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A teaching certificate

Teaching and audition certificates have become all the rage in the social history (of knowledge production) of the Medieval Middle East during the last decades. Ibn Ṭūlūn allegedly complained that he lost most of those he received from his teachers in the turmoil of of revolts and reconquests of Early Ottoman Damascus.  Yet, some actually have survived and even been edited by Muḥammad Muṭīʿ al-Ḥāfiẓ under the title Nawādir al-ijāzāt wa-l-samāʿāt (Beirut 1998).

In turn, some certificates he issued in turn to his own students do survive as well, dispersed in manuscripts in Berlin, Istanbul, Alexandria and Princeton. So far, I could identify five teaching certificates (ijāza) in Ibn Ṭūlūn’s handwriting. The four I have seen are between two and five pages long and were all written between 922/1516 and 943/1536. I hope to present all of them here in the near future.

The first one (see below for the attachment) is the earliest among them and also one of the shortest. It is found on fols. 30a-b in MS Wetzstein I 134 at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. In fact, Ibn Ṭūlūn might have been only the scribe but not the authority of this document, as it documents the transmission of a work elaborating on the merits of Damascus (faḍāʾil) from his teacher ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Nuʿaymī who was himself present. Fittingly, the ijāza follows directly a copy of another faḍāʾil work by Ibn Qāḍī Shuhba.

Even though it sits right in the middle of the volume, the ijāza carries two paratextual elements on the second page that indicate a later compilation of that codex. One is a reading note and the second a library stamp, both of which indicate one Ḥāmid b. Ismāʿīl al-Taqī as a temporary owner around 1314/1799. Below the reading note, there is another annotation which seems to indicate a price (all are included in the transcript).

This ijāza has some interesting information concerning Ibn Ṭūlūn’s social and intellectual environment. For once, the presence of his life-long friend, the Meccan scholar Jār Allāh Muḥammad Ibn Fahd stands out. Following Ibn Ṭūlūn’s own journey to Mecca, where he received several ijāzas from members of that family, he seems to have reciprocated by taking Jār Allāh under his wings in Damascus, and he frequently refers to his presence in other works as well.

Secondly, this session took place a mere half year before the Ottoman conquest of the city and in a garden (bustān) in Qaṣr al-Labbād, an area in the vicinity of Barza and Qābūn, north-east of the old city. The geographical designation is used until this day. In contrast, the three other sessions all took place in mosques. Nonetheless, at this one several Egyptians and Meccans were present, among them the imām of the Shrine of Abraham.

Ibn Ṭūlūn refers to this event in his chronicle as well (Mufākahat, vol. 2, 7), where he adds that the judge Karīm al-Dīn Ibn al-Akram decides to move ḥadīth studies there. Most of the participants met at the jujube tree in front of the judge’s house to travel there. In this account, al-Nuʿaymī is only mentioned as one and not even the first of those present, whereas the ijāza shows that he must have been rather one of the central figures in the following session.

Finally, the annotations mentioned above might indicate a later assemblage of the manuscript codex. Even though the text prior to the ijāza was copied contemporarily to its creation (the colophon gives the year 913/1508), it is not the work referred to in the ijāza. Instead it refers to a faḍāʾil work by the Mālikī author “Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. Shujāʿ al-Rabaʿī” (d. 444/1052-53).

The transcript of ijāza is an xml file and uses TEI XML for the manuscript description. In this I have followed the fihrist guidelines. Minor structural markup indicates page breaks. Place and personal names have been marked up as well in a very simple manner.   Every annotation on the two folios has been entered into a different <div> section.

Yet, the use of TEI is not completely coherent when it comes to point where I was unsure in my reading of Ibn Ṭūlūn’s handwriting. These instances are marked by a “(؟)”; sometimes two possible readings are given divided by a “/”. These uncertainties are indicated on the level of individual words.

Addition: All four ijāzas have been uploaded to github.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Torsten Wollina (July 31, 2017). A teaching certificate. Damascus Anecdotes. Retrieved April 27, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/ur57


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