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UCLA Library stewards the second-largest Islamicate and Arabic-script manuscript collection in North America. Through its ongoing Islamicate Manuscript Initiative, the Library and its partners are working to individually describe and conserve thousands of manuscripts within its collection to make them accessible to scholars and the broader public.
This article highlights recently described manuscripts related to the rich history of Islamic manuscript culture in Palestine from the medieval period to the early 20th century. It briefly introduces several manuscripts held in UCLA Library Special Collections with reference to Gaza and Jerusalem and discusses their intellectual and material contexts.
At the end, a link to a curated reading list of primary and secondary sources in the Library is provided for further reading.
Introduction
Palestine was historically home to a diverse array of Muslim, Christian and Jewish legal communities. The manuscripts below highlight the long presence and influence of the Hanafi school of law (madhhab) within Palestine.
The Hanafi school is one of the four madhhabs of the Sunni Islamic tradition, named after its eponymous founder, Abu Hanifah (d. 767 C.E.). It became the dominant administrative legal school in Palestine and Greater Syria under Ottoman rule from the 16th century onwards.
The manuscripts feature an array of paratextual elements, including endowment statements, import/export stamps and colophons (a scribal or authorial statement at the end of the text), that paint a broader portrait of the intellectual landscape of Palestine and its contributions to Islamic legal thought and tradition.
The prolific movement of manuscripts and scholars further showcases the historical connections and intersections between scholarly culture in Palestine and regions such as Albania, Anatolia, Iraq and Egypt. Given the destruction of libraries in Gaza, the manuscripts stand as a historical record of the rich convergence of Arabic, Persian and Turkish and showcase the vibrant history of intellectual exchange in Palestine.
Manuscript 1: A Legal Commentary Transcribed in Mamluk Gaza
Manuscript AI 13 of the UCLA Library Aintabi Manuscript Collection (LSC-0833-0014) is a commentary on the Hanafi legal compendium Majmaʻ al-Bahrayn wa-Multaqa al-Nayyirayn (“The convergence of the seas and confluence of the heavenly spheres”).
Both the original compendium and the commentary were written by the scholar Muzaffar al-Din Ahmad Ibn al-Saʻati (d. 694 A.H. / 1295 C.E.), who was born in and lived in Baghdad, where he taught at the famed Madrasah Mustansiriyah. His name “Ibn al-Saʻati” means “son of the clockmaker,” since his father, who hailed from Baalbek (present-day Lebanon), was known as a clockmaker.
The colophon— transcribed and translated below— identifies the location of production of manuscript AI 13 as “Madinat Ghazzah al-Mahrusah” (“Gaza, the Protected City”), which was one of the provincial capitals of Mamluk-era Palestine. The date of transcription is listed in the Islamic calendar as 831 A.H./1427 C.E. It was copied at the hand of Muhammad ibn Musa ibn ‘Imran al-Ghazzi al-Muqri al-Hanafi (d. 873 A.H. / 1469 C.E.), a scholar from Gaza who is mainly known as a specialist and teacher of the Qur’anic sciences to students in Gaza, Jerusalem and Cairo. This manuscript reveals his own personal interest in the field of Hanafi law.
Commentaries such as Sharh Majmaʻ al-Bahrayn were a medium through which scholars transmitted legal traditions across time, consolidated earlier texts and continued to develop, transform, critique and teach them to new generations of students.
One of the key features of this particular title was to explain issues of difference and debate between multiple legal schools and jurists, which the scribe Muhammad ibn Musa would also encounter in Mamluk-era Palestine. Contrary to earlier perceptions in 20th-century scholarship, which assumed that the proliferation of commentaries in Islamic law and other disciplines signaled intellectual stagnation and decline, researchers in recent times have begun to evaluate how commenterial traditions shaped and developed Islamic intellectual history in novel ways.
This manuscript is the third volume of a three-volume set and contains a beautiful title piece (pictured above) made of metallic gold elements and blue and white ink. It is one of roughly 200 manuscripts in the Aintabi Collection, which was acquired by UCLA in 1964 from Sami Assaad Aintabi, a Syrian bookseller and manuscript collector from Aleppo.
