The Al-Khalidi Library in Jerusalem

Islamic Texts, Palestine, Scholars

There is a recent article in the Arab News on the Al-Khalidi library in Jerusalem.

You can also visit the website of the library here. I attach the description from the library website. There are several online works in Arabic by Tarif Khalidi.

“The Khalidi Library (Al Khalidiyya), established in Jerusalem in 1900 by Haj Raghib al Khalidi (d.1951), is the first Arab public library established by private initiative in Palestine. The Khalidiyya is located in the Old City of Jerusalem in Tariq Bab al Silsilah about 150 yards away from Bab al Silsilah, one of the main gates to al Haram al Sharif. The Khalidiyya contains the largest private collection of Arabic manuscripts in Palestine and one of the largest such collections in the world. The Khalidiyya MS holdings contain approximately 1200 titles, the oldest of which is about 1000 years old, while its printed collection, mostly of 19th century vintage, contain around 5,500 volumes. In addition there is a massive archival corpus of family papers going back to the early 18thCentury.”

Opening of the Library 1900 From right Hajj Raghib al-Khalidi (d. 1952), Sheikh Taher al-Jaza’iri from Damascus, d. 1920), Sheikh Musa Shafiq al-Khalidi (d. 1927), Sheikh Khalil al-Khalidi and Sheikh Mahmoud al-Habbal (From the American Colony Collection).

Picturing Egypt a Century Ago

Architecture, Egypt, Food and Drink, Photography, Travel
Cairo around 1920

In 1921 one of the many geographical/travel books published was the The Human Interest Library: Visualized Knowledge (Chicago: Midland Press). In volume IV there is a brief account of Egypt, mainly on the archaeological wonders. But there are several photographs that are of interest. I include the captions from the text. Unfortunately neither the date nor the photographer are indicated, but let us assume that they represent life in Egypt in the first couple of decades of the last century. There is also a summary of information about Egypt at the time, as noted below.

“An Arab Cafe: These cafes are picturesque places where one sees the street life of Cairo at its best. Note the more humble style of the Turkish pipe smoked by this Arab without being set on the floor.”
“One of the oldest forms of irrigation machinery in the world. The captive Hebrews in Mosaic times probably heard the creak of the ungreased wheels and watched the water gush forth from the pottery buckets which are fastened to the endless grass ropes.”
“Sakkahs, or Water-Carriers: These men are sometimes negroes, as the seated man in the picture, as well as the boy who has taken water to drink from him. They are usually dervishes of the lowest grade, and are sometimes inclined to be fanatical. They are picturesque as well as a very necessary feature of Egyptian life.”

The Post-Ottoman Century: A View from 1917

Islam and Christianity, Islamic History, Ottoman Empire
The last Ottoman sultan, Mehmet VI, leaving his palace in Istanbul in 1922

The Ottoman Empire, firmly established after the conquest of Constantinople cum Istanbul in 1453 lasted for almost five centuries, with the last sultan, Mehmet VI, leaving Turkey in November, 1922. In March, 1924 the official end of the “Ottoman Caliphate” was announced. The so-called “sick man of Europe” in its last century was ultimately a victim of the disastrous World War I. What was the view of the future near the end of the empire? In the May, 1917 issue of Century Magazine, Herbert Adams Gibbons wrote an article entitled “Europe and Islam: The Problems of the Califate and the Devolution of Mohammedan Lands.” This article also serves as a chapter in his book, published in the same year as The Reconstruction of Poland and the Near East (pp. 101-153). His use of “Mohammedan” was common for the time, but his argument is well worth reading today for his critique of European relations with the Ottomans and the Islamic world.

For Gibbons, who had spent years as a journalist in Turkey, the handwriting was already on the wall. The Ottoman “defenselessness has kept whetted the territorial appetite of the European powers. Some choice morsels have already been devoured: Russia was eating steadily until she reached Armenia across the Caucasus in 1878; and France and England did not stop for half a century until Tunis was consumed in 1881 and Egypt in 1882; Austria revived the European traditions of the generation before in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908; Italy and France in Tripoli and Morocco in 1911.”

“And after the present what – what more?” asked Gibbons. The carving up of Ottoman lands on the back of a napkin had already been set on the table, so the knives were ready. Gibbons noted that Russia wanted all of Armenia and even Istanbul; the French claimed Syria; the British were beating their way to Baghdad; Italy was dreaming of Albania and Asia Minor; Austria-Hungary was savoring Macedonia. Germany, on the other hand, “claims to be the protector of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, and the sole friend left to Islam.”

“The history of international diplomacy in the Islamic world,” writes the American journalist Gibbons with little sympathy for European political ambitions, “is an unbroken record of bullying and blundering on the part of all the powers. In governmental policies one searches in vain for more than an occasional ray of chivalry, uprightness, altruism, for a consistent line of action in attempting to solve the problems that were leading Europe from one war to another, for constructive statesmanship. European cabinets used the aspirations of Christian subject races to promote their own ends against one another and to threaten Turkey. Then, for fear of sacrificing what they thought they had gained, foreign offices and ambassadors allowed the wretched Christians to be massacred for having dared to respond to European overtones and to put faith in promises of protection.”

