Approaching the Last Decades of Arabic Manuscript Culture (1870–1930): The Content of Handwritten and Printed Books

In the late 18th and first half of the 19th century, print gained a permanent foothold in the Middle East, enabling the mass production of books in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. Consequently, handwriting gradually ceased to be the primary technology for making books. This contribution, which is published in two parts, examines the metadata of roughly 1,200 Arabic manuscripts that were created between 1820 and 1930 and which are now kept in German libraries. As a first foray into this field of study, it will show what subjects remained popular in manuscript form and which ones were replaced by print. To this end, the evidence gained from the manuscript corpus will be compared to bibliographic data from Egypt, the biggest centre of Arabic printing in the 19th century, to learn where, how, and why the evolving print industry appears to have superseded manuscript culture.