Enumerating the Tradition Together: Bio-Bibliographical Reference Works of Arabic Literature, ca. 1875–1960, as a History of Co-Production

Between the 1870s and the mid-twentieth century an extraordinary cluster of bio-bibliographical reference works attempted to enumerate, describe, and thereby define the literary heritage written in Arabic. Some were produced by Middle Eastern scholars — Sunni (Ismāʿīl Pasha al-Bābānī, Khayr al-Dīn al-Ziriklī, ʿUmar Riḍā Kaḥḥāla, Yūsuf Sarkīs), Shiʿi (Āghā Buzurg al-Ṭihrānī, and around him Ḥasan al-Ṣadr and Muḥsin al-Amīn), Christian (Jurjī Zaydān, Louis Cheikho) — while others came from European orientalists working in the Literaturgeschichte mode: Brockelmann on “the Arabic literature” writ large, in fact excluding for the most part non-Muslim authors; Graf on Christian Arabic literature; Steinschneider on Jewish Arabic literature and on interconfessional polemic itself. Usually studied in isolation, each within its own confessional or disciplinary historiography, they are read here as a single, densely interconnected field, through the concept of “co-production” recently proposed by Katharina Heyden and David Nirenberg for the entangled histories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The wager is that the modern bibliography of Arabic letters — its canons, its categories (“Islamic,” “Christian Arabic,” “Shiʿi,” “Jewish-Arabic” literature), and even its descriptive techniques (the title-entry, the incipit, the author notice, the shelfmark) — was co-produced in competitive, asymmetrical, often polemical, but genuinely mutual engagement among Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and European scholars, and between all of them and a reactivated seventeenth-century Ottoman matrix, Kātip Çelebi’s Kashf al-ẓunūn.
A second claim concerns the channel. Co-production here ran through an identifiable body of paperwork — letters, proof sheets, offprints, journal installments, manuscript catalogs and handlists, dealers’ slips and publishers’ catalogs, unpublished inventories — and can therefore be studied at the resolution of a single entry. Doing so reveals what the framework does not predict: the channel was lossy. Information traveling from a private library in Najaf to a printed line in Leiden was selected twice, compressed, occasionally garbled, stripped of its informants’ doubts, and detached from their names. The loss ran the other way too: a German manuscript catalog, whose Arabic titles and incipits could be taken over verbatim while the German reasoning around them could not, entered the Arabic reference tradition shorn of the conjectures that had produced it, in one case transferring a whole oeuvre to the wrong Yemeni scholar — an error still resolved incorrectly by a Gulf library’s electronic catalog today. What the channel loses, in both directions, is rarely the datum but its epistemic status: the hedge, the ground, the name of the person who was unsure. The finished reference entry, the most authoritative-looking sentence in the field, is thus the point at which co-production becomes hardest to see, and at which its errors become permanent.