The Notebook of Kamāl al-Dīn the Weaver

Aleppine notes from the end of the 16th century

240 Seiten, Hardcover

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

At the end of the 10
th
/ 16
th
century in Aleppo, a weaver, cloth merchant, and poet named Kamāl al-Dīn would regularly take his time to fill blank pages with his varied observations. But it was not a linear narrative he produced, nor was it a diary. Rather, he scribbled down accounts on the political and social life of his city and the region; the climate; economic developments; his craft; poetry, much of it his own; anecdotes; reading excerpts; obituaries of dignitaries and friends; history. In doing so, Kamāl al-Dīn upends assumptions about literary agency, faith, and class in the Ottoman Arab provinces and thus gives us insights rarely seen in other contemporary works.

Only a fragment of what once must have been a sizeable work survives, now preserved in the Forschungsbibliothek Schloss Friedenstein in Gotha under the shelfmark MS orient. A 114. It represents the earliest known Arabic notebook of an artisan or merchant.

• Reihe: Bibliotheca Islamica
• ISBN: 9783110688870
• Sprache: Arabisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 04.10.2021
• Genre: Religion, Theologie
• Verlag: De Gruyter
• Sonstige Mitwirkung: Max Weber Stiftung
• Herausgegeben von: Boris Liebrenz, Kristina L. Richardson