Editing the Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm

Abstract

Arabic and Islamic studies, whether of the Abbasid or later periods, suffer from the lack of reliable editions of fundamental resources such as al-Ṭabarī’sTārīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, al-Masʿūdī’sMurūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar, Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī’sKitāb al-Aghānī, and others, despite a long history of scholarly interest in, and intensive use of these particular texts. The appearance in 2009 of the new edition of theFihristof Ibn al-Nadīm (d. 380/990) by Ayman Fuʾād Sayyid (hereafterafs) provides an opportunity to reflect on this general problem by considering the historical progress made in the editing and contextualization of this text that is central to the understanding of Abbasid history and letters and to nearly all the intellectual traditions that had arisen in the Islamic world by the fourth/tenth century. As will become clear, the complex history of scholarship on theFihristis an object lesson on the problem of failing adequately to take into account the work of earlier editors and scholars, made particularly difficult in this case by linguistic barriers and limited access to widely scattered publications. The following remarks attempt to reviewafs’s edition of theFihrist, to compare the views ofafs, the Russian scholar Valeriy V. Polosin, and others regarding the context and background of theFihrist, and to give an overview of the current state of knowledge about Ibn al-Nadīm and theFihrist. It will be argued that, beyond reliably publishing the contents of the earliest extant manuscript of theFihrist, substantial emendations to the text are required to produce a reliable edition of the work. An evaluation ofafs’s emendations to the text is followed by a number of additional proposed emendations.

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