to find them in a text that purports to be a dictionary. In this case, the account of the Rajah fits into an entry on tīr-būtah (meaning an archery range). An elegantly written copy of this remarkable dictionary—or perhaps it is better to see it as a miscellany cast in the form of a dictionary—is available at the British Library in manuscript (Or.1813) and has recently been printed in a critical edition (Mukhliṣ 2013). Besides providing us with details about life in eighteenth-century Delhi, even a cursory reading of the text demonstrates the richness of Persian scholarship and literary society in late Mughal India.

The historical importance of Persian in India has all but faded from modern cultural memory, but it was undeniably the key medium of expression among north Indian elites during the Mughal period. Though Persian is written in the same script as Arabic and therefore often pigeonholed as an Islamic language, Persian was a secular language in pre-modern India in the sense that all communities had access to it (though there was a class divide—it was mostly an elite language) and many Hindus like Mukhliṣ made their living by mastering it. The parallels between the Persian of pre-colonial times and the English of today as languages of personal advancement in South Asia are striking. (For more on this, see my new book Delhi: Pages from a Forgotten History (Dudney 2015), which addresses the history of Persian in India in far more detail than I can here.)

The composition of Mukhliṣ’s dictionary came at a time of great uncertainty for Delhi’s elite. Patronage for poets and indeed the whole political system was being renegotiated in the wake of Nādir Shāh’s conquest of Delhi in 1739. Nādir, ethnically a Turk, had conquered the whole of Iran and the region that became Afghanistan and turned next to India. It is undeniable that politics were by then quite different from how they were in the Empire’s glory days, but it is almost eerie to trace how literary culture not only carried on but arguably shone with greater brilliance in the aftermath of the worst bloodshed Mughal Delhi had ever seen.

Three-quarter length portrait of Nādir Shāh, Shah of Iran (r. 1736–1747), painted by an anonymous artist ca. 1740. Oil on canvas (British Library F44)

Mirʾāt al-iṣt̤ilāḥ has a particular interest in administrative terminology as well as in words and expressions having to do with painting, clothing, handicrafts, animals, flowers, hot beverages (particularly coffee), games, and so on. It is different from other Persian dictionaries in that it contains a great number of  ʻproto-anthropologicalʼ observations as well as long digressions describing, for example, particular people that Mukhliṣ knew such as the poet and scholar Sirājuddīn ʿAlī Khān Ārzū (briefly defining the term ārzū as ʻhope and desireʼ in as many words serves an excuse to launch into several hundred words of praise for his friend and teacher) or objects like the Peacock Throne. Additionally, it ends each letter’s section with a series of adages (amsāl), some of which have Urdu equivalents provided.


In this passage the expression dar jang ḥalvā bakhsh nimīkunand  [During war they don't hand out sweets] is rendered in Hindi (written in a special calligraphic script) as laṛāʾī meṁ koʾī laḍḍū nahīṁ baṭte —Indian laddus have been substituted for halwa (British Library Or.1813, f. 141r)

Despite these unusual features, Mirʾāt fits squarely into a remarkable tradition of Persian lexicography that began in Central Asia and continued in the Indian Subcontinent, with virtually no counterpart in Iran. In fact, there is a gap of nearly three centuries between Surūrī’s Majmaʿ al-furs (first ed. 1008/1599-1600, compiled in Isfahan) and the next major dictionary written in Iran, Riẓā Qulī Khān Hidāyat’s Farhang-i anjuman-ārā-yi nāṣirī (1288/1871, compiled in Tehran). (The fullest account of Persian lexicography in English remains Henry Blochmann’s 1868 article)

Like earlier dictionaries, Mirʾāt bridges different usages around the vast region where Persian was a language of high culture, a region that at its peak stretched from Anatolia (modern Turkey) in the west across Central and Southern Asia to the Chinese frontier in the east. Scholars debate the question of how different Indian Persian was from Iranian Persian—remarkably there has been little dispassionate analysis of this topic since the starting point is usually the misleading assumption that Indo-Persian, whatever it was, could not have been ʻauthenticʼ compared to Iranian usage. That is a discussion for another time but worth mentioning in the context of Mukhliṣ’s scholarship because he was so attuned to how different people used words and expressions.

