LIBRARIES

Several factors contributed to the prevalence of libraries in the medieval Islamic world. First, manuscript books were relatively cheap. Papermaking technology arrived in the Islamic world in the eighth century, providing Muslims with a material cheaper than the papyrus used previously in the Middle East and far cheaper than the parchment and vellum made from animal hides used in medieval Europe. Moreover, the Arabic script with its cursive forms and many ligatures could be written much faster than the medieval versions of the Roman alphabet. Second, the medieval Islamic world was a literate culture. Men and even women of the upper and middle classes were almost always literate. Both religious and secular literatures were popular, and scholarly and literary attainments were respected. Islamic rulers, constantly hungry for legitimacy, collected books for the same reason they built monuments and patronized scholars and poets—to acquire reputations as cultivated rulers. Libraries of elegant manuscripts and learned treatises were thus appropriate possessions for kings and those who imitated them, and it was not uncommon for Islamic rulers, military officers, and high officials to have well-earned reputations for literary taste and scholarship. Third, books were central to Islamic religious life. Despite a stress on oral learning in medieval Islam, books were necessary to record the masses of traditions of the Prophet, legal rulings, information concerning transmitters of religious lore, and linguistic lore that were the raw material of the Islamic sciences. Even the oral transmission of knowledge usually involved the production of a dictated book, so that studying a book involved producing a copy of it. Fourth, medieval Islamic bureaucrats were accustomed to use books: encyclopedias of useful information, literary manuals useful for producing elegant official documents, literature for amusement, and such things as manuals of occult sciences. Finally, the Islamic law of waqf, charitable endowments, allowed Muslim bibliophiles to donate their books to the libraries of mosques and madrasas with reasonable hope that their collections would be maintained intact.

The earliest Islamic libraries were the collections of Qur?ans that accumulated in mosques. Qur?an reading was an important Islamic devotional practice, and both copying Qur?ans and donating them to mosques were acts of piety. Larger mosques often acquired more diverse libraries, mostly through gifts. When a mosque was built or renovated, the donor often gave a collection of books as the basis of the library. Bibliophiles and scholars, particularly those who taught in a particular mosque, often willed their books to the mosque library. Books copied in class were often given to the mosque library. To this day, many of the most important collections of Islamic manuscripts are in mosque libraries—for example, al-Azhar in Cairo and Suleymaniyyeh in Istanbul.

There are records of royal libraries as early as Umayyad times, the earliest associated with the scholarly Umayyad prince Khalid b. Yazid. The zenith of Islamic royal libraries was in the Abbasid period. The Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun (r. 813–833) founded the Bayt al-Hikma, the house of wisdom, which was the center for translation from Greek, Syriac, and Pahlavi and which was the basis of a caliphal library that survived for more than a century. The Umayyad royal library at Cordova, founded by al-Hakam II (r. 961–976), was supposed to have had 400,000 manuscripts. The greatest of the royal libraries was that of the Fatimids in Cairo, founded in 1004 by the caliph al-Hakim (r. 996–1021). It survived, despite some vicissitudes, until it was ordered closed by Saladin in the late twelfth century and its collections were dispersed and partly destroyed. The royal libraries sometimes had aggressive programs of commissioning both the copying and the composition of books. Both the Abbasid Bayt al-Hikma and the Mogul royal library in Delhi commissioned extensive translations, in the latter case often of Sanskrit Hindu literature of all sorts. Most of the great illustrated and illuminated Islamic books are the product of royal commissions.

There were also public libraries known as dar al-?ilm, houses of knowledge. These were more or less public libraries, often established for sectarian purposes. These institutions played a role in the establishment of madrasas, Islamic seminaries. With the rise of madrasas in the eleventh century, their libraries became increasingly important.

