1 Introduction

When I was growing up in a Muslim neighbourhood in Malabar in southwestern India, I was encouraged to treat books with veneration. The religious notion of inviolability which surrounded the Holy Qurʾan was sustained for anything written in Arabic script. As children, we were asked to watch out for any pieces of paper written in Arabic which had been left lying on the ground or on the roadside. There was an underlying notion that they contained names of God or of the Prophet and therefore deserved respect. Our heads retained such veneration in the early morning as we ran through the gentle rains of the monsoon or in the early rays of the rising sun to and from the madrasa with our muṣḥaf and textbooks. In or around the puddles of muddy water or on or beside the dusty roads, we stopped in our tracks when our eyes caught sight of something written in Arabic. We picked it up and took special care of it. We kept it safe inside our muṣḥaf until we carried it with us back home. It remained inside the muṣḥaf with other similar pieces until perhaps they fell out on one of our morning sprints for someone else to find.¹

Such naivety grew more sophisticated when I moved from the village to a residential school-cum-college elsewhere in the district. There we were taught to keep our books in order. In our classroom, the upper shelf of the single bookcase for forty students was reserved for our muṣḥafs. The next shelf down was for the thick hadith texts, such as the tabloid-like Mishkāt al-maṣābīḥ printed in north India or the Qurʾan-like Riyāḍ al-ṣāliḥīn. Somewhere on the next two or three shelves, some of us managed to reserve a tiny space for our textbooks for the coming year. They were the privileged few. The rest kept their books in a narrow compartment in their desks. Whether in the bookcase or in the desk, whether privileged or deprived, we had to observe some loose rules for keeping books in order: the tafsīr (Qurʾan exegesis) at the top, below it a small hadith-text that did not require any shelf-space, then texts of fiqh (law), then ʿaqīda (theology), then manṭiq (logic). Below these we placed extra-religious texts, such as history, literature, language, and science; from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice to Sunbul Nigar’s Urdu shāʿirī/nathr kā tanqīdī muṭālaʿa. This “order of books” was always to be followed, and academic and religious reprobation would be the consequence of delinquency. I remember one teacher instructing us that the usefulness of knowledge (manfaʿat al-ʿilm) depends on three kinds of etiquette (adab, pl. ādāb): a respect for books, a respect for teachers, and a respect for the place of learning.

This religio-academic approach to books was rooted in a longer tradition of etiquette ascribed to the texts of the Islamic tradition. Long before printed texts became common, such rules and codes circulated across the scholarly spheres about manuscripts. The disciplines in our neighbourhood in Malappuram were part of a larger historical continuum. I would eventually realise that it was a Muslim majority district in southwest India, which in turn was strongly connected to the larger socio-cultural world of the Indian Ocean, through which many such norms and notions were exchanged across centuries. Even the spread of Islam in southwest India, as elsewhere across the Indian Ocean rim, was facilitated by the enduring mobility of people, travelling along maritime routes for trade and scholarship. So many aspects of modern literary culture, scripts, manuscripts, and books, can be traced back to a triangle of Arab-Afro-Asian interactions in which scholars, jurists, mystics, and authors exchanged their understanding of the physical and metaphysical world. This chapter explores the roots and routes of such discourses in Malabar as well as in the wider Indian Ocean littoral by focussing on the book culture there from the sixteenth century onwards.

As a first stepping-stone, I take the text Ajwibat al ʿajība by Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī (henceforth Ajwiba; see fig. 9.1 and 9.3–9.6) compiled on the Malabar coast. The text discusses legal issues for the everyday lives of ordinary Muslims living in the cosmopolitan world of this oceanic region. The author belonged to the Shāfiʿi school of Islamic law, a school widely followed across the Indian Ocean, from Cape Town in South Africa to the southern Philippines. From the Ajwiba we gain significant insights into book-related practices of its time and earlier.

I shall examine how jurists in Malabar exchanged ideas with their counterparts in the Middle East on the scribal and bibliophilic praxis of their time with reference to a deeper handwritten book culture. Their exchanges across borders of time and place are engrained in the Shāfiʿi scholarly world, where books are perceived not only as a source of information but also as sacred objects and communal responsibility. They represent as such a collective heritage requiring an individual and a corporate accountability to respect and preserve them. Of course, similar social codicological notions can be located in many or most common practices of Muslims in Asia or Africa. But I shall argue that the discourses in this text from the sixteenth century reveal an informed process of meaning-making among the scholars of Malabar, Maʿbar, Zabīd, Mecca, and Cairo. All of them applied a metaphysical quality to the words, folios, and codices, not just as a Volksweisheit but as part of a long-lasting, transregional, intellectual, religious, and sacred disposition.

2 Locating the Malabari Scriptoriums

In the maritime towns of Malabar, such as Calicut and Ponnāni, there was a rich scribal culture with several language communities conversing with one another. This was the result of the widespread movement of people exchanging commodities and ideas across the highway of the Indian Ocean. Calicut welcomed people from “China, Jawa, Ceylon, the Maldives, Yaman and Persia” as well as Abyssinia, Somalia, Iraq, Egypt, and many other parts of the Indian subcontinent, and its “harbour was one of the largest in the world,” according to Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, writing in the mid-fourteenth century after staying there.² It was also the seat of the local Hindu kings, the Zamorins, who rose to prominence in the thirteenth century and whose authority continued until the eighteenth century, if not later. Ponnāni was their second capital with its own harbour and a cosmopolitan share of maritime trade and culture. Both places recorded their histories through a rich writing culture that prevailed across the Malabar coast. Many travellers, diplomats, and officials who visited the region wrote in detail about the extensive scriptoriums and scribal activity there.

Quoting the foreign accounts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Sebastian Prange has recently noted that the local rulers and officials had made “a very deliberate and highly organized effort […] to collect and preserve the records and chronicles of their kingdoms” and that the travellers and officials were impressed with “the astounding diligence with which royal officials recorded the affairs.”³ For example, Duarte Barbosa, a Portuguese chronicler and scribe (escrivão de feitor) in the service of Estado da Índia, wrote in the early sixteenth century: “The king of Calicut continually keeps a multitude of writers in his palace who sit in a corner far from him; they write upon a raised platform, everything connected with the King’s Exchequer and with justice and governance of the realm.”⁴ A century later, the French traveller François Pyrard de Laval made a similar comment about the palace: “Hard by there is a block of buildings allotted to the secretary and clerk to the king, for keeping all the registers. The order and system is [sic] most admirable herein, and I have ofttimes wondered to see the great number of men with no other duty or work all day but writing and registering.”⁵

These travellers also noted (with some misrepresentation) the writing materials in use, such as palm leaves and iron styli. Barbosa observed that “they write on long and stiff palm leaves, with an iron style without ink; they make their letters in incised strokes, like ours, and the straight lines as we do.”⁶ De Laval wrongly makes this a generalisation for the whole of Malabar: “The king hath the like writers in all towns, ports, harbours, and frontier passages of his kingdom, who render account to those of the palace, all being well organised and in obedience one to another, each having his proper superior. Throughout the whole Malabar coast there is the same manner of writing and the same ordering thereof.”⁷ The royal scribal office might have followed the same pattern, but the documents from the region during, before, and after his travel also demonstrate a wide variety of writing materials and methods used by different linguistic, occupational, and religious communities. There was a significant division in the materials used in the region for writing Malayalam and Arabic, for example, before the nineteenth century. The Malayalam texts were almost exclusively written on palm leaf, while the Arabic texts were entirely on paper.⁸ They rarely exchanged the materials and both scripts intersected only in such rare documents as royal endowments, which were recorded on copper and silver plates and stones.

