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Note on the Text

The Manuscript

The unique manuscript, held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (numbered Arabic 960, accession number Pococke 230), consists of i + 70 folios, 13 lines to the page, and is quite possibly in ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs hand.⁷⁹ It is neatly and often beautifully written, with generous voweling and almost no lacunae. Some of the interlinear and other notes are, however, harder to read, simply because of their small size.

I have worked from a digital scan of the manuscript, but was eventually also able, in October 2019, to examine the original. The examination cleared up a few small queries, and also enabled me to read with more confidence two early ownership inscriptions in the lower left-hand corner of the title page.⁸⁰

Previous Arabic Editions

There have been two major printed editions of the The Book of Edification and Admonition. The first is Whiteʼs, issued by Paulus in octavo in 1789, then revised and re-issued in quarto by White himself in 1800. It is generally very faithful to the manuscript. The problem is that—as was almost always the case at the time—it is totally unvoweled. Despite this drawback, Whiteʼs edition sired all but one of the other available printed versions that I have seen. Their genealogy is clear. Both the White versions omit ʿAbd al-Laṭīf’s short but important preface. The Arabic text of this preface was appended by Silvestre de Sacy to his French translation of 1810;⁸¹ however, he in turn omitted its final phrase. Of the derivative editions, therefore, al-Shaykhʼs descends directly from Whiteʼs (because it lacks the entire preface); that of Maṭbaʿat Wādī al-Nīl derives from Whiteʼs plus Sacyʼs (because it includes the preface but lacks its final phrase). Details of these editions are given in the Bibliography.

The second major printed edition is Sabānūʼs. This bristles with problems—misreadings, hypercorrections, even a couple of instances where the editor has turned over two leaves together, and has thus completely missed a substantial chunk of text. Despite its faults, Sabānūʼs edition is useful in that it prints the two main biographies of ʿAbd al-Laṭīf as appendices, in addition to miscellaneous fragments of his writing.

This Edition

In preparing this edition, I have incorporated or placed in footnotes all marginalia and all sub-, supra-, and interlinear additions that I regard as authorial. I have also attempted to clarify any obscurities for twenty-first-century Arabic readers. To that end, I have standardized orthography where necessary. A recurring (if minor) problem is that ʿAbd al-Laṭīf does not dot the first letters of many imperfect and similar verbs.

I reserve for a forthcoming scholarly edition with full apparatus the complete range of variants. This will show how ʿAbd al-Laṭīf has been read, misread, deformed, and reformed by readers much nearer to his own time, and by later editors.

This Translation

Getting the basic meaning right has not always been easy, given the range of subject matter in the book. What, for example, is the sās with which you insulate an egg incubator? It is not in any of the standard dictionaries. What, precisely, is the “button of the heart”? Here the dictionaries do help, defining it as a small bone which supports that organ—except that the bone in question seems to be a figment of someoneʼs (probably Galenʼs) imagination. The nearest thing is probably the xiphoid process or metasternum.

Apropos bones and processes, it has been said that a translator is like an anatomist, not a taxidermist.⁸² My approach (and I hope ʿAbd al-Laṭīf the anatomist would approve) is to take the meaning apart from the inside, and expose it to view as literally and lucidly as possible. Having said that, there are a few places—notably the striking opening of the second chapter in Part Two—where I believe that literalness would kill the original. Most other instances where I depart from the literal are those where ʿAbd al-Laṭīf has used sajʿ—rhyming and rhythmic prose. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, he employs it sparingly; it is thus all the more arresting when he does use it. I therefore usually try to echo it: it should stand out in the translation, as it does in the original. (To give an example, the scant irrigation provided by an insufficient rise in the Nile is likened, in §2.2.32, to “a token touch at most, like some dream visit from the river’s ghost.”)

Translations from the Qurʾan are my own.

Appendix: The Egyptian Calendar

In addition to the Islamic lunar calendar, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf uses two different solar calendars—the Coptic and, occasionally, the Syriac or “Syro-Macedonian.” He does so because the lunar Islamic months are not in step with the solar year, by which the rise of the Nile and most agricultural activities are timed. The table below shows the Coptic months, first in their arabicized versions and then in standard modern transliterations, together with their starting dates in the Julian calendar (“Old Style” dating, used in western Europe before the Gregorian adjustments to the calendar that began in the sixteenth century) and their approximate Syro-Macedonian and Julian/Gregorian equivalents.