Join us for the next session of Readings in the Khalidiyya with Benedikt Reier, Centre for the Studies of Manuscript Cultures, University of Hamburg. Introduction by Brinkley Messick.

The Last Mamluk Library
After some devastating decades, in the early nineteenth century Jaffa witnessed a flourish period. Abu Nabbut, the deputy governor of the Mediterranean town, fostered Jaffa’s fortification and attracted traders by investing in the economic infrastructure. Following his former master, Acre’s strongman Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, he established a large-scale endowment complex to finance his endeavour. As a central part of this complex, Abu Nabbut built the Great Mosque (also known as Mahmudi Mosque) which included a madrasa and a book collection. In this lecture, we will zoom in on the Great Mosque’s library. Based on a combination of different source material, we will trace its foundation, see what its former books have to say about their own history, and follow their trajectories until today. This, in turn, will reveal a largely unknown part of the history of books and libraries in Ottoman Palestine. 

Benedikt Reier studied Middle Eastern History in Hamburg, Birzeit, and Berlin. He holds a PhD from Freie Universität Berlin/Berlin Graduate School Muslim Culture and Societies with a dissertation on biographical dictionaries in the Mamluk era. His research interests include historiography, history of archiving, book and library history, crusades, and the cultural and social history of bilad al-sham. He has published on the reception of jihad literature in the crusading period (Crusades) and on a 17th century Aleppine private library (Der Islam). He is currently working in Hamburg at the Centre for the Studies of Manuscript Cultures on the early-Ottoman sijillat of Jerusalem. 

Brinkley Messick is Professor of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. Writing and reading, considered as cultural and historical phenomena, have figured centrally in Brinkley Messick’s research on Islamic societies in both Arabia and North Africa. This work considers the production and circulation, inscription and subsequent interpretation of Arabic texts such as regional histories, law books, and court records. Messick has sought to understand the relation of writing and authority, events such as the advent of print technology, hybrid contemporary practices of reading, and local histories of record keeping and archiving. Much of this work dovetails with Messick's general interests in legal anthropology and legal history, and with his specific interests in Islamic law.