The diverse scriptoriums in Malabar thus produced texts and documents in a number of languages: Malayalam, Tamil, Sanskrit, Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Persian, and many European languages, including hybrid dialects such as Maṇipravāḷam (Malayalam and Sanskrit), Garshūni Malayalam (Malayalam written in Syriac script) and Arabic-Malayalam (Malayalam written in Arabic script). Although most of these rich resources are lost, hundreds of manuscripts from these languages and dialects have survived in Asian, European, and American libraries.⁹ Here I concentrate on the Islamic materials in Arabic and Arabic-Malayalam to show how the Muslim community perceived and conceptualised the contemporary and correct book culture.

Since the thirteenth century, a vibrant and cosmopolitan Islamic community thrived along the Malabar coast and we find occasional references to their scribal practices from the following centuries onward. For example, we have a letter written by a few Muslim leaders from Calicut to the court of a Rasulid sultan in Yemen on February 15, 1393 (on Rabīʿ al-Ākhir 2, 795) requesting permission to read his name in the Friday sermon.¹⁰ The request was granted along with due favours, and the local judge formalised the relationship by bestowing a robe on the sultan. This successful epistolary exchange is evidence for the function of scribes in that world. From the same century and from the same region, we also know of a Shāfiʿi juridical text, the Qayd al-jāmiʿ by Faqīh Ḥusayn b. Aḥmad al-Mahfanī, whom Ibn Baṭṭūṭa may have actually met.¹¹ A fully fledged book culture had possibly developed there by the fifteenth century, when we have concrete references to many scholarly works produced by members of the community. These works deal with various Islamic themes, including mysticism, law, ethics, and panegyrics. But we have to imagine what the private workplace of a scholar or a copyist of the time looked like because the texts reveal hardly anything about the ways in which books were produced or circulated in the region. Moreover, the manuscripts we have mostly come from much later, and they often bear no colophons.

This absence of original textual evidence contrasts with the survival of some small manuscript collections found in situ across the coastal belt, from the northern region of Mangalore to Cape Comorin in the south. These places have been identified as the extreme points of Malabar, though some Arab geographers stretched the northern boundary to Konkan and Gujarat, and British colonial officers limited it to Ponnāni in the south and Kannur in the north. All the major collections I have been fortunate enough to consult in the last decade are situated in the old centres of maritime commerce and culture: Ponnāni, Tānūr, Calicut, Bukhara, Cāliyam, and Māṭṭūl. These collections have hardly been identified as such, or even been surveyed, catalogued, or studied systematically. A decade ago, Jan Just Witkam observed that the textual idiosyncrasies from “this remote corner of the Islamic world, which, however, has a long-standing Islamic tradition, are not or nearly not bibliographically known, let alone described.”¹² His observation still remains true. Some of these collections are part of the traditional mosque-college system, where students were required to copy and study some of these texts. Others, such as the one in Cāliyam, was a kutubkhāna purpose-built by a local scholar, Aḥmad Kōya Shāliyātī (d. 1954).¹³ He is said to have employed scribes to copy manuscripts for his library at an interesting time, when the production of printed texts was at full swing among local Muslims.

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Figure 9.1

Opening page of the Ajwibat al ʿAjība, a collection of fatwas by Shāfiʿī jurists from the Middle East and South Asia, compiled by Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī (d. in or after 1583). Ponnāni MS. 1203 [2598]

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Without any proper analysis of the Malabar scriptoriums, it is too early to say anything concrete about the nature of the manuscripts, the choice of paper, or varieties of script, illumination, binding, etc. Even so, without going into detail, three preliminary observations can be made. First, among the enormous number of manuscripts surviving from the region, only very rarely do we find a complete colophon giving the dates of composition and copying and identifying authors and copyists by name and place. While more recent manuscripts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries do provide skeletal information (the name of the copyist preceded by the phrase bi-yad “by the hand of,” and occasionally a date as well), the general absence of colophons is different compared to manuscripts from the broader Islamic world. Secondly, in the region a unique scribal style of Arabic script was in general use for all kinds of Arabic and Arabic-Malayalam books, from the Qurʾan and law to poems and fictional narratives. Ponnāni lipi (Ponnāni script) was popularised in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by printing presses which had made lithographs from handwritten manuscripts.¹⁴ Scribal styles in different manuscripts illustrate its development: fig. 9.1 and 9.3 show prototypes of the Ponnāni script, which can be seen in fig. 9.7. Third, once lithographs were producing an enormous amount of “printed manuscripts” from the region,¹⁵ scriptoriums were active in and around the printing centres of Ponnāni and Tirūraṅṅāṭi, and the preparatory craftsmanship tasks for printing were allotted by gender: Women were usually occupied at home copying manuscripts for publishers while men performed the actual printing.¹⁶ Before this lithographic boom in the region, copying manuscripts was mainly a male occupation and restricted to a small circle of people in and around the mosque-colleges where only male students could lodge. The juridical discussions on book culture at the core of this chapter flourished in such settings.

3 The Text and the Author

Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī, the compiler of the Ajwiba, hailed from the port of Ponnāni. Not surprisingly, therefore, his text is intertwined with its immediate socio-cultural context and with the wider religious norms and etiquettes for writing and preserving manuscripts. Ponnāni was the second capital of the Zamorins and an important residence for Muslims on the Malabar Coast. Its main congregational mosque, Valiya Jumuʿat Paḷḷi (see fig. 9.2), had attracted thousands of students to study Islamic disciplines to an advanced level for centuries. As a pre-eminent mosque-college for Islamic education, it was known as “the Mecca of South India” and “Little Mecca.” It was a hub of Islamic textual production and preservation and as such a natural centre for an advanced level of teaching and research. In the age of manuscripts, it produced thousands of them, and once the printing press had become popular in the late-nineteenth century, the town printed even more booklets and books for over a century. There are still hundreds of libraries of various sizes, congregational and serambi mosques, and a few Islamic educational institutions.

The scholarly leaders of educational activities in Ponnāni were members of the Makhdūm family. They had migrated there from Cochin on the Malabar Coast, but were originally from the Coromandel Coast in Southeast India. It was Shaykh Zayn al-Dīn Senior (1467–1522) who had established the mosque-college after his return from a long journey in the Middle East for education and pilgrimage. He was the author of several works on mysticism, ethics, and law, as well as a poem opposing Portuguese incursions in the region. The Portuguese had attacked Ponnāni several times since it was the base for the Kuññāli Marakkārs, Muslim admirals of the Hindu Zamorins who fought the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. Shaykh Zayn al-Dīn was the instigator of resistance to the Portuguese attacks on the Malabari people and their businesses.¹⁷

His legacy of scholarship, leadership, and activism was continued by his grandson Zayn al-Dīn Jr., the compiler of the Ajwiba. There is little solid historical information about his life and career, although elaborate details are given in many later hagiographical works.¹⁸ He may have written many works in various fields of Islam, primarily in law and history. His most important work in law is the Fatḥ al-muʿīn, an auto-commentary on his Qurrat al-ʿayn, but he is best known among historians for his chronicles on the Portuguese onslaughts, which provide detailed, accurate descriptions of the region and its communities in the sixteenth century.

