Muhammad [Abd al-Hayy al-Kattani. Tarikh al-Maktabat al-Islamiyyah Wa-man Allafa Fi’l-Kutub

The greatest transmissologist (musnid) of the last century and Moroccan genealogist Shaykh Muhammad [Abd al-Hayy al-Kattani (1302–1382/1885–1962) is known mostly for his Fahras al-Faharis (Catalogue of catalogues) which is an encyclopaedia of chains of transmissions and of the most important narrators of Hadith and other disciplines from the earliest times to his. This is an equally important book of his on Islamic book repositories and historians, edited on the basis of two autograph manuscripts with abundant footnotes. It is a superbly Beirut-bound, gold-spined edition of a major work that is not only of interest to Hadith specialists and intellectual historians but also highly representative of Islamic cultural civilization as a whole, particularly in the Maghreb of the premodern and modern periods. As its exordium shows, the work was originally conceived as the author’s maiden speech at his appointment to the Arabic Language Academy of Damascus in 1929 and was thus intended as an education of “eastern” Ulema about the North African heritage....