When an author completed a text he would mark that moment (which was not seldom planned on a Friday), and thank God briefly or extensively. And when copyists finished transcribing a manuscript, they almost always added a few words of their own at the end to record their completion of the new copy. This ‘copyists note’ on the last page or pages is a nearly ubiquitous feature of Arabic manuscripts, and while it never seems to have earned a name in pre-modern Arabic parlance, the feature is known today as a ‘colophon’.
The fact that there was no Arabic term for the ‘colophon’ indicates that it was never the subject of detailed discussion in Arabic books. As a result, there were neither rules nor precise conventions in place regarding the writing of a colophon. There is great variation in their form and the amount of information they contain. The most elaborate colophons are visually embellished with their text written as geometric patterns, and these can often contain considerable information.
In its simplest
form, a copyist's note only mentions that a work is finished, with a short expression of praise
for God or the Prophet. If one is lucky, it also gives the year or even the exact date when the manuscript or the copy was finished. The oldest colophons often give no more than this
information.
Over time colophons began to contain more information. Scribes began adding
their own name and the place where they finished their work - always
writing in the third person. Later colophons also came to include the
title of the work, its author and eulogies for the author and , very interestingly, information about the exemplar (model) from which the book was copied.
Even when the information of a colophon is written as simple text at the end of work, it is often easily recognised, visually or because of the terms or formulae used. The formulae would be variations with forms of verbs for ending, completing or finishing, such as فرغ , كمل , تم (see lesson 26). Visually, the first
line of a colophon would be indicated by indentations on both sides of
it. Since the eighth/fourteenth century the text below that line
was arranged in a downward triangle with a mīm (for tamma, to end) or a ha (for intaha, to end) delineating a perfect point on the bottom.
Beware of double colophons When a work with a colophon was
copied, this first colophon could either be copied ("transferred" نُقل)
with it, as part of the text, after which the copyist added his own
colophon; or the "present" copyist could add to his own colophon that the exemplar from which he had copied, had been copied in a certain year, so that the earlier date would appear later in the text.
This manuscript is the only surviving copy of a text against smoking tobacco by a seventeenth-century scholar, Muḥammad al-Wālī, who worked in Baghirmi and Bornu, sultanates in today’s Chad and Nigeria. Tobacco had been introduced there, as elsewhere on this side of the Atlantic, early in the seventeenth century. It provoked fierce debates everywhere, in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, in which identity, religion, law, medicine and more were all tied together. The second part of Al-adilla al-ḥisān is a direct response to a fatwa by a Mālikī shaykh from al-Azhar who condoned smoking. Al-Wālī fought it in every way he could, using fiqh and logic, but also folklore, in the first part of this work. He wrote the treatise in the second half of the seventeenth century.
The manuscript received its binding in Leiden after 1950. Originally it was unbound, but thanks to the catchwords (taʿqibāt) on the bottom of each verso side of a folio, there could be no confusion.
Read f 23v. a) Where does the colophon begin? Compare the lay-out of the colophon with what Rosemarie Quiring-Zoche notes about the lay-out of many colophons since the fourteenth century.
b) Who was the copyist of this manuscript and when did he finish his work? How long after the original creation of the text was this? Use this tool to find the corresponding date Common Era.
اهون من الورع دع ما يريبك الى ما لا يريبك
كما في صحيح البخارى والله اعلم فقد اتضح لك
بما قررناه من نقض الشبه المذكور ان شرب
الدخان حرام بما اوضحناه من الحجج ونقضناه من
الشبه ولله الحمد ولا حول ولا قوة الا بالله
العلى العظيم وحسبنا الله ونعم الوكيل نعم المولى
ونعم النصير وكان الفراغ من كتابة ذلك في يوم
الثلاثا المبارك سابع عشر محرم
الحرام من شهور سنة الف وماية
وسبعٍ وخمسين من الهجرة النبوية
على مشرفها افضل الصلاة
والسلام على يد العبد
الحقر عمر البدراوى
غفر الله له ولوالده
ولجميع المسلمين
امين
امين
م
Assignments
The colophon tells you when, but not where the copy was made. As a whole, however, the manuscript does give information about the region where it was produced. What can you say about it? Compare the script in the viewer with that of this fragment of a folktale about tobacco from al-Wālī's native region (Baghirmi, Bornu).