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Figure 9.2

Valiya Jumuʿat Paḷḷi, the main congregational mosque in Ponnāni, a major centre of Islamic learning in the region since the sixteenth century

Source: Wikimedia Commons

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The Ajwiba, with its idiosyncratic comments on social, cultural, political, juridical, and religious histories of Malabar in particular and the Indian subcontinent in general, has not been as well studied by historians.¹⁹ The collection of fatwas (nonbinding legal opinions) in it differs from most other such collections. These tend to establish an individual jurist’s authority and record the answers he (hardly ever she) has given to questions on different topics raised by different people from different regions.²⁰ The jurists or their students would classify the questions and answers into different sections of legal categories and then compile them into a book.²¹ While the questions derive from different sources, the answers are attributed to a single jurist. The Ajwiba reverses this pattern: All its questions are raised by a single source, and the answers come from various authorities. Zayn al-Dīn Jr. poses the questions to jurists from Mecca, Cairo, the Ḥaḍramawt, and the Coromandel Coast.²² All of these jurists belonged to the Shāfiʿī school and used early authoritative texts for their answers. Often the same question was asked to many jurists simultaneously, which resulted in complementary and frequently contradictory opinions on the same issues. Many questions in the text concern legal complications Zayn al-Dīn Jr. had to deal with in his homeland, where Muslims were a minority and lived under the authority of a Hindu kingdom (the Zamorins). His questions naturally raised issues which were not found in the usual Middle-East-centric Islamic legal texts of his period. The text also helps us to understand how Muslim communities in such a place as Malabar, far away from the Islamic heartlands, were seeking ways to solve recurring religious and legal predicaments which could not be resolved with the help of the existing Arabo-Persian-centric interpretations of Islam.

The Ajwiba has survived in at least three manuscripts and has been printed several times in Malabar. The manuscript I consulted for this chapter is from the mosque-college library of Ponnāni (MS. 1203 [also numbered 2598], fig. 9.1 and 9.8). I cross-checked with two other uncatalogued manuscripts, one of which is now kept at the Islahul Uloom Arabic College in Tānūr (fig. 9.3 and 9.4) and the other at Mithqāl Paḷḷi in Calicut (fig. 9.5 and 9.6). Both copies end with a statement that the text with answers from ten imams has been completed before 977 Hijri Era (=1569 CE), and they list the names of all ten scholars. This statement must be from the compiler himself. The printed edition (fig. 9.7) also has the same statement at the end. Following the general patterns of Malabar manuscripts, the Ponnāni manuscript has no colophon, and therefore it is difficult to know by whom, when, and where exactly it was copied. The other two copies were written in the nineteenth century, and they do contain partial colophons. The Tānūr copy appears in a multitext-manuscript, and its colophon says its copying (kitāba) was completed after the night prayer (ʿishāʾ) on Thursday, Muharram 1[1], 1344 HE (July 30, 1925), but no name of the copyist is given.²³ The colophon for the Calicut manuscript is better: Imbicci Muḥammad b. al-Qāḍī Muḥammad al-Kālikūtī al-ʿUmānī copied it on Saturday, Jamād al-Ākhir 3, 1347 HE (November 17, 1928).²⁴ The Ponnāni manuscript could be older than this, but it contains mistakes (even in the names of an answering jurist whom the compiler possibly knew in person), so it cannot be an original autograph.²⁵

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Figure 9.3

Opening page of an Ajwiba manuscript in a multi-text manuscript kept at the Islahul Uloom Arabic College, Tānūr, uncatalogued

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Figure 9.4

Closing page of the Ajwiba manuscript with a partial colophon in a multi-text manuscript, Islahul Uloom Arabic College, Tānūr, uncatalogued

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In the text, we have a set of questions and answers related to bibliographical practices, and there the author builds up his narrative mainly based on the earlier authors from Arabia. Even so, we see elsewhere that he moves away from the discourses with his own arguments, furthering the legalistic discursive tradition. The text provides an opportunity to explore the history of scribal and textual culture in the region and an insight into the conversations taking place across the wider Indian Ocean littoral. It elucidates how manuscripts were produced, preserved, and circulated through discussions about rules for writing, illuminating, classifying, shelving, loaning, erasing, correcting, discarding, and objectifying. My further discussion of these aspects of this text will involve supplementing the Ajwiba with a few extra texts, some written by the author, such as the Fatḥ al-muʿīn, and a few others, either from this region or the wider Islamic world.

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Figure 9.5

Opening page of an Ajwiba manuscript at the Mithqāl Paḷḷi, Calicut, uncatalogued

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4 Writing Etiquette

Early in its discussions of different legal issues, the Ajwiba addresses the question of respect for books instead of the usual carelessness. Its main concern is any written material, whether books or manuscripts. Diverse terms are used. Most are derived from the Arabic root k-t-b (e.g. kitāba, the writing process; kitāb and maktūb, the result of that process), but very rarely it uses terms now used particularly for manuscripts (e.g. n-s-kh, “copy”; or kh-ṭ-ṭ, “letter”). It was certainly written in the manuscript age, because printing technology had not yet gained popularity. Manuscripts were at the forefront of their minds, even though they used generic terms for any written material.

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Figure 9.6

Closing page of the Ajwiba manuscript at the Mithqāl Paḷḷi, Calicut, with a clear colophon, uncatalogued

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Figure 9.7

The cover page of a lithographed edition of the Ajwiba. It uses the local style of Arabic script known as Ponnāni lipi, which was developed in Ponnāni and used widely in the lithographed texts of Arabic and Arabic-Malayalam. The upper margin contains the price and the name of the owner, who endowed it to the Valiya Jumuʿat Paḷḷi in Ponnāni as noted in the right margin

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The initial codicological discussion is part of a section on ritual purity. It is linked to the rules of purity for approaching the Qurʾan, touching or copying it, thus interconnecting this with general rules for textual praxis. Regarding the production of manuscripts, the Ajwiba has two main concerns: writing and illumination. On writing it raises the question on whether the Qurʾan can be written with human saliva; that must have been done in local talismanic and funerary rituals when certain verses from the Qurʾan were written on the corpse, the shroud, or funerary objects. Shaykh ʿAbd al-Raʾūf says it is permissible,²⁶ based on indirect evidence (mafhūm, “gist”) from the Majmūʿ of Yaḥyā b. Sharaf al-Nawawī (d. 1277). There is a prohibition against copying the Qurʾan with inexcusable impure things, from which it may be concluded that it is not prohibited to write with excusable impure things. Saliva is therefore an appropriate medium for writing. On the basis of analogical reasoning, he identifies the practice as karāha, a reprehensible act but one that is not prohibited. It is reprehensible because saliva becomes contaminated when it is separated from the mouth.

