The Library of Al-ḥakam II Al-Mustanṣir and The Culture of Islamic Spain

Abstract

The library amassed in Cordoba by the second Umayyad caliph there, al-Ḥakam II al-Mustanṣir ( reg . 350/961-366/976), has attracted the admiration and the hyperbole of writers from that ruler’s own time up to the present. From Ibn Ḥazm, in the fifth/eleventh century, who claimed (just plausibly) to have known the eunuch in charge of the collection, to Ribera, in this century, they unite in claiming that the library contained some four hundred thousand books (Ar. mujallad , though that word is as potentially vague as the English ‘book’), and that the catalogue alone filled forty four volumes, of twenty pages each, listing nothing but titles 1 . (It is perhaps just worth noting, parenthetically, that these figures work out at two hundred and twenty seven items on each side of every single page of the catalogue, a fact which seems to have caused no difficulty for anyone from Ibn Ḥazm to Ribera.)

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