Beschreibung:

Nataij al'Funnun bound with a historical treatise, in Arabic and Turkish, decorated manuscript on paper [China (town of Khong Fo, probably Xingjiang/Eastern Turkestan), dated 1128 AH (1712 AD)] 104 leaves (plus an endleaf at each end), 2 parts in one volume, both complete, single column with 19 lines of cursive nasta'liq, important phrases and overlining in red, three leaves with diagrams in the text (first section), some water-staining to upper edge of volume, mostly affecting first section, some slight spotting elsewhere, contemporary annotations to endleaves, generally clean and good condition, 200 by 130 mm.; contemporary limp leather, blind-stamped and ruled, a little rubbed An early and important witness to the crossover of Islamic and Chinese book culture in seventeenth-century Xingjiang/Eastern Turkestan; perhaps the only such manuscript to come to the open market It is a little known fact that from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, Arabic and Persian manuscripts were sought out by Chinese scholars living in the border province of north-western China, and such manuscripts were copied in large numbers in the most westerly region of Eastern Turkestan, now Xingjiang (meaning new dominion). Following the Mongol invasion of China in the late thirteenth century AD, Chinese culture opened its intellectual horizons to the scholarship of its neighbours (especially that brought by the Mongols Uyghur Turkish bureaucrats). Occasional influences between these Chinese and Islamic book cultures can be demonstrated since the fourteenth century AD (see Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Persan776, and comment by D. Weil, Islamicated China: Chinas Participation in the Islamicate Book Culture during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century, Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 4 (2016), pp. 37-39). However, it was not until the last decades of the sixteenth century that these took root, with the scholar Hu Dengzhou travelling around China to collect Islamic and Persian texts, and the beginnings of importing such materials eastwards along the Silk Road. The present manuscript dates to the first few decades of this cultural movement. Such texts in the West are of enormous rarity with isolated examples in grand libraries such as the Beinecke in Yale (who own a fragment of an eighteenth-century Quran), and Leiden University (who recently acquired the small collection of 29 manuscripts from the collection of Dr Frederick de Jong). The sole substantial holding is that of the Gunnar Jarring collection in Lund, Sweden, collected by that diplomat-scholar in the first half of the twentieth century in Turkestan and then donated to that library in 1982. We have been unable to trace another on the open market. The Nataij al-Funnun has received little scholarly attention, but is a scientific treatise dealing with important discoveries and relating them to the reign of the relative sultan in power at the time of their discovery. This manuscript is dated Rabi I 1124 AH (1712 AD) and signed by Chengiz bin Timur. The second section of this volume forms a historical account, described in the opening colophon as Waqamat wa'Tarikh al-Sultan Shah Jahan (events in history relating to Sultan Shah Janah) compiled by Al-Fadhil desi Efendi. This section is also separately signed and dated at the end of the volume, also by Chengiz bin Timur and dated 1224 AH (1712 AD).