In his Fatḥ al-muʿīn, Zayn al-Dīn Jr. also has an interesting discussion on writing the Qurʾan, particularly on the use of non-Arabic script. “It is forbidden […] to write the Qurʾān in the non-Arabic script (al-ʿajamiyya),” he writes.²⁷ This ruling is part of a larger debate between the Shāfiʿī and the Ḥanafī schools on copying the Qurʾan and translating it into different languages. The Ḥanafī jurists allowed it as long as it was a tarjama musāwiya, an equivalent translation (i.e. word-for-word) and was accompanied by the Arabic original, even though al-Shāfiʿī (d. 820), the founder of the school, and his followers asserted that scripture was untranslatable.²⁸ This ruling was not applied to non-Qurʾanic texts. In fact, al-Shāfiʿī asserted the necessity of translating books from other languages, especially if they belonged to enemies during a war.²⁹ In an aside in the Fatḥ al-muʿīn, in a chapter on funeral rites, Zayn al-Dīn Jr. says that it is prohibited to write on the kafan (the plain cloth used to wrap the corpse) anything from the Qurʾan or any name for God unless it is written with saliva, for that writing does not remain visible for long.³⁰

The Ajwiba also briefly discusses writing the title of a manuscript in the text.³¹ This question arose from using the Qurʾan and other books as carriers or platforms for valuable objects (see below). The answering jurist is Wajīh al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Ziyād al-Zabīdī (d. 1568), a Shāfiʿī jurist from Yemen and a mufti there and in the Hijaz. He cites the Jawāhir al-ʿiqdayn fī faḍl al-sharafayn: sharaf al-ʿilm al-jaliyy wa l-nasab al-nabawī (“Pearls of Two Strings on the Merits of the Two Dignities: The Dignity of Illuminating Knowledge and of the Prophetic Lineage”; = Jawāhir). This was written by Nūr al-Dīn ʿAlī al-Samhūdī (1440–1506), a noted Egyptian jurist, historian, theologian, traditionist, and prolific author, who migrated to Medina in 1485 and settled there until his death.³² What Zabīdī does not realise is that Samhūdī has taken the whole passage from Tadhkirat al-sāmiʿ wa al-mutakallim fī adab al-ʿālim wa l-mutaʿallim (“Reminder to the Listener and Student on the Etiquette of the Teacher and Student”; = Tadhkira) of the well-known Mamluk jurist Badr al-Dīn Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad Ibn Jamāʿa (1241–1333), who was the Shāfiʿī chief judge of Egypt on three occasions, and of Damascus twice.³³ I shall discuss the details of the passage later, but in the Ajwiba we have an indirect citation from Ibn Jamāʿa: “it is required to write the title of the text from the bottom of the last pages. The heads of the letters of this title should be towards the cover page on the side of basmala.³⁴ This would be useful to identify the text, and to facilitate taking it from among several texts.”

That this passage is cited in the Ajwiba shows that Arabic texts were normally written on paper and not palm leaf, which is presupposed by the question and the response. Shared concepts and familiarity between the questioner and the respondent were important for a meaningful exchange of legal ideas in general and especially for fatwas. The answer in this citation presupposes the same writing material and that there were many manuscripts and libraries in Malabar. That Zabīdī had close juridical contacts with the region can be seen from his two separate collections of fatwas, one specifically titled al-Ajwibat al-Malaybāriyya (“Malabari Answers”).³⁵

The discussion subtly links writing a sacred text with ritual purity and the use of an unusual writing. The ideal concept of writing for jurists was a sacralised activity, while some of them recognised that other styles of writing were practised by ordinary people. Without any immediate access to paper and ink when circumstances required them, they would write scriptural texts on cloth with saliva as an instant, cheap substitute. Local jurists questioned the legality of the practice, lest it be considered ritually impure, but after a Meccan jurist permitted it, they allowed it, provided proper ink was not used. In Islam, the notion of ritual purity has often dominated the tradition of writing. Olly Akkerman has recently explored this theme in detail in the context of the Alawi Bohra philological tradition in Gujarat in western India. She demonstrates how copyists applied themselves to being pure in body, spirit, dress, place, and time when preparing to copy and the act of copying manuscripts was considered sacred and accessible to a select few in a defined place.³⁶ While the Shāfiʿī discourse does not restrict ordinary people from access to writing or to what is written, it requires everyone to maintain purity in body and mind and also in their choice of writing material. The stipulations on adding a title to a manuscript are a further sophistication of this ideal, and they ensure that the texts in one’s own collection or in a public library can be easily identified.

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Figure 9.8

Two pages from the Ajwiba (Ponnāni MS. 1203 [2598]) with a question and two answers related to the contemporary book culture.

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5 Ornamentation

Manuscripts of the Qurʾan and other texts could be ornamented by using precious metals and other material, and this was another codicological praxis that Zayn al-Dīn Jr. includes in the Ajwiba. His gendered perspective on the ownership and ornamentation of the texts separates the rules for men and for women concerning the precious metals. This discussion occurs in answering a question about the entanglements of the Qurʾan with gold and silver, provoking an answer from three different scholars.³⁷ The detailed answer is from Zabīdī with a long passage from Jawāhir and Tadhkira. Zayn al-Dīn says elsewhere that men can ornament their personal muṣḥaf with silver, but not with gold. Quoting Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī (d. 1567), a noted Egyptian Shāfiʿī jurist who migrated to Mecca and lived there until his death, he writes that the silver ornamentation, such as ornamenting the cover with silver, is allowed to receive blessings (tabarruk). Women can ornament their personal muṣḥaf with gold, but men should not use gold. Ornamentation with silver (for men) and gold (for women) can demonstrate an honour (ikrām) attributed to the Qurʾan.³⁸

It is recommended (ḥasan) that even men should write the Qurʾan with gold, but they should not ornament other manuscripts, not even with silver.³⁹ This is an interesting set of rulings. Women may use gold and silver to write and ornament a Qurʾan manuscript, but for this, men may use only silver. However, men may use gold to write the text of the Qurʾan, but not to ornament it or its pouch. Such a gender difference between writing (katb) and ornamentation (taḥliya) applies only to Qurʾan manuscripts. For other manuscripts, gold and silver are unconditionally proscribed for men; probably that applied to women too, but the text is not specific.

Immediately after this discussion, Zayn al-Dīn says that the overlaying or plating with gold is “absolutely and unconditionally forbidden” (wa-l-tamwīh ḥarām qaṭʿ muṭlaq). It is not clear whether he is referring to the general practice of covering metals or materials with gold or silver, or coating the manuscript folios or cover boards with golden or silver leaves. From the qualifications of qaṭʿ muṭlaq, it appears always to be forbidden, in manuscripts and elsewhere. He writes further, “if anybody obtains anything from it by exposing it to the fire, it is forbidden to sustain it.”⁴⁰ That there is an element of deceit embodied in the camouflage of the ornamentation seems to be the problem leading to this outright prohibition.