There is an apocryphal story that Mukhliṣ chased after the Qizilbash soldiers of Nādir Shāh’s army to ask them about points of Persian usage. The logic is that they were native speakers, and he wanted to know how Persian was really spoken. One difficulty in this story is that these soldiers were not actually native speakers in our sense because in daily life they either spoke Turkish dialects (like Nādir Shāh himself) or local variants of Persian. The category of native speaker (usually translating the term ahl-i zabān) is a problem in this context because literary Persian was a learned language. Mirʾāt was part of this economy of teaching Persian. The entry in Encyclopaedia Iranica claims that Mukhliṣ’s dictionary was intended to “to improve the falling standard of Persian in India”—but its preface does not in fact say anything like that (and indeed though there is a reference to īrān-zamīn [the land of Iran] in the colophon, this was written in 1850, a full hundred years after Mukhliṣ, and therefore cannot be assumed to reflect his thinking). Even the editors of the 2013 critical edition claim that “It can be seen from a close reading of the text that after finishing the work, he got it authenticated from speakers of the language just arrived in India” (2013: 33, English introduction). While some of his material comes from such people, the implication is wrong: He was asking them not because he thought of them as ʻnative speakersʼ but because they knew administrative terminology current in the establishment of Nādir Shāh, who having just conquered Delhi had modified the administrative structure to suit his needs. To find positions under the new regime, Mukhliṣ and his colleagues needed to be savvy in the new terms and procedures. It was not that Indian elites were desperate for Iranian native speakers to sort out their degenerate Persian but rather that they sought insider knowledge about the new political dispensation.

Further reading
Anand Ram Mukhlis, Mirʾāt al-iṣt̤ilāḥ, edited by Chander Shekhar, Hamidreza Ghelichkani and Houman Yousefdahi. Delhi: National Mission for Manuscripts, 2013.
—,  Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Medieval India: Mirat-ul-Istilah, translated by Tasneem Ahmad. Delhi: Sundeep Prakashan, 1993.  A complete English translation of the text, this is a useful tool but too ambiguous and inaccurate to be used without consulting the Persian text.
Ahmad, B, “Ānand Rām Mokles: Chronicler, Lexicographer, and Poet of the Later Mughal Period”, Encyclopædia Iranica vol. 2.1, p. 1 (1985).
Blochmann, Henry, “Contributions to Persian Lexicography”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal 37 (1): 1-72 (1868).
Dudney, Arthur Dale,  A Desire for Meaning: Ḳhān-i Ārzū's Philology and the Place of India in the Eighteenth-Century Persianate World. Columbia University Academic Commons, 2013.
—, Delhi: Pages from a Forgotten History. New Delhi: Hay House India, 2015.

Arthur Dudney, University of Cambridge
[email protected]

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On a recent visit to Indonesia, I was informed by Professor Oman Fathurahman of the State Islamic University of Syarif Hidayatullah, Jakarta, of plans to set up a ‘Museum Islam Betawi’, which would explore aspects of the practice of Islam in Batavia, the old Dutch name for Jakarta. We discussed what might be exhibited in such a museum, and the first thing that came to mind was Islamic manuscripts written in Batavia, representative of the texts that were taught and studied in the locality, and which shaped beliefs and daily life.

A warung, or small coffee-stall, in Gunung Sari, Batavia, very close to Salemba, where the manuscript discussed below was copied. Watercolour by John Newman, 1813. British Library, WD 953, f.82 (93).

Among the Malay manuscripts in the British Library which have recently been digitised there is only one which was definitely written in Batavia, but it is probably an excellent example of the type of work used for Islamic instruction in the city. It is a copy of Bayān ‘Aqīdah al-Uṣūl, ‘Elucidation of the fundamentals of faith’, also known as Masa‘il, ‘Questions’, a simple catechism written in question-and-answer form by Abū al-Layth Muḥammad b. Abī Naṣr b. Ibrāhīm al-Samarqandī (d. 983), a jurist of the Hanafi school of law from the ancient city of Samarkand, located in present-day Uzbekistan. What was originally a single manuscript has now been separated into two parts, one consisting of the Arabic catechism of al-Samarqandī with interlinear translation into Malay (IO Islamic 2906), and a second volume (MSS Malay C.7) containing texts wholly in Malay.  The Malay volume starts with a catechism on prayer (sembahyang) also in question-and-answer form, and is followed by instructions on prayers for the dead (Ini niat sembahyangkan mayat laki-laki) and a text on marriage (Inilah kitab pada menyatakan hukum nikah), which is left incomplete as the manuscript ends abruptly.

Islamic catechism of al-Samarqandī, in Arabic with interlinear Malay translation, Batavia, early 19th c. IO Islamic 2096, ff. 1v-2r.

Islamic catechism in Malay, Batavia, early 19th c. MSS Malay C 7, ff. 2v-3r.

