Public Libraries

Until the invention of the printing press in Europe, the Arab Islamic civilisation was arguably the most literate and bookish society in the world. From as early as the ninth century, Middle Eastern scholars had benefited from a revolution in book production, driven in large part by the intro-duction of paper. While Europe was using prepared animal skins to make books, Arabs had gained the secrets of paper production from the Chinese. Chinese paper was hand-made. The Arabs greatly improved on the technology by harnessing watermills to operate trip hammers which pounded rags to make the long-fibred pulp needed for the finished paper. In this way they mechanised the most labour-intensive part of papermaking. Arab linen paper was much cheaper to produce and of more consistent quality than parchment or vellum. Papermaking was carried out throughout the Arab Empire from Central Asia to Spain, with Baghdad being the centre of greatest production.

Inexpensive paper allowed books to be produced more cheaply, which led to the foundation of libraries on a scale unknown in Christian Europe where paper technology was not used until the thirteenth century. By that time books were widely available throughout the Islamic world. The great cities of the Middle East developed a tradition of endowed local libraries. Madrassas, mosques, teaching institutions and even the mausoleums of prominent people possessed libraries available for the use of the literate public. As well as public libraries, wealthy individuals had private collections which surpassed almost any available in Europe. Although there are no quantitative records, recent scholarship has arrived at estimates of literacy in excess of 10 per cent among city-dwelling Arabs (Gründler 2016: 31–66). An analysis of the catalogue of an Arabic library of the thirteenth century, that of the Ashrafiya madrassa in Damascus, has shown that this undistinguished establishment had almost 2,000 book titles. The works were on theology, poetry, mathematics, the sciences and history written by ancient Roman and Greek authors as well as great Islamic scholars. The Christian West had little to compare with this modest library of the Arab world. The book collections of all the colleges of Cambridge University combined did not exceed that of the Ashrafiya until two centuries later (Hirschler 2016: 2–3).