The discussion shows that there was a nuanced understanding of manuscript ornamentation among Malabari jurists. It is intriguing that the rulings on the use of gold and silver in Islamic law on the basis of gender spills over to cultural ideals in general book culture. It is not immediately obvious why men should be able to use gold to write the Qurʾan but not anywhere else. In practice, not everyone in the region seems to have followed this ruling strictly, at least concerning general manuscripts. In the nearby Tānūr mosque-college library there are a few manuscripts with gold in its opening folios. One example is the multi-volume Fatāwā ʿĀlamgīriyya, a Ḥanafī text of Islamic law commissioned by the Mughal ruler Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707). Its provenance is not clear, but it seems to have been produced in northern India and brought to Malabar, where it has remained as part of the mosque library. It might be an anomaly in view of the general lack of ornamented manuscripts in the Malabar region. If so, it demonstrates that local scholars were prepared to accommodate texts written against their codicological norms. After the European expansion in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century there had been an increase in the circulation of gold and silver in the Asian markets. People had been encouraged to melt down European coins and to reuse the bullion for everyday treasures. This supply of excessive bullion precipitated some economic, cultural, and political commotion in South and West Asia, so these legal discussions about codicological practice may well slightly reflect these tensions. Through their subtle rulings, the Arab and Indian jurists tried to discourage the overuse of gold, which was seen as deceitful camouflage after it had begun to become easier to acquire along the Indian Ocean rim by the late-sixteenth century.

6 Shelving Manuscripts

While as a child I was being taught how to keep my schoolbooks in a proper order, I did not think that several years later I would be reading similar instructions in the Ajwiba, which gives fairly detailed suggestions for arranging and shelving manuscripts according to their disciplines. The responses of Zabīdī about gold and silver ornamentation on Qurʾan manuscripts and manuscripts that contain verses from the Qurʾan are followed by specific recommendations about how to arrange books. This is what motivates him to cite in detail Samhūdī’s Jawāhir, and thus indirectly also Ibn Jamāʿa’s Tadhkira. Both texts have a long chapter on the etiquette for different manuscripts.

“The etiquette (adab) should be maintained in placing the books with attention to their disciplines, dignity, authors, and their greatness,” says Ibn Jamāʿa as quoted by Zabīdī in the name of Samhūdī.⁴¹ Because manuscripts retain the aura of their disciplines and of their authors, their proper location in a library depends on this aura. Accordingly, “the most honourable ones should be at the very top of everything, then the ones after that in rank, and so on and so forth.” Determining the status of a manuscript depends more on its discipline than its authorship, except for the Qurʾan, which always occupies pride of place. Similar sacred texts, such as the Bible, are not taken into account. They are recognised by Islam as composed by revelation, but the Qurʾan states that there are interpolations in the contents.

There are several discussions in Shāfiʿī texts giving a legal basis for the etiquette of conserving Qurʾan manuscripts. These include the rules about copying, carrying, touching folios or margins, turning pages, erasing words, burning, washing, and destroying.⁴² In the Malabar context itself, Zayn al-Dīn Jr. provides a summary of these discussions in the Fatḥ al-muʿīn when discussing what is prohibited without ablution.⁴³ This proscription derives from the Qurʾan itself (chapter 56, verse 79) where touching it without being ritually pure is discouraged. Its prime location among other manuscripts was confirmed by Samhūdī, as quoted in the Ajwiba: “if there is the Holy Muṣḥaf, it should be kept on top of everything.”⁴⁴ He also recommends keeping the Qurʾan in a case (kharīṭa, a case made of leather or a similar material) that has a strap on a nail or to keep it on a brad (watid or watad) on a clean, pure wall in the façade of the room (ṣadr al-majlis).

Next come “the exclusive hadith texts, such as Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim.” By “exclusive hadith texts,” Ibn Jamāʿa and those who cite him mean texts compiling only hadiths without explanations or interpretations. These compilations represent a sacred corpus of direct sayings and deeds of the Prophet, without any interpolations of compilers or scholars. For such works, authorship is not a concern; Ibn Jamāʿa cites Muslim (b. al-Ḥajjāj, d. 875) specifically and not Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl al-Bukhārī (d. 870), whose Ṣaḥīḥ is the most respected hadith text among most Muslims. The underlying principle for naming or not naming a specific hadith text relies on a wider conception that the line of transmission of their contents must be derived directly from the Prophet Muḥammad. The compilers of the hadith commanded respect themselves, but that depended on the topics they dealt with and the methods they employed to collect the words and deeds of the Prophet. All such works immediately follow the Qurʾan in their importance as a source of Islamic law, and thus they occupy the second position on the shelf.

After the Qurʾan and the hadith texts come texts with some exegesis of the Qurʾan and the hadith. This specific category of exegesis, tafsīr, is used differently in the Ajwiba manuscript from the critical edition of Samhūdī’s Jawāhir I checked. The Ajwiba says that it is the tafsīr of the Qurʾan, while the printed Jawāhir says it is the tafsīr of the hadith.⁴⁵ However, the printed editions of the Ajwiba and Tadhkira reconcile this difference by linking both texts. They state that the tafsīr of the Qurʾan should take priority over the tafsīr of the hadith (thumma tafsīr al-Qurʾān thumma tafsīr al-ḥadīth).⁴⁶ Such a mismatch between a manuscript and a printed edition can be explained as a scribal error on the part of the copyist. Alternatively, we could take each manuscript or edition as a product of its own time embodying individual preferences.

Ibn Jamāʿa then identifies a range of other disciplines in order of priority: “theology (uṣūl al-dīn), then legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh), then substantive law ([furūʿ al-]fiqh), then grammar (naḥw: inflections and declensions), then morphology (taṣrīf: conjugation of verbs), then poems of the Arabs, then metrics (ʿarūḍ).” In this hierarchical order there are some disciplines not mentioned which catch our attention. It is noteworthy that some major fields, such as mysticism (taṣawwuf), ethics (akhlāq), philosophy, and logic are omitted, despite the fact that these were important areas of Islamic study. His selective choice of disciplines would not have been accidental but correspond to the dominant curricula of the institutions of his time. For these subjects they would have had larger collections of books, but smaller ones for topics deemed peripheral.

A finer distinction is then made by Ibn Jamāʿa (and therefore Samhūdī and Zabīdī in the Ajwiba): “If two texts are from the same discipline, at the top should be the one with the most [verses from the] Qurʾan or hadith. If they are equal [in the Qurʾan verses or hadith], the [priority should be given] to the author’s distinction. If they are also equal, then the oldest one written and the one used the most by the scholars and the pious people. If that is also equal, then the more valid one (aṣaḥḥ).” Such subdivisions illustrate a general pattern in Islamic tradition of prioritising scripture above an author’s distinction, age, and popularity. This last criterion is the most subjective one, and hardly constitutes a good basis for judging validity. It may be based on the number of mistakes in a specific copy of a manuscript, on personal assessments of valid and invalid conclusions, or on the general opinion of the scholarly community.