وقع الفراغ من نسخ هذا الجلد الثالث يوم الخميس المبارك بتاريخ العشرين من شهر ربيع الأول من شهور سنة أحد وثلثين وثمان مائة بمدينة غزة المحروسة كتبه بيده لنفسه ولمن شاء الله من بعده محمد بن موسى بن عمران الغزي المقري الحنفي غفر الله له ولوالديه ولمشايخه ولمن دعا له بالتوبة والمغفرة ولجميع المسلمين وصلى الله على سيدنا محمد وآله وصحبه وسلم تسليماً كثيراً
The copying of this third volume was completed on a blessed Thursday, the twentieth day of the month of Rabiʿ al-Awwal in the year 831, in the protected city of Gaza. Written by hand for himself and for whomever God wills after him, by Muhammad ibn Musa ibn ‘Imran al-Ghazzi al-Muqri al-Hanafi, may God forgive him, his parents, teachers, those who pray for his repentance and forgiveness, and all Muslims. And may God’s abundant peace and blessings be upon our leader Muhammad, his family, and his companions.
Manuscript 2: A Trust for Students at the al-Aqsa Sanctuary
Manuscript 119 of the Egyptian Collection (LSC-0955-0119) contains an extremely rare—and unpublished—copy of Tuhfat al-Ashab wa-Hadiyat al-Ahbab (“The gift to the companions and present to the beloved ones”), a legal treatise in Arabic authored by the Ottoman Hanafi jurist and Sufi mystic ‘Abd al-Majid ibn al-Shaykh Nasuh Ibn Israʼil al-Rumi (d. 986 A.H. / 1588 C.E.).
The manuscript begins, as is typical for legal compendia, with "Kitab al-Taharah," or "The book on ritual purity," and ends, quite unusually for a Hanafi text, with “Wasiyah lil-Imam al-Shafi’i” or "The Last Will of Imam al-Shafi’i.” According to the colophon, this manuscript was copied directly from the author’s manuscript in the year 1057 A.H. / 1647 C.E. by ‘Abd al-Hadi ibn Hasan al-Tusuwi (et-Tosyevi), who shared the author’s affiliation (nisba) to Tosya, a town in modern-day Turkey.
The main text is followed by excerpts of poetry in Persian and Ottoman Turkish, including a selection in Turkish from the Albanian poet Yahya Bay Dukagjini (d. 1582 C.E.) eulogizing the death of the Ottoman prince Shahzadah Mustafa (d. 1553 C.E.). An additional selection in Persian is attributed to the famous Sufi poet of medieval Delhi, Amir Khusraw (d. 1325 C.E.). Its inclusion here is reflective of Ibn Israʼil al-Rumi’s renown as a translator of Persian poetry into Turkish. It shows how manuscripts crossed different genres, languages and disciplines of knowledge.
The very first leaf displays an endowment (waqf) statement on behalf of an "al-Amir Mustafa Agha,” an Ottoman agent in Egypt, for "the students of knowledge at al-Haram al-Qudsi." Waqf statements are an important means of tracing the provenance and stewardship of written texts, and this statement places the manuscript at the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem alongside the benefactor from Egypt.
The date of the endowment (26 Jumad al-Akhir, 1204 A.H. / March 13, 1790 C.E.) and a condition for the endowment: that “al-Sayyid Muhammad al-Dawudi” serve as the administrator (bi-shart al-nazar ‘alayhi) are included within the remaining portion of the statement. The stamps of “al-Amir Mustafa Agha” are also present throughout the text.
This manuscript remained in the Aqsa Sanctuary up to the late 19th century, as a later endowment attestation notes that it was endowed to the Sacred Rock (al-Sakhrah al-Sharifah) by “the servant of the Aqsa Sanctuary” Ishhadah ibn Hasan al-Ansari in 1308 A.H. / 1890-1891 C.E.
From here, it ended up in the manuscript collection of Muhammad Mukhtār Bik ibn al-Hajj Mustafa Agha al-Kharbutli ibn Husayn Agha, the former governor of Massawa (modern-day Eritrea) and thereafter Girga (Egypt) in the late 19th century. His collection forms the bulk of the UCLA Library Egyptian Collection of Manuscripts, which was also acquired contemporaneously with the Aintabi Manuscript Collection in the 1960s.
