ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad al-Shabrāwī (1680–1758)

Dīwān

Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Kāstiliyya, late Ṣafar 1293 AH [1876].

Pagination to 88. Arabic verse, with an ornamented opening and text set within decorative borders; printed half-title and terminal imprint.

Marbled paper-covered boards with a triangular handwritten title label.

Manuscript bibliographical notes, an unassigned ownership inscription, and occasional pencil or ink marks.

Verse by al-Shabrāwī, the Shafiʿi head of al-Azhar from 1725, uniting literary cultivation with the religious learning of eighteenth-century Cairo.

The Kāstiliyya, or Castelli, press gives this edition a particular place in Egyptian printing history. Founded in Cairo by the Italian Jewish printer Mosè (Mūsā) Castelli in the early 1850s, it issued Arabic books from 1853–54 and became a prolific private producer of Arabic classics. Its work connected a European printer with Cairo’s Muslim scholars and book market. In his 1874 report, Ignác Goldziher commended the fully vocalised Qāmūs printed by Castelli and corrected by Naṣr al-Hūrīnī: evidence of the scholarly expertise available to the firm.

Schwartz’s research shows Castelli working through commissioned editions, linking scholarly demand to private financial risk. This 1876 Dīwān gives that commercial history a literary form. Its title label and annotations record use by an unidentified owner.

Condition

Binding detached from the text block. Boards, spine and edges rubbed and scuffed. Preliminary leaves browned and spotted, with marginal chips, tears and creasing; opening inner hinge split, with a repair strip. Small irregular holes in the blank inner margin near the end.

References

• Çağrıcı, Mustafa. “Şebrâvî.” TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 38, 2010. Source
• Stanford Libraries. “Dīwān al-ʿĀlim al-ʿAllāmah al-Baḥr al-Fahhāmah al-Shaykh ʿAbd Allāh.” SearchWorks, record in00001142382. Source
• Hsu, Cheng-Hsiang. The First Thirty Years of Arabic Printing in Egypt, 1238–1267 (1822–1851): A Bibliographical Study with a Checklist by Title of Arabic Printed Works. University of Edinburgh, 1985. PhD thesis, vol. 1, pp. 76–77, 163–66. Source
• Goldziher, Ignác. “Report on the Books Brought from the Orient for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences” (1874). Translated and introduced by Adam Mestyan, Journal of Semitic Studies, vol. 60, no. 2, 2015, pp. 443–80, especially pp. 457, 469–70. Source
• Schwartz, Kathryn A. “The Political Economy of Private Printing in Cairo as Told from a Commissioning Deal Turned Sour, 1871.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 49, no. 1, 2017, pp. 25–45. Source