Colophon is our word for the information written down by a scribe or
copyist in the Arabic tradition at the end of a text. In its simplest
form it indicates where a work ends, with a short expression of praise
for God or the Prophet, and with a year in which the copy was finished,
if you are lucky. The oldest colophons often give no more than this
information. Considering that many texts have not been preserved
entirely, and that others were (and still are) part of collective
volumes, even this is more important than it may seem at first sight.
Over time colophons would give 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
information about the exemplar (model) from which a book was copied.
Rosemarie Quiring-Zoche notes that, remarkably, there was no term for the colophon, (khātima,
the seal of the text, rather referring to a conclusion) although clear
conventions developed about what a colophon should be like. The
beginning of colophons is usually marked by a word meaning to finish,
end, complete (for instance فرغ , كمل , تم ) From early on, the first
line of it was often visually indicated by indentations on both sides of
it. And since the eighth/fourteenth century the text below that line
was arranged in a downward triangle with a mīm (for tamma, to end) delineating a perfect point on the bottom.
Double colophon 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
his exemplar had been copied by so-and-so, so that the earlier date is
found later in the text.
(For further study of the details of colophons, go to Lesson 26)
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.
For further study of the details of colophons, go to Lesson 26
Questions
Read f 23v. a) Where does the colophon begin? Compare the lay-out of the colophon with what Rosemarie Quiring-Zoche noted 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). What does this suggest about the scope of the treatise's impact?