Manuscript 3: Legal Rulings from a Jurist of Ottoman Gaza
Manuscript 67 of the Egyptian Collection (LSC-0955-0067), Fatawa al-Tumurtashi, is a collection of Islamic legal rulings (fatwas) presented in the format of question-and-answer, beginning with "Kitab al-Taharah," or "The book on ritual purity," and ending with a section on miscellaneous issues or "Fasl min Masa’il Mutafarriqat.” The work was authored by Muhammad ibn ʻAbd Allah al-Khatib al-Tamartashi (1006 A.H. / 1598 C.E.), a renowned Hanafi scholar who was born in and served as a mufti (a jurist who issues legal rulings) in Ottoman Gaza.
This copy was produced one century after the author’s death in Homs, Syria, by a Hanafi judge of the city in Dhu al-Qa’dah 1107 A.H. (June 1696), as indicated by the colophon. It contains several ownership statements, showing active use by several scholars and officials through the 18th century. It presents a material record of how a Palestinian jurist’s work was actively consulted by Ottoman officials and scholars in the region long after his passing.
The introduction to the work mentions the context for its composition: how the author began issuing legal rulings in Gaza in his youth, and in his older years, sought to compile the legal answers he provided to make it easier to refer back to them.
The opening lines of the introduction are transcribed and translated below:
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم وبه نستعين حمداً لمن أنعم علينا بعلم الشرائع والأحكام وهدانا بحسن الهداية إلى سلوك العلماء الأعلام وصلاة وسلاماً على أشرف الأنام وعلى آله وأصحابه الفخام وتابعيهم بإحسان السادة الكرام فيقول راجي عفو ربه ولطفه الخفي محمد إبن عبد الله الحنفي لما إبتليت من عنوان شبابي بالإفتاء بغزة هاشم ونواحيها فتارة كنت
In the name of God, the most Compassionate and Merciful, whose help we seek. Praise be to the One who has blessed us with the science of His laws and rulings, and guided us with the most beautiful guidance to the path of the luminous scholars. May His blessings and peace be upon the most noble of humanity, his honorable family and companions, and upon those respected leaders who followed them with excellence. So says the one who is hopeful for his Lord’s pardon and subtle kindness, Muhammad ibn ʻAbd Allah al-Hanafi: When I was tested in the early days of my youth with issuing fatwas in Gaza (Ghazzat Hashim) and its environs, I would…
The above text contains the famous epithet for Gaza, “Ghazzat Hashim,” in reference to Hashim ibn ‘Abd Manaf, the Prophet Muhammad’s great-grandfather, whose tomb is located therein. It also displays a copyist’s error: عنفوان has been rendered as عنوان.
Manuscript 4: An Import from Early 20th Century Jerusalem
The production of manuscripts in Palestine continued into the 20th century and late Ottoman Empire, coexisting with the printed book. Manuscript 180 of the Egyptian Collection (LSC-0955-0180) stands as an example: produced on Italian paper displaying the watermark “J PERRIGO” and bound in boards overlaid in black buckram, this title was copied in 1329 A.H. / 1911 C.E. from a manuscript held at the Khalidi Library of Jerusalem, which was only recently established at the beginning of the 20th century.
The manuscript contains two titles concerning hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that constitutes the fifth pillar of Islam: 1. Tuhfat al-nasik fi bayan al-manasik, or "The gift to the pilgrim explaining the rites of pilgrimage," about the rulings of pilgrimage within the framework of Hanafi law. 2. Al-Ni‘am al-sawabigh fi ihram al-madani min Rabigh, or "The abundant blessings in the ritual consecration of the Medinan pilgrim from Rabigh," concerning rulings specific to pilgrims who were traveling from Medina to Mecca.
Both titles were authored by the famous Ottoman Hanafi polymath, ʻAbd al-Ghani ibn Ismaʻil al-Nabulusi (d. 1143 A.H. / 1731 C.E.), whose family lived for a time in Nablus before relocating to Damascus and hence were known as “al-Nabulusi,” or “of Nablus.”
What is especially interesting about the manuscript is evident on the title page: a series of import-export and postage stamps indicating that the manuscript traveled from Jerusalem to Port Said in Egypt.
Here the persistence of manuscript culture amidst modern infrastructure can be seen: the copying of a manuscript from one of the first public libraries of Jerusalem, and its export through the modern port city of the Suez Canal.
Reading List
Interested in learning more? Browse a reading list(opens in a new tab) with relevant sources in English and Arabic.
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An Ottoman map from 1732, published by the Müteferrika Press (Istanbul). From the Kitab cihannüma(opens in a new tab), UCLA Library Special Collections.