Arabic Writing Tradition, an Historical Survey : Lexicographyuntil C. 430 Ah

For over sixty years, Professor Fuat Sezgin meticulously documented the literary and scientific writings and achievements of Muslim scholars. His celebrated Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums (GAS), the largest bio-bibliography for the Arabic literary tradition in general, and the history of science and technology in the Islamic world in particular, is still of utmost importance for the field.

Fuat Sezgin (1924–2018, Ph.D. Istanbul, 1951), a renowned Turkish orientalist and historian of science, was Professor Emeritus of the History of Natural Science at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and the founder and long-term director of the Institute of the History of the Arab-Islamic Sciences at that university. He also established Frankfurt’s (1983) and Istanbul’s (2008) Museum for the History of Science and Technology in Islam, bringing together nearly 800 ingenious replicas of historical scientific instruments and medical tools. His best-known publication is Geschichte des Arabischen Schrifttums, a systematically organised bio-bibliographical reference in seventeen volumes on the history of science and technology in the Islamic world. Being a literary history in the broadest sense of the word, this magnum opus dedicates a large part of its focus to the history of science and technology in the Islamic world.

Joep Lameer (Ph.D. Leiden, 1992) specialises in Islamic philosophy and logic. Proficient in Persian and Arabic, he has a passion for philology and codicology, publishing books and scholarly articles, some of them jointly with young and upcoming scholars from Iran. A resident of Tehran for several years, he was awarded the Iranian Book of the Year Prize in 2010 for a study on the epistemology of Mullā Ṣadrā (17th cent.). Doing much to promote Iranian scholarship outside Iran, he was actively involved in Brill’s publication of the Miras Maktoob Persian e-book Collection some years ago.