Previous page | New search |
The free AfricaBib App for Android is available here
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Title: | The Haroun Ould Sidia Collection of Arabic Manuscripts |
Author: | Stewart, Charles C. |
Year: | 1991 |
Periodical: | History in Africa |
Volume: | 18 |
Pages: | 349-358 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | West Africa |
Subjects: | Islamic studies manuscripts History and Exploration Bibliography/Research |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/3172071 |
Abstract: | This note describes a collection of Arabic manuscripts which was microfilmed in Boutilimit, Mauritania, in 1987-1989. This filmed collection consists of five discrete sets of material that overlap in part. In its entirety, the film is the record of a private manuscript library from West Africa which represents about 100 years of book collecting and copying (c. 1810-1910) and which must be among the largest such collections in the region. The library which forms the core of the collection dates from the career of a southern Saharan savant, Shaykh Sidiyya 'al-Kabir' (1775-1868), whose studies and travels took him from his native Trarza region (today's southwest Mauritania) to Timbuktu in the east and northwards as far as Fes. In many respects the library which he thus accumulated represents something of a culmination of the known and studied Islamic sciences in West Africa on the eve of European penetration. Notes, ref. |