When an author pens his own work in his own hand, the result has always commanded a special esteem. It could lead to an elevated economic and academic value for collectors and researchers through its aura of intellectual proximity, and, in philological terms, the authority of an immediate translation from intention to execution, in other words the indisputably correct text. Understanding holograph manuscripts (as they have recently come to be known as opposed to the widely used term autograph), what they may tell us and how they can be identified or falsified, is therefore a laudable task undertaken here in a pioneering volume put together by Frédéric Bauden and Élise Franssen.
After a thoughtful introduction by the editors, in which they present the possibilities derived from studying holograph copies, a first contribution looks at the question from outside the field. Marie-Hélène Marganne asks “Comment reconnaître un autographe parmi les papyrus littéraires grecs ?”. Since the corpus of preserved papyri is pretty much confined to Egypt, it follows that we can hardly expect any holographs from authors who did not live or write there. The whole corpus, often anonymous texts, appears to consist of 29 fragments. Whether the criteria to identify them (reuse, quality of papyrus) can be transferred to the study of Islamic manuscripts is questionable.
Adam Gacek's scholarship has elevated the field of Islamic manuscript studies in general to the level that makes a volume such as this possible. In his contribution “Arabic Holographs: Characteristics and Terminology” he rightfully cautions against taking assertions of being a holograph so often found on manuscripts at face value. The elaborations on his criteria are less convincing to me. Many of the examples he cites, while interesting, seem to lack a coherent point. In one discussion, he declares “most authors (…) never use honorifics as part of their signature” (p. 73) and “we have to ask the question: Would al-Tustarī speak of himself as “called (or known as) Badr al-Tustarī’?” (p. 74) Not only is the answer to this question a resounding ‘yes’; al-mulaqqab, al-madʿū, al-šahīr bi- and the like were routinely part of self-appellations in colophons and manuscript notes and those parts of a name were also often shuffled at will. It also simply makes no sense: If avoiding such phrases was the general convention at the time, then employing them would have been a clear giveaway of those supposedly willing to deceive. There are many smaller issues, too: The collation statement supposedly depicted on Fig. 3.7 is not found there. Statements in Fig. 3.8, which Gacek reads as belonging to Ẓahīr al-Dīn al-Dabbūsī, on inspection actually belong to his al-Dabbūsī's son.
But what if the identification of a holograph does not hinge on the information provided in a colophon? What if an anonymous copy is identified because an author's distinctive hand is recognised? Both editors are concerned, in their respective articles, with the problem of how to translate the expert's instinct that assuredly identified that handwriting from experience into verifiable criteria to actually prove it. Both are mindful that one writer's hand can change with age, circumstances, writing material employed, nature of text, writing speed, or just the willful employment of different styles, and they test methods to objectively describe the outcome.
Élise Franssen's “Bi-khaṭṭ muʾallifihi’ … Vraiment?” tests out the SHOE (Standard Handwriting Objectve Examination), a complex method developed in a modern judicial context. She lays out its criteria and identifies those most important for an analysis of Arabic-script manuscripts. Her test case is the so-called Egyptian Recension of the Arabian Nights, a complete text of the cycle in four volumes cobbled together in the nineteenth-century to meet European demand for complete manuscripts and preserved today in fourteen uniform copies. Employing the method, Franssen shows that, although only one scribe is named in some of the colophons, two distinct hands were at work in the corpus. While the article is in a way not conforming to its title and the book's intent (Franssen's corpus, after all, does not claim to be “in the author's hand”), it advances criteria for a “rationalisation des études paléographiques arabes” (p. 109) that could be employed to match anonymous hands in other contexts.
Frédéric Bauden, tackling the same problem, concentrates on the many surviving holographs of the Mamluk historian al-Maqrīzī in “The Characteristics of al-Maqrīzī's Handwriting”. Bauden offers a profound analysis of the author's style, tackles the influences of his biography, training and age, and proceeds to an exhausting description of every possible aspect of his hand and the changes it underwent, from the single letter to the material employed. Bauden also discusses, tests, and dismisses, Nikolaj Serikoff's “thumbnail index method”, but sets his eyes on artificial intelligence. Teaming up with a group of IT specialists from St Petersburg, a programme fed with the criteria Bauden identified shows promising results in rightly identifying some of Maqrīzī's holographs, but also routinely misidentifies others. For now, the criteria presented by Bauden can help solidify what an expert eye has already identified. If and when an artificial image recognition programme will be able to duplicate or even surpass this human expertise will be interesting to see.