Both parts are written in the same hand, and a note on the cover, now housed with the Malay volume, identifies the scribe. The owner of the manuscript is named as Mister Alperes of Kampung Salemba in Batavia, and the scribe introduces himself as Duljabar, who had come to Batavia from Cirebon. With conventional modesty he apologises for his poor handwriting “like chickens’ scratchings” (cakar hayam); in fact, as can be seen, his hand is quite stylish, with sophisticated layerings of certain letters, such as in the initial word alamat. Although the manuscript is undated it was most likely acquired during the British administration of Java (1811-1816) and therefore probably dates from the early 19th century.

Note by the scribe of the manuscript: ‘This is the book of Samarqandi, belonging to Mister Alperes, who lives in Kampung Salembah. This book was written by Master Duljabar, from Cirebon, who came to Batavia when he was very young, and who learnt to write from Mister Alperes. I was set to write all sorts of things and I wrote them to the very best of my ability, fearful of being accused of refusing or being lazy; and so this is the result, but my humble apologies are offered to those gentlemen who will read it, because the writing looks like it was scratched by chickens’, Alamat surat kitab Samarqandi Tuan Alperes yang empunya dia yang telah duduk dalam daerah Kampung Salembah adanya. Dan yang menyurat kitab ini Enci' Du al-Jabar anak Cerebon, kecil ia datang di Betawi baharu belajar menyurat daripada Tuan Alperes menyurat apakan dia dengan seboleh2 hamba suratkan takut hamba dikatakan tiada mau serta malas inilah akan rupanya melainkan maaf jua perbanyak2 kepada tuan2 yang membaca dia karena suratannya bagai dicakar hayam demikian adanya. British Library, MSS Malay C.7, f.1r 

Michael Laffan (2011: 33) has noted that by the mid-19th century the catechism of al-Samarqandī was one of the two most popular Islamic texts throughout Indonesia, the other being Sifat Dua Puluh, ‘Twenty Attributes’ of God, derived from the ‘Umm al-Barāhīn of al-Sanūsī (d.1490), which also featured in a recent blog. Al-Samarqandī ’s work seems to have been particularly well-regarded in Java, and the British Library holds three copies of parts of the text with Javanese translations (MSS Jav 43, MSS Jav 77 and Or. 16678). Another manuscript in Arabic with Javanese translation is found in Cambridge University Library (Or. 194) while the Royal Asiatic Society holds a full translation into Javanese (Raffles Java 22). In Leiden University Library, of the 14 Arabic manuscripts of Bayān ‘Aqīdah al-Uṣūl, 13 have an interlinear translation in Javanese, while one has a Makassarese translation (Voorhoeve 1980: 45). The Endangered Archives Programme has also documented four manuscripts of the work with Javanese translations, two held at an Islamic boarding school in East Java, the Pondok Pesantren Tegalsari in Jetis, Ponorogo, and two in Cirebon on the north coast of west Java: one in the royal collection of Sultan Abdul Gani Natadiningrat  and another held by Muhammad Hilman. It is thus interesting to note that Duljabar's manuscript copied in Batavia is relatively rare in presenting al-Samarqandī's Bayān ‘Aqīdah al-Uṣūl with a Malay translation.

The start of al-Samarqandī's catechism, in Arabic with small interlinear Javanese translation, and with the beginning of each question highlighted in red, late 18th century, from the collection of Colin Mackenzie. British Library, MSS Jav 43, f.89v

Bayān ‘Aqīdah al-Uṣūl by al-Samarqandī, in Arabic with interlinear translation in Javanese. Collection of Muhammad Hilman, Cirebon. EAP211/1/4/1

Further reading:

J. van Ess, Abu'l-Layt Samarqandi, Encyclopædia Iranica, I/3, pp. 332-333.
Oman Fathurahman, Museum Islam Betawi. Republika, 24 Oktober 2015.
Michael Laffan, The makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the narration of a Sufi past. Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2011.
M.C.Ricklefs, P.Voorhoeve† and Annabel Teh Gallop, Indonesian manuscripts in Great Britain: a catalogue of manuscripts in Indonesian languages in British public collections. New Edition with Addenda et Corrigenda. Jakarta: Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient, Perpustakaan Nasional Republik Indonesia, Yayasan Pustaka Obor Indonesia, 2014.
P. Voorhoeve, Handlist of Arabic manuscripts in the library of the University of Leiden and other collections in the Netherlands. 2nd enlarged ed. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1980.

Annabel Teh Gallop, Lead Curator, Southeast Asia

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