Size, Nature, and Organization of Premodern Islamic Libraries

Medieval accounts mention libraries containing hundreds of thousands or even millions of books, notably the royal libraries of Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba. Individual scholars are mentioned whose libraries consisted of some thousands of books. The higher numbers are scarcely credible. Istanbul, for example, has more than a hundred manuscript libraries or collections dating from Ottoman times, some four centuries old, yet in 1959 a careful survey indicated that there were only about 135,000 Islamic manuscripts in the city, the largest collection containing about ten thousand manuscripts. It certainly is credible, however, that the larger medieval Islamic libraries contained tens of thousands of manuscripts and that wealthy individual scholars and bibliophiles possessed libraries of several thousand volumes—collections dwarfing anything in Europe at the time.

At their finest, Islamic libraries were large, well-organized institutions with specially built facilities for book storage and reading, professional staff, regular budgets and endowments, catalogs, and even lodging and stipends for visiting scholars. Public access varied, depending on the nature of the libraries, but established scholars could generally gain access to most collections. Books were usually stored on shelves or in cabinets, stacked on their sides with a short title written on the upper and lower edge of the book to aid in finding it. (Traditional Islamic bookbindings do not usually contain the title or author.) Catalogs were either bound handlists, the waqf documents donating the books, or lists posted on the doors of the cabinet. Collections were organized by subject. Avicenna describes visiting the royal library in Bukhara, for example, where rooms were devoted to different subjects. Paper, pens, and ink were sometimes furnished for the use of patrons.

Smaller collections had less elaborate facilities. Most mosques and madrasas had libraries. Private libraries and individual books were often donated to such institutions as waqf, endowment, and the terms of the gift would be carefully recorded on the flyleaf. Donated collections were often kept as separate units. There were also family libraries. In a society where professions were often hereditary, some families produced scholars and clerics generation after generation for centuries. Not uncommonly a library would accumulate in the family home over many generations. Examples include the al-Husayni, al-Khalidi, and al-Budayri libraries in Jerusalem, each of which dates from the eighteenth century.

Destruction and Dispersal of Libraries

Islamic chronicles mention the destruction of many libraries, either deliberately or, more commonly, accidentally. Apart from a few places and times, warfare was endemic in the Islamic world and took its toll. Few surviving libraries in the Islamic world predate the older Istanbul libraries. While the story that the Muslim invaders burned the library of Alexandria has long been known to be false—it had been destroyed in Roman times—the sack of cities did often result in the destruction of libraries. Most of the major libraries of Abbasid Iraq were destroyed during the Mongol invasion. The Islamic library in Tripoli was destroyed when the city was sacked by the Franks during the First Crusade, beginning in 1095. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 apparently resulted in the destruction of much of the collection of the National Library in Baghdad.

Sometimes the destruction was ideologically motivated. Mahmud of Ghazna burned the heretical works in the library of the wazir Isma?il b. ?Abbad and confiscated the rest. The books on philosophy and the natural sciences in the library of al-Hakam II in Cordoba were burned by the orthodox during his son's reign. The mass destruction of Arabic books was part of the Catholic kings' program to suppress Islam in Spain, including the burning of Arabic books in Granada at the order of Cardinal Cisneros. There also was a curious tradition of scholars destroying their own books at their death, either to suppress embarrassing or incomplete works or to avoid unauthorized transmission of hadith and other texts that ought to be transmitted orally.

Finally, lack of supervision led to the decay of many libraries, with books stolen by readers or dishonest librarians or lost to damp and insects, the latter a particular menace in South and Southeast Asia, where insecticide is still sometimes sprinkled between the pages of books.

The destruction of libraries in wartime was not always, or even usually, deliberate. Books were valuable, and thus were better stolen than destroyed. There is a report that when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, the sultan ordered the surviving Greek manuscripts in the city collected for the palace library, and there can be no doubt that the size and quality of the manuscript collections in Istanbul are in good part the result of the imperial reach of the Ottoman armies. Likewise, many of the Islamic manuscript collections in Europe were, to some extent, the product of colonial wars. The great Islamic manuscript collections in Russia are the product of the Russian expansion into Central Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The treasures of the Mogul royal library were dispersed after the 1857–1858 mutiny, and many of the finest items ended up in London.