Elias Muhanna's “The Art of Copying: Mamlūk Manuscript Culture in Theory and Practice” focuses on the Mamluk author al-Nuwayrī (d. 733/1333) who not only left many holographs of his own works and was known as a prolific copyist, but also theorised about the profession of copyist in his great oeuvre on the secretarial arts. Muhanna expounds on al-Nuwayrī's expanded and idealised understanding of the copyist's duties, namely that he demands of him a deeper understanding of the text's content and terminology and a view to extra-textual features such as layout, which leads Muhanna to suggest “[t]ranslating the term nāsikh as ‘copyist’ may be problematic in this regard” (p. 239). (This careful discussion, a plea to not understand the work of a copyist too narrowly, then becomes “the word nāsikh not only means copyist, but also compiler, anthologist, or editor” (p. 27) in the book's preface.) Muhanna also discusses a copy of al-Bukhārī's al-Ṣaḥīḥ which shows al-Nuwayrī's practice as a hired copyist. (The colophon actually states that this was al-Nuwayrī's fifth copy of the work, showing how this activity was a routine aspect of his working life). The fact that this skilled calligrapher used a markedly different handwriting for this task than for his own holographs shows the difficulty of tracing a writer through his hand alone.
Kristina Richardson's “The Holograph Notebooks of Akmal al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Mufliḥ (d. 1011/1603)” discusses three holograph volumes of this author's Tadhkira (Commonplace notebook). Two of these were anonymously transmitted and identified by Richardson through Ibn Mufliḥ's handwriting. She focuses on the function of these versatile collections as “archives of family history” (p. 260). Namely, the many anecdotes related by Ibn Mufliḥ of his venerated forebears shape the image of his family and, by extension, his own, while the notes of births and deaths serve the archival function of a (patrilineal) family tree.
In Nobutaka Nakamachi's “Al-ʿAynī's Working Method for His Chronicles”, three surviving holograph volumes of his history that deal with the author's own lifetime are employed to elucidate the question of the interdependence of al-ʿAynī's writings with that of his contemporary al-Maqrīzī. Nakamachi establishes that the volumes are not merely copies of the same text, but that one is an excerpt and another contains additional material and they thus represent different recensions (the usual long, middle, and excerpt) that the biographical sources already pointed to. Some conclusions may be debatable. When comparing a manuscript in Istanbul containing confused passages where events are repeated, as opposed to a copy in Paris where the narrative is linear and clean, Nakamachi sees the clean text as the earlier one, a “pre-insertion prototext” (p. 292). I would argue that the process could have been reverse, that the Paris manuscript might have been streamlined and therefore later. Nakamachi also attempts to clear up the convoluted interdependency through mutual borrowing between al-ʿAynī and al-Maqrīzī, concentrating on a marginal note in which al-ʿAynī cites and criticises al-Maqrīzī without naming him. This episode remains a bit impressionistic and the author will hopefully continue the analysis of this important marginal material.
Retsu Hashizume offers “Textual Criticism of the Manuscripts of Ibn Khaldūn's Autobiography”, a work that was part of his large history al-ʿIbar but that also circulated independently. Whether a holograph copy of it is preserved is uncertain. Because the issue is a complicated one and disentangling the lineage of the preserved manuscripts, as Hashizume attempts to do, is not a straightforward task, based as it is on the descriptions of other editors and not always on autopsies, this discussion is a fairly confusing one. It is also very short, ultimately inconclusive, and does not contain much by way of the textual criticism the title had promised. The whole discussion is very unconvincing, basing its judgments on such debatable propositions as that Ibn Khaldūn “could not have presented the manuscripts as gifts if they had marginal notes” (p. 305). Hashizume claims to have identified one volume as an archetype for several other copies and, through an analyses of some marginal notes finds “that Ibn Khaldūn kept the draft of al-Taʿrīf (or al-ʿIbar) at hand” (p. 310). If I understand this correctly, this would mean that the manuscript in question (Ayasofya 3200) would also be the author's holograph. Judgement about its validity may have to be deferred to the time when the author may actually analyze the marginal notes and the textual history that this article only alludes to.
Finally, Julien Dufour and Anne Regourd investigate “Les safīnas yéménites”, the oblong format often but not exclusively identified with poetry anthologies. After a historical overview of the format and the literature for which it was most widely used (in the Yemen this was classical poetry followed by ḥumaynī, ecstatic strophic poetry), the vast majority of the piece is given to cataloguing in detail six such volumes from the twentieth century Yemen. For a contribution that, with its overly long section of tables, covers no less than about a quarter of the whole book, one question needs to be asked: Why is such a discussion even part of this volume on holographs? After all, the poetry collected in these safīnas, except for one example, was not authored by those who copied it in the twentieth century. Of course, one might ascribe an authorial function to those who gathered the poetry into individual collections, often anonymously (although I would not). But one short nod to the problem (“C'est le caractère unique de chaque safīna qui en fait des holographs potentiels”, {p. 353}) is all the reflection we get on this.
The editors are right that looking at holographs touches upon many themes of a general importance for the study of manuscripts (palaeography, codicology, textual authenticity) and the field as a whole can draw many enlightening insights from these contributions. That not all of them live up to the ambitious goals and sophisticated questions raised by the editors does not diminish the success of this volume.