Here is what Gibbons proposed:

Gibbons continues: “The indictment of European diplomacy in the near East is terrible; one might even say that it seems incredible.” After recounting the havoc sown by the major European powers, he adds, “The result is that virtually every Mohammedan country in the world has been treated by European nations as Belgium and Serbia and Poland have been treated. Their wrongs cry out to Heaven to be redressed, their aspirations cry out to the sense of fairness and justice for all mankind to be heard.”

So what was the author’s wish in 2017: “The problem is a thorny one, and, I am told by my diplomatic friends, ‘exceedingly difficult’. But that is only because European statesmen and politicians have made it so. Let every power in Europe proclaim its own disinterestedness, and state that it does not regard this war as a war of conquest, but a war of emancipation, and, lo! the problem disappears.”

Sadly, the problem did not disappear and new problems inevitably evolved.

Library Research: A Lament but not an Obituary

Books You Should Read

I arrived a little early to the Great Mosque of San‘a’ in Yemen to continue my research in the small upstairs room which was the “Western Library.” I sat down in a corner waiting for Qadi al-Sharafi to arrive and open the door. All of a sudden a crazed individual, thinking I was a tourist, started shouting at me. I tried to calm him down but immediately others came to my rescue, explaining that I was a researcher studying manuscripts in the library and should not be bothered. When the Qadi arrived, I followed him upstairs, asked for the manuscript I was working on (which was stored in another room) and spent the day sharing a table with a man reciting Quran and another man reading another manuscript. The Qadi was hard of hearing, so when the phone would ring, it was a comedy routine in Arabic of “what did you say?”. This day is forever stored in my pleasant memory department.

Over the past four decades I have spent many hours in libraries, as an undergraduate browsing little-read, dust-covered books on biblical archaeology at Wheaton College, a graduate student browsing the well-stocked stacks at the University of Pennsylvania, requesting rare 19th century Arabic texts in the Oriental Studies room of the New York Public Library, being served tea while reading manuscripts in the Egyptian National Library (Dar al-Kutub), in awe at the one-of-a-kind Bodleian in Oxford, enjoying the lakeside view from the library of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, being amazed at the private library on the Arabian Peninsula of a shaykh in Qatar, to name only the obvious.

I love libraries, because I love books and I love manuscripts. Of course, I read for information, the goal of research. However, this feeling of love is nurtured by actually touching the hardness of a book, absorbing the aroma of yellowed paper or gazing at the original ink or fading print. The book in hand is no less both subject and object than the libraries where they have a home. My age betrays me; my joy is for the bibliophilic memories but my lament is for the current explosion of the pdfs, the Profoundly Dull Facsimiles, that have transformed the research environment. Yes, I know that the pdf is an amazing gift for anyone who works on old books and ancient manuscripts. Blessed be archive.org and its cyber siblings. A digital copy is definitely a “helpmeet” in the tired old biblical sense, but it is still a lifeless robot beside the paper-and-ink flesh of the original.

In 1981 on my way home from a consulting assignment in Egypt, I carried a rapidly purchased suitcase of dubious quality from the Cairo suq full of the hefty 9-volume set of the mother of all Arabic dictionaries, the Taj al-‘Arus of al-Zabidi. This was the 1306/1889 Egyptian version without vowels. For someone just finishing up a dissertation this was a century-old godsend. The suitcase was so heavy that I gave the airport porter extra bakshish. Somehow it made the weight limit on TWA and I arrived with the precious volumes intact at JFK. As I was lugging the suitcase through the doorway into our home, the suitcase exploded and the volumes poured out on the floor, like an offering to the guardians of the house. I now have downloaded the far superior Kuwait edition of the dictionary in pdf and my revered copy, well thumbed over several decades, catches the inevitable dust-off of no longer being useful. Even the pdf has been superseded by an online searchable site of al-Zabidi and several other major Arabic lexicons, including the archaic-yet-eternal Arabic/English lexicon of Edward Lane (http://arabiclexicon.hawramani.com/).

My own library, especially of Arabic books, was built up over several decades. Every trip I made to the Middle East involved checking out bookstores for interesting books in Arabic. Several of the books I purchased, perhaps most, are now available somewhere on the web in pdf and a few are even searchable online. As I look to downsize the far-too-many books that have accumulated, I do appreciate that I can still have access to the information without having to find space for the physical volumes. Like all researchers these days, I have access through pdfs of books and manuscripts I never knew existed or would only find in the storage recess of a major university library, if there. My lament is not for the benefit of progress, just as I would not turn in my Acura TSX for the horse and buggy my grandparents rode more than a century ago. My memories of books, libraries and bookstores are well embedded inside me; any sadness I feel is for those who may not have or take the opportunity to engage with books face-to-face in a space that no digital version can replace.

This is not an obituary. Libraries, especially those useful for scholars of all stripes, are not going to disappear in the near future. There are books upon books in the market and many more coming into print every year. Johannes Gutenberg need not roll over in his grave, although I suspect this 15th century inventor might turn sommersaults over the website named for him (https://www.gutenberg.org/). The lament is not that you cannot share what I have experienced, but that you actually do not have to; but you should.