Situating an Eighteenth-Century Library: Reflections from the Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar’s Library Project (Gotha Manuscript Talks)

In recent years, the study of Middle Eastern and Islamic libraries has called into question commonly used adjectives: “Islamic”, “Ottoman”, “Medieval”, “Mamluk”, “Syrian”, “Palestinian”... Years of research and numerous monographs have made it quite evident that each of these adjectives conceals as much as it reveals about the library, yet scholars have found it hard to abandon them. The question of the proper adjectives has become pressing again in the collaborative research project on the eighteenth-century library established by the famous Ottoman governor al-Jazzar in the northern Palestinian town of ‘Akka. As one of the editors who coordinated the project, whose participants came from different disciplinary backgrounds, I found myself intrigued by these attempts to classify al-Jazzar’s library. The talk, then, will offer a reflection on the challenge of classifying a library in the broader context of the historiography of libraries in the region.

Guy Burak is Librarian for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU Libraries. His research focuses, among other topics, on Islamic history and law.