A Library in One Volume – The Notebook of the Nineteenth-Century Ismāʿīlī Scholar Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī from Surat

Abstract

Abstract The focus of this article is the eminent Ismāʿīlī scholar Sayyidī Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī (1833–98) and his private notebook, which over time he filled with a wide variety of content, ranging across religions, history, the sciences and mathematics, literature, and the occult. The multiple-text manuscript (majmūʿa) is part of the Hamdani Manuscript Collection, now at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London (Ms. 1662). Al-Hamdānī, who is known as an important protagonist in the history of this family library, was also a “moving spirit” in the Daʿwa, the religious and political mission of the Ismāʿīlī Dāʾūdī Bohra Ṭayyibīs in Gujarat. As most of his epistles and his memoirs are not accessible and have not been researched until now, the notebook provides a preliminary testimony, opening a window to his intellectual world. In this article, this unique document is presented in its historical context and described in terms of its materiality, content and use. It is considered as a rich source of information about its owner and the literary holdings a nineteenth-century Bohra scholar could draw on. We also ask what role the personal manuscript might have played with respect to Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī’s religious commitments in the Ṭayyibī Daʿwa.