Graduate Student Discovers Arabic Manuscript in al-Maqrizi’s Own Hand
Just published in the newsletter of the Near Eastern Studies Department of the University of Michigan:
“Noah Gardiner, a third-year graduate student in the [Near Eastern Studies] Department’s AAPTIS division, is a member of the team that is re-cataloguing and digitizing our Library’s splendid collection of Islamic manuscripts. (This three-year project, “Collaboration in Cataloging: Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan,” is funded with a grant from the Mellon Foundation, see http://www.lib.umich.edu/collaboration-cataloging-islamic-manuscripts-michigan and http://www.lib.umich.edu/islamic/ .) In early April, Noah set to work on a manuscript of Volume 3 of al-Mawa‘iz wal-i‘tibar fi dhikr al-khitat wal-athar (or al-Khitat), a well-known work on the topography of Cairo and the history of Egypt. The author of the work is the famous and prolific Egyptian writer al-Maqrizi (1364-1442). This particular manuscript belongs to the A.S. Yahuda Collection and has been in our Library for decades. However, like most of these manuscripts, it was incompletely and sparsely catalogued and described. Noah soon noticed a discrepancy: while the paper seemed right for the late Mamluk era (when Maqrizi lived), the handwriting did not.”
The entire article can be read at this link: http://www.umich.edu/~neareast/newsletter2008-2010.pdf