The Notebook of Kamāl al-Dīn the Weaver

Bibliotheca Islamica (BI) is the Orient-Institut Beirut’s platform for the critical edition of mainly Arabic texts. The series dates back to 1929, when Hellmut Ritter edited the Kitāb Maqālat al-islamīyīn wa-ḫtilāf al-muṣallīn of Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī al-Ašʿarī, a seminal text on dogmatic positions in the early Islamic period. Since then, the OIB has published more than fifty titles in this series.

---

At the end of the 10th / 16th 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.