Whatever the subject matter of a manuscript may be, the Ajwiba has four brief suggestions on how to store them. As before, these have been taken over from Samhūdī’s Jawāhir and Ibn Jamāʿa’s Tadhkira.⁴⁷ The name of every text should be written on the front edge as described earlier in order to be able to identify it among other manuscripts. In the case of a manuscript set down on the ground or on or under a wooden shelf (takht is used in the printed editions of the Ajwiba and Tadhkira, but taht in the Ajwiba manuscript and in the critical edition of the Jawāhir), the front side with the basmala and the opening pages should face upwards. A manuscript may suffer damage if other folios are placed inside it or by placing it on its envelope flaps.⁴⁸ Large codices and tomes should not be placed on smaller ones lest they overbalance. This is followed by further precautions to avoid the damage or destruction of manuscripts.

7 “Preservation through Destruction”

Islamic book culture includes various ways of producing and preserving manuscripts as well as for appropriately and legitimately discarding them.⁴⁹ The legal texts are concerned with folios and manuscripts in which a name for God or words from the Qurʾan or the hadiths are written. Any such written material would be contaminated if discarded as trash and must always be treated with respect. Similar notions existed in Jewish communities in the Middle East, who archived documents containing the divine name in a special storeroom in synagogues known as a geniza. Discovering them now provides scholars with an abundant source of historical documents. Islamic jurists gave suggestions about ways to avoid the burden of preserving such materials indefinitely while cautioning against destroying manuscripts unnecessarily and inappropriately. The Ajwiba touches on these subjects (tearing, erasing, washing, swallowing, drinking, and burning) when dealing in general with the preservation or protection of everyday objects used by the people.

In the Ajwiba, Zayn al-Dīn Jr. forbids any tearing of “the manuscript with no purpose.” He also proscribes eating written materials (e.g., parts of Qurʾan) even though drinking any ink that has been erased when copying the Qurʾan would be allowed. This was an element of the talismanic and medical traditions which existed throughout the Islamic world. The people would write verses from the Qurʾan, hadith, or prayer books on pieces of paper with easily removable ink, put what they had written into a cup of water until it was dissolved, and then drink the solution. They would also write on selected pottery, wood, or stone, then wash off what they had written and drink the mixture of ink and water. Despite the prohibition on swallowing paper, we should note that this talismanic praxis has persisted among some Malabar Muslims and their coreligionists in many other parts of Asia and Africa, who swallow paper snippets on which quotations from the Qurʾan, a prayer, or a talismanic code had been written.⁵⁰

Elsewhere, Zayn al-Dīn Jr. discusses the burning and washing of manuscripts which causes damage or destruction: “it is reprehensible (yukrah) to burn something written on it, except for such purpose as precaution (ṣiyāna).” This means that written material may be burned in order to prevent it being disrespected by letting it fall on the ground or discarded as trash.⁵¹ This ruling occurs when discussing Qurʾan manuscripts, so it most likely refers primarily to folios on which Qurʾanic verses are written. But this statement may apply generally to any written text quoting sacred verses or mentioning a divine name. He implies that burning is not reprehensible if done in order to protect sacredness, but, instead of burning, he adds: “it is better to wash it off.”⁵² This brief discussion is in the Fatḥ al-muʿīn; it does not appear in the Ajwiba but was anticipated in the larger commentarial corpus of the Shāfiʿī school.⁵³ His teacher in Mecca, who may have been Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, expresses similar opinions in his Tuḥfat al-muḥtāj and adds that burning any manuscripts is proscribed because “it wastes the wealth.”⁵⁴

Erasing with saliva may also destroy a document. In the Ajwiba, this point is raised when questioning if it was correct to use saliva instead of ink to quote the Qurʾan, as mentioned earlier. The respondent, ʿAbd al-Raʾūf, says that writing with saliva is different from erasing with it. He allows writing, but proscribes erasing: “It is prohibited as some jurists have expounded, because in the erasure there is a process of contaminating something that has already been established as honoured and sacred, in contrast to writing with it; think!”⁵⁵ Such a prohibition on the small-scale destruction of a text specifically concerns verses from the Qurʾan regarded as sacred. It does not necessarily apply to non-religious texts. Although the ruling for using saliva is not specific, it will have applied to correcting minor mistakes or disfiguration when writing anything.

There are other ways of discarding unwanted sacred books, especially the Qurʾan, but no others are mentioned. As far as I know, ritually burying a sacred text is not practised in Malabar communities, but there are reports that the Alawi Bohras of Gujarat bury manuscripts in a graveyard or throw them into lakes or unused wells.⁵⁶ Malabar Muslims would also regularly discard unwanted sacred texts into unused wells until recently, but now that more and more open-wells have been replaced by bore-wells, they use rivers instead. That the Ajwiba and its forerunners do not discuss these methods indicates that they were uncommon in the region in that period.

8 Circulation

Through the centuries manuscripts travelled in the Islamic world, from micro-networks, small households and scriptoriums, through wider networks to far-away regions and even across continents. Many scholars have studied various dimensions of such textual mobility, and I have explored elsewhere the transoceanic circulations of texts with a focus on Shāfiʿī legal works.⁵⁷ In the texts with which we are concerned here, the jurists concern themselves with the laws and etiquette of transferring manuscripts on the micro-level, such as borrowing, lending, buying, selling, endowing, and inheriting them.

Ibn Jamāʿa, out of eleven rules on manuscripts or books at large, has three prescriptions for buying, borrowing, and leasing. In the Ajwiba, only a few portions from the second and third directives have been quoted. The first directive concerns possession of manuscripts as a requirement for studying a discipline. “It is obligatory on a student in every possible manner to access the necessary books by purchasing them. If [he is] not [able to purchase, he may] hire (ijāra) or borrow (ʿāriya) them.” He adds further that he “should not borrow (lā yastaʿīr) a book if he is able to purchase or hire it.”⁵⁸ The second directive is detailed, and it specifically talks about the etiquette of borrowing books. “It is meritorious (yustaḥabb) to lend books to others, if there is no harm to borrower or lender. It is reprehensible to lend them [the books] for a group (qawm). The former is the better, for it provides assistance for knowledge along with the virtues and merits of unconditional gratuitous loan.” He goes on to explain nuances of lending books with historical anecdotes, and says, “It is required of the borrower to thank the lender and reward him well. He is not to keep [the book] with him for long unnecessarily, but he should return it as soon as his need is over. He should not withhold it when the owner requests or spares it. It is not allowed to write on it without the permission of the owner, to write marginalia or anything on the blank spaces in its preliminary or concluding material unless he knows the owner is content, as a muḥaddith would write on a part he had heard or written. He should not blacken it, lend it to others, or deposit it except for the extreme urgency allowed in law. He also should not copy anything from it without the permission of its owner.”⁵⁹ Following this long list of procedure for a borrowed or lent manuscript, some trivial exceptions to these rules in the case of the manuscript being endowed to imprecise beneficiaries are provided.

