The decline paradigm, according to which the Arabic world suffered a cultural decline after 1000, or 1258 at the latest, is obviously approaching its definitive end. Literary studies have brought and still bring overwhelming evidence that the Ayyubid and Mamluk eras were among the most productive, creative and innovative periods of Arabic literary history. Library studies, instead, adhered to the decline paradigm until very recently. Impressed by reports about destructions of libraries and the obvious end of grand caliphal libraries, common opinion was that the availability of books had decreased significantly by the post-Mongol period. Already in his previous book, Konrad Hirschler had produced persuasive arguments that precisely the opposite was true. Even though the era of monumental royal libraries, to which probably only a small elite had access, had ended, people from all parts of society had access to a vast number of smaller public libraries in all larger towns of the Ayyubid and Mamluk empires (Hirschler, The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands:. A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices, Edinburgh, 2012, esp. chapter 4). In general, these libraries were endowments and formed part of madrasas, mosques or khānqāhs. These libraries were open to the public, and people could borrow the books; they therefore played a significant role in the education of the middle classes in Cairo, Damascus and elsewhere. As a result, “Arabic societies, at least those in Syria and Egypt, arguably belonged to the most literate and bookish societies worldwide when the Ashrafīya library was founded in the seventh/thirteenth century” (p. 2).

Unfortunately, these per se rather unspectacular libraries are known mainly from endowment decrees and are only rarely mentioned in narrative sources. Moreover, we do not possess detailed descriptions of them or their catalogues. However, there is one major exception – the Ashrafīya library in Damascus, first mentioned in Hirschler's previous book, where he gave a first glimpse into its catalogue (Hirschler, The Written Word, 149–54). This catalogue, the only known catalogue of a library with substantial holdings from that period, is a sensational find. Scholars were not entirely ignorant of it, but had difficulty understanding the manuscript and profiting from it. As every reader of the present book will immediately realize, to exploit the potential of the Ashrafīya catalogue for scholarship presupposes a very careful and meticulous study and edition. Scholarship must indeed be grateful to Konrad Hirschler for undertaking this laborious task and for the formidable job he has done.

The subject of the book is given in the sub-sub-title. In large part it is an edition and study of the Ashrafīya catalogue, preceded by an account of the history and organization of the library. Hirschler has managed to reconstruct the history of the library in minute detail. It was part of the mausoleum of the Ayyubid sultan al-Malik al-Ashraf (d. 635/1237) situated close to the Umayyad Mosque. It also functioned as a madrasa, albeit a rather unimportant one. Its one and only professor taught Quran readings. The royal library of al-Ashraf and the private library of another Ashraf, the scholar and administrator al-Ashraf Aḥmad, formed the foundation stock of the Ashrafīya library. This second Ashraf was the son of Saladin's famous secretary and epistolographer al-Qāḍī al-Fāḍil, through whose own library a number of volumes from the Fatimid royal library found their way into the Ashrafīya. Hirschler not only reconstructs the highly interesting and complicated history of the library's genesis in every detail, but also traces the later fate of many of its holdings. He also managed to identify with high probability the author of the catalogue and date it into the 670s/1270s. The catalogue not only allows the identification of the library holdings but also the reconstruction of their arrangement on the shelves. The library's more than 2,100 volumes were arranged according to a rather tricky system involving size, subject and alphabet. Hirschler brilliantly succeeds in unravelling this system; thus he not only makes the catalogue understandable but also fundamentally contributes to our knowledge of library structures in the Middle Period.

The author's precise analysis of the thematic structure of the library stocks leads to surprising results. His statistics, which are illustrated with well-designed tables, reveal that the professor's specialization is only marginally reflected in the holdings. Instead, poetry, mostly secular, makes up about a third of the books. Substantially more than half of the library's books belong to the fields of poetry, adab and philological sciences. This is an important testimony for the process of the “adabization” of the ʿulamāʾ during this period.

In addition to a full-colour facsimile reproduction, the text of the catalogue is given in transcription and has been fully translated and annotated. In almost 300 pages (pp. 144–441), Hirschler presents and translates the titles of the 1,707 works. He manages to identify almost every work and assign it to its author, despite the fact that the catalogue often gives anonymous short titles only. Further data, such as a book's position on the shelf, its scribe, the number of quires, or its present location, are given when available. This part, the core of the work, is a philological masterpiece and will be extensively used by scholars of Arabic literature and cultural history.

Mistakes are extremely rare (read al-Ruhā instead of al-Ruhāʾ, Āmid instead of Āmad; the weird transcription as “Abū al-Shīṣ”, etc., is not the author's fault). Concerning the index of authors (pp. 508–20), readers must know that it follows Brockelmann's GAL in determining the name under which a certain person is known. Brockelmann, however, did not always hit the right one. To mention one example, the person given as “al-Ṭarābulusī al-Raffāʾ” in the index (p. 520) is in fact better known under the name “Ibn Munīr al-Ṭarābulusī”. However, these are very minor points. In sum, Konrad Hirschler's book is a pioneering study that will certainly give a new turn to library studies and remain indispensable for everyone working on Ayyubid scholarship and Arabic literary and cultural history.