The al-Jazzar Library Project

2022 – 2025

Said Aljoumani (UWA/CSMC), Guy Burak (New York University), Konrad Hirschler (UWA/CSMC)

The al-Jazzar Library Project writes the history of the library founded by the Ottoman governor of the province of Sidon, Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar (d. 1804). While al-Jazzar is famous for his defeat of the Napoleonic troops, his library has so far remained unknown. Yet, this book collection was part of the most visible and enduring aspect of his long rule, a splendid mosque and madrasa complex at the economic and administrative center of his power in Acre (modern-day Israel). Even though this was a library on the cultural periphery of the Ottoman Empire, the holdings of this library included over 1,800 manuscripts, among them ‘ancient’ masterpieces such as the most important copy of Ibn al-Nadim’s (d. 995) bibliographic work, The Catalog (al-Fihrist).

Manuscripts bearing the stamp of al-Jazzār’s library have been known for a long time to sit in libraries around the world including Chester Beatty, Princeton and Berlin. Yet, the recent discovery of the 1801 library inventory in the Ankara Endowment Ministry has finally provided the decisive clue to study one of the most important cultural projects of its period in the Ottoman provinces. Situated at critical junctures of the political and intellectual history of the region, the library represents continuities and changes in the wider world of books and knowledge economies during the 18th and 19th centuries.

The al-Jazzār Library Project brings together more than twenty colleagues from universities around the world to write a two-volume work on the significance of this library, its position in the broader context of al-Jazzār’s governorship, its contents, the materiality of its manuscripts, the trajectories of manuscripts before they went into the al-Jazzār library and after they started to leave the library only a few years after its founder’s death. The project started in 2022 with online meetings followed by an in-person workshop in Hamburg. The final volume Al-Jazzar’s Library: Book Culture in Ottoman Syria is scheduled for publication in 2025.

Since 2023, the CSMC is carrying out the project Rescuing the Books of al-Jazzar, funded by the Aliph Foundation, to create the conditions for the long-term preservation of the remaining collection in Akka.