The Islamic Shelf

This is a canon of about a hundred and fifty authors and collective works, not a library. The test for inclusion was consequence: was it read, imitated, refuted, memorised, translated or banned by those who came after? Islamic civilisation produced more first-rate books than any shelf can hold, and a great many fine ones fail that test and are not here.

The shelf is built around authors rather than titles, so that a life stands behind each book. It begins just before the Hijra, with the pre-Islamic odes that set the standard of Arabic against which the Qur’an was first heard, and closes around 1700, with Evliyâ Çelebi, Kâtib Çelebi and Mullā Ṣadrā.

Four languages carry most of it, and they do not simply succeed one another. Arabic remains the language of law and science long after Persian takes over poetry; Persian becomes the literary tongue of Anatolia and India as much as of Iran; Turkic and the Indian vernaculars arrive late and quickly produce masterpieces. The region filter is often more revealing than the language one.

The Qur’an is included, unlike the Hebrew Bible on the companion Jewish shelf. The asymmetry is deliberate: the Bible long predates the literature it grounds, while the Qur’an inaugurates Arabic letters and is the text every later author here had by heart. It is marked as scripture rather than as anyone’s composition.

Corrections made along the way

The list this grew from repeated the Muwaṭṭaʾ of Mālik as two separate entries, and split Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddima from the Kitāb al-‘Ibar it introduces; each appears once here. Al-Bad’ wa’l-Ta’rīkh is by al-Muṭahhar al-Maqdisī, not the geographer al-Muqaddasī of the Aḥsan al-Taqāsīm; the two are regularly confused. The Tuḥfat al-Mujāhidīn was written in Arabic, not Malayalam. The astronomical epitome credited to Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī is his Tadhkira, and he died in 1274, not in the following century.

Several entries could not be verified and have been left out rather than repeated: a Tuḥfat al-Ẓā’ir by a traveller distinct from Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, a seventeenth-century Maqāmāt al-Lu’lu’iyya, a Manṭiq al-Muṣarrif by ‘Ubayd Zākānī, and a Masīr-i Ṭālibī by Ṭālib Āmulī. Zākānī and the travel literature are represented instead by works that certainly exist.

Absences that were harder to defend

The list arrived without al-Mutanabbī, without Ḥāfiẓ, without Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Rushd, al-Bīrūnī, Sībawayh, Ibn Ḥazm, al-Ma‘arrī, the Kitāb al-Aghānī, Amīr Khusrau, Ibn Taymiyya or Mullā Ṣadrā. All are here. So are the first Sufi handbooks, the Shi‘i hadith corpus, and the Malay and Bengali writers who make the eastern edge of this world legible.