The Maktabah al-Mutanabi:
Buying Arabic Books

May 13, 2006

Today was my single largest one-day purchase of Arabic books. The trip to the bookstore had been planned for months. I guess it can be viewed in a couple of different lights: either as graduation present, as preparation for the position at Lawrence this coming year, or as a chance to replace many of the books that I lost in New Orleans. I knew exactly where I wanted to go: The Mutanabi Bookstore, which during my last trip had turned out to be the most reliable place for finding medieval Arabic classics.

As with many bookstores, the space inside is quite narrow, and the shelves lined with colorful titles. Browsing is not encouraged, and someone always comes up and asks to help you find something. The idea seems to be that one comes into the shop wanting to find something, and they help you. Arabic is big on multi-volume sets.. something that I think hinders translation projects, since we want everything to fall into nice Penguin-sized editions. The spines, when put together in the right order, often spell out the title of the volumes and the author.

I am always cognizant of just how ridiculous a figure I cut as I walk into a bookstore.. in this case especially, with my camera active. Here I am, asking for some major monuments of Arabic literature, but only marginally able to talk with these people in the Egyptian dialect. It must feel strange to be exchanging so much of their cultural past for (in this case) a thick mixture of Egyptian pounds and American dollars.

The books I acquired are as follows (the number of volumes in the set is noted in the parenthesis, and an asterisk marks that these are volumes to replace ones lost in New Orleans):

• Muruj al-Dhahab, Masudi (4 vols., *)
• Risalah, Ibn Fadlan (1 vol., *)
• Khitat, Maqrizi (2 vols., *)
• Tarikh, Ya'qubi (2 vols.)
• Mu'jam al-Buldan, Yaqut (7 vols., *)
• Tarikh Baghdad, Khatib al-Baghdadi (25 vols.)
• Kitab al-Aghani, Isfahani (25 vols.)
• Tarikh Tabari (6 vols.)
• Tafsir Tabari (12 vols.)
• Kitab al-Mughazi, Waqidi (2 vols.)
• Risalah, Qushayri (1 vol.)
• Sirat al-Nabi, Ibn Hisham (4 vols., *)

So you can gather it was a pretty big day for this small bookstore. Below you can see the guys packing them all up in boxes. [I realize that those titles will mean nothing to non-Arabic speakers.. but rest assured that in the years ahead these will make appearances in the blog..]

The booksellers in Arab countries is a curious creature. I recognized almost all the people in this store from my time in Egypt three years ago, which shows that they are not students working at a bookstore until they find a better job, but people who have taken up bookselling as a profession. They have never struck me as knowing a whole lot about medieval Arabic literature.. no one smiles and communicates that he loved reading such and such a book.. which we expect from a bookseller in America. They do not seem to have a whole lot in the way of formal education either.. at least that is my impression. Their job is to find a certain type of book for their customers.

Today, their professional decorum was somewhat breached by my large purchase, and here they are loading up the taxi with my books (that white box contains my set of the Kitab al-Aghani, and another large box was still to come).

Right now I am thinking I will need one more large trip to the bookstore.. and I was already asking them about titles for next time, some of which they have, others they will look for.