None of these discussions appear in the Ajwiba. But Zayn al-Dīn Jr. discusses related issues in his Fatḥ al-muʿīn, and he echoes Ibn Jamāʿa’s opinion on the gratuitous loan of books. He does not refer to him or to Samhūdī but instead refers to his contemporaries, scholars such as Ibn Qāsim al-ʿAbbādī (d. in or after 1584) and Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī. At the end of a chapter on gratuitous loan, he writes: “Important: ʿAbbādī and others have opined on a borrowed book in which one finds a mistake that he should not rectify it, except in the case of the muṣḥaf [whose rectification] is obligatory. Our teacher [Ibn Ḥajar] has said: ‘what appears [to me] is nothing should be rectified in someone else’s property except in the muṣḥaf, unless one assumes the owner would be content.’ ” This differentiation between the manuscripts of the Qurʾan and other manuscripts is important, and it is intriguing that Ibn Jamāʿa and Samhūdī do not mention this despite a detailed discussion on the topic. Amplifying this aspect of the discussion, Zayn al-Dīn writes: “It is obligatory to rectify the muṣḥaf, but only if it does not damage its script (khaṭṭ) because of its fragility. [Similarly,] it is obligatory to rectify the endowed [manuscript] if one is certain about the mistake.”⁶⁰

Endowment, as discussed by Zayn al-Dīn, was an important way of transferring ownership. A manuscript was considered to be a very valuable commodity in the premodern world, and many public institutions, such as colleges, universities, mosques, and libraries, benefited from such endowments. In the Fatḥ al-muʿīn, Zayn al-Dīn encourages this tradition. He says that endowing manuscripts of the Qurʾan and religious texts in the name of deceased people would benefit them in the hereafter.⁶¹ At the end of a chapter on endowment, he writes that the administrator of endowments is obliged to facilitate any legitimate application to copy an endowed manuscript within the limits of the rights of an applicant and administrator’s duties.⁶² This provision is slightly elaborated by Ibn Jamāʿa, who allows copying or correcting a manuscript if it is an endowment to unfixed beneficiaries, yet says it is better to ask the permission of the administrator. Furthermore, someone who copies with the permission of the owner or administrator should not insert empty pages into the codex or place the inkpot and inked pen above the folios.⁶³ Even so, Zayn al-Dīn asserts that the borrower or the applicant is not to be held responsible for any damage caused to the manuscript during careful and legitimate use. “For example, if a jurist borrows a book endowed for the Muslims, then [he is not responsible] if it is damaged in his hand without any misuse, because he is included among the beneficiaries of the endowment.”⁶⁴

9 Objectification

Of central concern in the Ajwiba is the utilisation of manuscripts for all sorts of purposes: carriers, holders, cases, cushions, pillows, air coolers, balancers, etc. The text proscribes any such practice as showing disrespect or allowing damage to a manuscript. The precise question Zayn al-Dīn poses is whether it is appropriate to place precious metals on the muṣḥaf or on a manuscript. From three contemporary jurists he receives completely different responses with different justifications.

The question posed was, “I asked about placing gold and silver or other things on the muṣḥaf or books or about keeping them inside [the books]. Is this permitted or not?” The first answer is from Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, who says that the previous jurists have explicated the prohibition of making the muṣḥaf or anything that contains the divine names a container (ẓarf). “What is mentioned [in the question] is about placing [on or inside], neither of which makes it a container, and therefore there is no place for prohibiting this.”⁶⁵ He speculates on placing things in between the folios, which calls for a meticulous judgement. “The most apparent view is that there is no prohibition, because each page (waraqa) independently cannot be identified as a carrier, and therefore it is not improper treatment (imtihān), compared to the mistreatment in making the paper itself a carrier.”

The ensuing answers from the jurists Zabīdī and ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿUmar Bā Makhruma (d. 1565) take a completely different approach. Quoting the Fatāwā of al-Ḥanāṭī, as cited by Ibn Mulaqqin (d. 1401) in his commentary on the Minhaj al-ṭālibīn of Nawawī, Zabīdī writes: “It is not permitted to put gold, silver, and the like on the paper (kāghad) of the books that contain bi-smi llāhi l-raḥmāni l-raḥīm. If someone does so, being aware of its reprehension, he has sinned. In his ʿUbāb, our teacher the erudite al-Muzjad has also held the same view of its prohibition. His exact statement is this: ‘It is prohibited to place dirhams on pages of books that contain [verses from] the Qurʾan.’ ”⁶⁶ Similarly, Bā Makhruma says: “Certainly placing gold, silver, and similar things on the holy muṣḥaf and the [manuscripts of] religious knowledge is prohibited, because it certainly degrades and denigrates its honour. The same goes with placing those inside them.”⁶⁷ From this discussion centred on the Qurʾan, it is evident that the same rules also apply for other texts. Bā Makhruma refers to the religious knowledge (al-ʿilm al-sharʿī) while Zabīdī and others whom he cites generalises for any text that contains the basmala.

Zayn al-Dīn ignores the historical context of these juridical opinions in a related substantive legal discussion in the Fatḥ al-muʿīn.⁶⁸ The Ajwiba was compiled “before 977 HE” (1569 CE), while the Fatḥ was completed on Friday Ramadan 24, 982 (= January 17, 1575).⁶⁹ In this process, he ignores the opinion of his teacher Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, and takes the opinions of other jurists for a conclusive statement: “It is forbidden to give the immature people access to the like of the muṣḥaf, even if it has only some verses; to write it [the Qurʾan] in non-Arabic script (ʿajamiyya); to place things such as a dirham on the manuscript[s] (maktūba) of [the Qurʾān] and religious knowledge (ʿilm sharʿī). The same goes with keeping it [the dirham] in between the pages, pace our teacher.”⁷⁰ These contradictory views between Meccan and Malabari jurists on keeping the silver coins inside the books are worthy of note, and it is left for the readers to follow whichever opinion they prefer in their daily practices and veneration of manuscripts.

Besides discussing the utilisation of manuscripts as containers for precious metals, the legal texts also deal with other uses for manuscripts. In the Ajwiba, the discussion is part of Zabīdī’s previous answer, and he cites Samhūdī and thus Ibn Jamāʿa. They all proscribe using manuscripts in which to deposit odd papers, documents, and pamphlets, or as a pillow (mikhadda), press (mikbas), armrest (muttakaʾ), bolster (masnad/misnad), fan (mirwaha), swat to kill bedbugs (miqtalat al-baqq) and other insects: “especially killing a bug while it is on a page is a serious [offence].”⁷¹ Besides these interdictions deriving from Ibn Jamāʿa via Samhūdī, Zabīdī cites another noted contemporary jurist, Shihāb al-Dīn Ahmad al-Bakrī al-Ṭanbadāwī (d. 1541), from Zabīd. He says that it is not allowed to use religious texts (kutub al-sharaʿ) as bookrests while reading other texts, “because it shows disrespect for knowledge (ʿilm).”⁷² Zabīdī adds that “it is forbidden to place new footwear on it or inside it, because it shows a sort of disrespect.”⁷³ These two admonitions are against disrespecting books or knowledge in general, whereas the rationale is based on the damage to manuscripts that these practices would cause.⁷⁴

10 Conclusion

In the Ajwiba, the Malabari jurist Zayn al-Dīn Jr. sought answers from Yemeni, Egyptian, and Hijazi contemporaries on the juridical implications of different practices of writing, owning, and preserving books. The answers he received give significant insights into the bookcraft of people of letters and law in the Islamic world of his time. In their discussions, various socio-cultural and religious norms are intertwined with the perception and etiquette and of writing and reading which was rooted in preceding, deeper discourses across several centuries widespread across the lands of Islam. Scholars from a broad intellectual spectrum sought to make meanings of themselves, their religion, and their scriptural and associated texts. They ascribed a metaphysical aura to written materials and to the very act of writing, accumulated from thought processes about intellectual, religious, and sacred spheres with a distinguished genealogy. Their discussions lead us to five main conclusions.

