The Library of A?mad Pasha Al-Jazzar: Book Culture in Late Ottoman Palestine: 219 (Islamic History and Civilization)

This study is the first to examine the history and composition of the library of Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār (d. 1804), the famous governor of northern Palestine in the late eighteenth century, on the basis of the inventory of the library’s holdings. The chapters in the first volume situate the library, one of the largest in Palestinian history prior to the end of the nineteenth century, in its historical context, examine the materiality of the collection based on a study of the extant manuscripts and other historical sources, and analyse the contents of the library. The second volume consists of a facsimile of the inventory, a critical edition and index.

Said Aljoumani, Ph.D.(2010), Cairo University, is Research Associate at Universität Hamburg (Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures) and has numerous publications on the history of libraries and book culture including The Library of a Madrasa in Aleppo at the End of the Ottoman Era(2020).

Guy Burak, Ph.D.(2012), is the Librarian for Middle East, Islamic, Jewish and African Studies at New York University’s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library. He has published several articles on Islamic legal and intellectual history in the post-Mongol period and is the author of The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire(Cambridge, 2015).

Konrad Hirschler, Ph.D.(2003), SOAS, is Professor of Middle Eastern History at Universität Hamburg (Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures). He has published extensively on historiography, history of libraries and archives and book history from the Ayyubid period through the twentieth century.