Libraries in the Modern Islamic World

With some exceptions, the library situation in modern Islamic countries falls short of the glories of the medieval period. Some premodern libraries have survived and prospered. In Ottoman Turkey a stable bureaucratic tradition and internal stability meant that most of the old waqf libraries survived as functioning institutions until they were taken over by the modern Turkish state. Several of the larger Ottoman libraries in Istanbul are still functioning, and the collections of most of the smaller libraries have been gathered in a central library in the Suleymaniyyeh mosque. Al-Azhar University in Cairo has a library that has functioned for centuries in one form or another.

Most of the libraries of the Islamic world are of more recent date. These may be divided into two classes: libraries of traditional type founded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Western-style libraries founded by colonial administrations or modern independent Islamic states.

Even after the occupation of most of the Islamic world by European colonial powers and the establishment of modern nation states in the Islamic lands, libraries continued to be established that, despite occasional appurtenances of modern libraries and the prevalence of printed books, were indistinguishable in style and purposes from those established centuries earlier. The libraries of the Muslim rulers and nobility of princely states in British India were royal libraries of the old sort—for example, the Raza Library in Rampur, based on a collection started by the Rohilla Nawabs of Rampur in the eighteenth century, and the Salar Jung Museum Library in Hyderabad, Deccan. New mosques and madrasas had libraries indistinguishable from those of previous centuries, apart from the presence of printed books. A notable example is the Mar?ashi library in Qom, founded by a bibliophilic grand ayatollah in the mid-twentieth century, which emerged as a major library after the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

The colonial period marked a major change, with the introduction of European-style libraries intended to promote the diffusion of modern knowledge and to support the new systems of education and, to a lesser extent, to support modern industry. At the top of the pyramid are national libraries, supported by depository laws and national bibliographies. In some cases, such as Egypt and Iran, these libraries emerged from earlier royal libraries and are themselves important repositories of Islamic manuscripts. In other cases, such as Pakistan, they are new foundations rivaled or overshadowed by older university and traditional libraries. The introduction of modern educational systems led to the creation of school and university libraries. University libraries are well established across the Islamic world, though in general only a few of the older universities have really major libraries: Istanbul University, American University of Beirut, and Punjab University in Lahore, for example. Many newer universities have very limited library facilities. The high cost of foreign monographs and periodicals poses particular difficulties for academic libraries in the poorer Islamic countries, and the lack of such materials is one of the most difficult problems faced by academics in the Islamic world. The increasing importance of computers and electronic resources is an additional burden that few academic libraries in the Islamic world can afford.

Elementary and secondary school libraries are generally weak or nonexistent. Public library systems are also usually inadequate and rarely have much priority in competition for scarce public resources. Public libraries exist in major cities, but much less commonly in provincial cities or small towns. Translations of foreign works are relatively scarce. Cultural factors sometimes hinder progress. Where public libraries exist, there may be restrictions on circulation, subscription fees, or educational requirements that hinder free access, as is the case for the best public libraries in Pakistan. The Islamic world has not yet had its Andrew Carnegie, endowing mass self-education through free public libraries. As a result, foreign institutions such as the British Council still play a significant role in providing library facilities, despite their existing only in the largest cities. The new Alexandria Library being built in Egypt in emulation of the ancient library deserves mention, though it is far from clear that it will be able to achieve its goal to become a world-class research library.

There have also been challenges applying modern library techniques. The mixture of Arabic and Roman script books has posed problems for cataloging and computerization. The Dewey Decimal System has been widely adopted, despite the inadequacies of its treatment of Islamic and Middle Eastern topics.

See alsoEducation ; Ma?mun .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Atiyeh, George N. The Book in the Islamic World: The WrittenWord and Communication in the Middle East. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.

Nadim, al-. The Fihrist of al-Nadim: A Tenth-Century Survey ofMuslim Culture. Edited and translated by Bayard Dodge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970.

Pedersen, Johannes. The Arabic Book. Translated by Geoffrey French. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Rosenthal, Franz. The Technique and Approach of MuslimScholarship. Rome: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, 1947.

John Walbridge