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A second ijāza

In the last post, I announced the upload of transcripts of Ibn Ṭūlūn’s ijāzas here. In the meantime, I have uploaded all the files on github. The second ijāza presented here is one of two found in MS Princeton, Firestone Library, Garrett 4098Y which can be accessed online.

This ijāza is item five in the manuscript and covers fols. 52b to 54a. It was issued for the recitation by the Shafiʿite Qurʾān reciter (muqrī) Shihāb al-Dīn Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. Jābir b. Ghānim al-Dimashqī al-Ḥarīrī, which took place in the Umayyad Mosque on 15 Ramaḍān 923/1 Oct. 1517. The subject of the session headed by Ibn Ṭūlūn was the 13th-century Arabic grammar work al-Muqaddima al-Ajurūmiyya.

As can be expected, the text then lists the chains of transmission of that work up to Ibn Ṭūlūn. This documentary character notwithstanding, the ijāza is illuminating as to Ibn Ṭūlūn’s education and the hierarchies he realized between his different teachers.

As has been indicated in the prior post, it also gives insight into the composition of the audience present at the event, which lay in the middle of the fasting period and only shortly before the holiest part of Ramaḍān, during which ḥadīth would be regularly recited.

For this document, I have added markup for personal and place names. Yet, the result is not optimal for people who do not work with an xml viewer or editor. It appears there are also some issues with the file’s presentation in some browsers. Perhaps markDown might prove a better way to host these files for audiences both familiar and unfamiliar with markup? Or an even simpler way would just be using standard formatting features to indicate certain entities: e.g. bold for personal names and underlining for place names?

Correction (April 2018): The mentioned markups have been removed from the file and replaced with line breaks. I still think markdown might be a better way to enhance the usability by identifying personal and place names as well as book titles.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Torsten Wollina (December 8, 2017). A second ijāza. Damascus Anecdotes. Retrieved April 27, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/ur58


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