Three manuscript copies of the Collection of Proverbs by al-Maydānī from the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Oriental Department of Gorky Library, St.Petersburg State University, and the National Library of Berlin

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of three manuscript copies of the Collection of Proverbs by the famous Muslim scholar-linguist al-Maydānī. Two of the copies are part of St. Petersburg manuscript collections: the collection of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the collection of the Oriental Department of Gorky Library at St. Petersburg State University. The third copy is part of the holdings of the National Library of Berlin. The al-Maydānī Collection of Proverbs is a collection of Arabic proverbs arranged in an alphabetical order. Each proverb is accompanied by a commentary on individual words, grammatical constructions, and the origins and uses of the proverbs. The collection is prefaced by the author and includes twenty-eight chapters, one for each letter of the Arabic alphabet. Two additional chapters contain the list of Arab battle dates, the sayings of Muhammad and some prominent figures of Islam. Interest in the work al-Maydānī is still alive today; his work Magma ‘al-’amṯāl continues to be reprinted. Most proverbs, which the author included in his work several centuries ago, are widely used to this day. The study of the surviving copies of this manuscript makes it possible to get the most complete impression of one of the largest and most important works of the Arab thinker and scholar al-Maydānī, and also enables researchers to look at the whole cultural and historical layer through the prism of proverbs used in living speech.