First, a close examination of these discussions reveals a theoretical basis in their approach to the codicological tradition of Malabari Muslims, and possibly of Muslim communities at large across the Indian Ocean. It shows diverse ways in which a religious and legal framework was applied to the pious way Muslims lived with manuscripts while maintaining attention to their sacred and sacralised status. Books are seen as omnipresent in people’s routines, whether they are sleeping, eating, or drinking, and are to be protected, preserved, shelved, and even discarded with veneration. By identifying problems that arise in everyday events of life, and in death, many procedures for writing and ornamenting are identified as acceptable or not. Like most theories, the substance of these laws aims for an ideal in the world of books while recognising the existence of current practices. These deserve further investigation into collections still deposited across the coastal townships of Malabar. For now, we must make do with an impression of society’s intellectual and legalistic approach to codicology from the prescribed ideal way of handling manuscripts. In practice, things may be different.

Second, we have observed in the sources we discussed above significant undercurrents in the discourses on appropriate social uses of the manuscripts, which cover place, time, and theme. Jurists from Malabar and the Indian subcontinent raise similar concerns, as also Egyptian, Yemeni, and Hijazi scholars share a common lexicon for codicological subjects. Their transregional exchanges illuminate the ways in which the ideas of a shared book culture circulated across the Indian Ocean littoral from the highlands of Zabīd in Yemen and the holy cities in the Hijaz to the coastal belt of Malabar on the Indian subcontinent. Temporally, our sources can be seen from the perspective of a longue durée, in which a chain of jurists, stretching from the sixteenth century back to the thirteenth (from Zayn al-Dīn to Zabīdī, Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī, Samhūdī, Ibn Jamāʿa, and Nawawī) interconnect through a cord of related ideas. The fact that the codicological elaborations of Ibn Jamāʿa from the thirteenth century remained relevant across diverse regions until the sixteenth century demonstrates that people continued to observe techniques and tactics in handling manuscripts to sustain sacred notions which underpinned their codicological tradition. The discussions illustrate a consistent emphasis on the theme of respect. Within particular sets of concerns, these scholars demonstrate this theme in connection with the production of manuscripts, their intellectual order of importance and physical positions for storage on the basis of their disciplines, scriptural content, authorship, and scholarly reputation. The very act of letting a citation make its passage between scholars from different centuries shows a consensual yet evolving concept of an acceptable and unacceptable approach to manuscripts. Small changes within the citations may not be inadvertent errors of copyists or later typesetters but broader developments to make new sense of the tradition according to the contextual preferences of jurists, authors, citers, copyists, and editors.

Third, despite the length, breadth, and depth of these codicological discourses, they are all intriguingly limited to a Shāfiʿī codicological world. The informed yet selective citations rooted in an exclusive textual corpus of Shāfiʿīsm was not accidental or a natural selection by the participant jurists. One simple fact to keep in mind is that the compiler raised all these questions to his contemporaries in Shāfiʿī regions of influence, such as the Coromandel Coast, Yemen, the Hijaz, and Egypt. He did not consider raising the same questions to his counterparts elsewhere on the Indian subcontinent, especially in the realm of the Mughals, who predominantly followed the Ḥanafī school of Islamic law. This intentional selection of respondents shows that there was a shared sacred notion of books circulating among Muslims on the rim of the Indian Ocean, and that Shāfiʿīsm itself began to be predominant there. Today Muslims from Cape Town in South Africa to Maguindanao in the Philippines are known as followers of that school, but the spread of Shāfiʿīsm occurred mainly in the sixteenth century due to many internal changes in the school and external ones on the littoral. The codicological discussions and scholarly strategies in our sources are one dimension of the evidence for this transition. By spreading specific notions of Islamic textuality, legal authority and spirituality, the school gradually found favour among the Muslims there, as well as many other elements associated with that school. Many Shāfiʿī jurists relied on the Ajwiba and the Fatḥ, and many Shāfiʿītexts mentioned them in their curricula or the texts they produced, leading to an enriched Shāfiʿī cosmopolis across the Indian Ocean. That Shāfiʿī cosmopolis benefited from the production and dissemination of such texts so that the school’s jurists and texts remained prominent in their discourses. In turn, respondents traced their authority back even further to other Shāfiʿī authors, including the eponymous founder of the school.⁷⁵

Fourth, the work of collecting juridical opinions from various places and people shows that the compiler of the Ajwiba was conforming to a local book culture by posing his questions as he did. In Ponnāni and Calicut, a dynamic scribal and manuscript culture thrived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when rulers, scholars, traders, and travellers produced a significant number of documents. In a cosmopolitan world of many scripts, languages, and dialects, the Islamic umma maintained its own book culture, with its own books, depositories, scripts, and procedures commensurate with others.⁷⁶ The fatwa collection itself was a response to the vibrant literati in the region in the sixteenth century. The questions in the Ajwiba addressed specific codicological concerns, and the respondents provided detailed answers, and the compiler included contradictory and complementary answers for producing and preserving books. All this demonstrates the nuances of a fully-fledged local book culture that was able to fit with the broader praxis of Islamic codicology in its specialised terminology.

Fifth, the compiler Zayn al-Dīn Jr. repeated his questions and the responses in his own preferred style in his substantive law book Fatḥ. To do this, he stripped away the contextual inferences in the Ajwiba and formulated the outcomes as direct statements of universal rules. The legal statements in the Fatḥ are different with relation to utilising manuscripts for as containers or using precious metals for the ornamentation of writing in the muṣḥaf and other manuscripts. He gave priority to the opinions that he thought were most appropriate rather than the ones advocated by the prominent jurists in the school, including those of his own teacher, Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī. His was a substantive text which became popular across the Indian Ocean littoral, from Southeast Africa to Southeast Asia, where it became a significant part of the Shāfiʿī curricula. Throughout this broad area, its suggestions on manuscript culture culled from the Ajwiba influenced codicological practices all along the littoral.

While there are many differences between printed books and manuscripts, most of the suggested rules apply also to printed books. The discussions are not to be taken as applying only to manuscripts, just because codices happened to be the mode in which texts were produced and circulated in their age. It is obvious that they should refer to any written materials. That is why this discourse composed several centuries earlier continues to hold sway in Malabar in the twenty-first century, notwithstanding several remarkable changes in the languages, technologies, and modes of knowledge transmission in the communities there. The suggestions in the Ajwiba and the Fatḥ as well as in the Jawāhir and Tadhkira still influence procedures for the production, consumption, and circulation of knowledge.

Children growing up in the region, as I did, are often still introduced to a respect for writing and caring for their books, unaware of how long that tradition has lasted and how far it has spread, and of the concept of a longue durée.

Acknowledgements

I am very thankful to Olly Akkerman and Leon Buskens for the invitation to the workshop in Rabat, as well as to the participants, especially Nir Shafir, Annabel Teh Gallop, Konrad Hirschler, Zahir Bhalloo, and Anne Regourd, for their comments and questions.