The curious story of medieval Damascene Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s (d. 1503) book collection at the heart of this study belies the old adage that history is written by the winners. Konrad Hirschler’s meticulous study demonstrates that, precisely because this collection was of virtually no scholarly value in its own time and for the following 400 years, it survived to become the “founding stock” of the medieval collection of the modern manuscript library of Damascus and, by extension, Syria (66). Many of these books also found new life as part of late twentieth-century Islamic revivalism.A specialist in medieval Middle Eastern history, Hirschler is the author of several books on the comparative history of books and reading. He is well placed to explain the meaning and significance of this collection and the original catalog of its contents. His nuanced study of the late thirteenth-century catalog of Damascus’s Ashrafiya Library challenged the tendency of historians to prioritize Sunni conservatism during Islam’s Middle Period (1000–1500 CE).1 Instead, Hirschler argues that the variety of the Ashrafiya’s holdings reflect reading interests beyond those of the ulama and wider than those associated with religious fields of learning.Even though also composed in Damascus (if 200 years later), Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s catalog is of a very different sort. Hirschler’s brand of local history allows text and context and the catalog’s prehistory and legacy to shape the analysis. The result is a microhistory with implications that transcend its specific time and place. At the highly local level, Hirschler argues that Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s catalog was “a project of monumentalizing a specific moment from the past of his city, his quarter, his family, and his scholarly community via his carefully curated collection of books” (3). More broadly, Hirschler’s study illuminates the life cycle of a collection and of its books with attention to Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s notes documenting readings, purchases, and endowments; his addition of a personal archive of receipts and accounts to the collection; his reconfiguration of individual books into composite manuscripts; and the material aspects of binding, gluing, and reusing paper. Together these practices shape the ebb and flow of individual books and the collection over half a millennium. “The present book thus moves away from focusing on the point of production as the determining point in the life cycle of a manuscript or book but, in line with recent scholarship on medieval Europe, it considers the book as a process that resulted in its continued and constant evolution” (14).The significance of Hirshler’s work extends well beyond these important contributions of medieval book circulation. There was a time when the medieval or Middle Period of Islamic history was of little interest to historians. It stood between the “golden age” of Arabo-Islamic arts and sciences and the canonization of hadith and consolidation of legal schools of thought, on the one hand, and the nineteenth-century era of Islamic reform and the renaissance (the Nahda) of Arabic letters. The second volume of Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, published in 1974, marked the beginning of sustained forays into this era in terms of intellectual and literary trends that defied the earlier tendency to dismiss this long period as a cultural “dark age.”2 Since then, historians of Islamic law challenged the assumption that the “gates of independent reasoning” had closed by the eleventh century with the process of canonization and consolidation. It used to be that the historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) was considered an anomaly of his time for the originality of his insights. Due to scholarly interest in intellectual life during the Middle Period he now stands among a host of others, Syrian theologian Ibn Taymiya (d. 1327), Egyptian encyclopedist Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri (d. 1333), astronomer Ibn al-Shatir (d. 1375), and Persian poet al-Hafez (d. c. 1390) just to mention a few of his fourteenth-century counterparts. The building of colleges and libraries and patronage of the ulama in Ayyubid (1171–1260) and Mamluk (1260–1517) Damascus have drawn the interest of medieval Syria scholars who have reconceptualized the political significance of the ulama, explored social life in ‘Abd al-Hadi’s Salihiyya neighborhood, and dug deep into the biographies and books of the time, foremost among them Hirschler himself.3In the same year that Columbus sailed the Atlantic and that Jews and Muslims were expelled from Spain, an all-but-forgotten Hanbali collector of hadith (reports of the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad) living in a suburb of Damascus composed a list of almost 3,000 books, the largest extant book list from the pre-Ottoman Arabic lands (2). What was Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi up to and why is it significant? Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi was a descendent of the founders of the Salihiya neighborhood on foothills of Mt. Qasyun just northeast of the walled city of Damascus. It was founded in the twelfth century by Palestinian refugees from Jerusalem following its conquest by Crusaders. They belonged to the Hanbali legal rite (one of the four major Sunni schools of thought) and, over time, Salihiya came to surpass Baghdad as the center of medieval and early modern Hanbalism. The Hanbali school is traditionalist and puts a premium on hadith as a source of guidance in tandem, of course, with the Qur’an. By the tenth century, the process of canonizing hadith collections had taken place, thus privileging textual transmission. Hirschler follows a recent line of inquiry, which notes the emergence of a “post-canonical” trend of hadith transmission that sought to reinstate the use of a continuous oral mode of transmission. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were the heyday of this practice in Damascus, particularly in Salihiya. But, by the fourteenth and certainly by the time Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi composed his catalog, it had run its course.Hirschler’s argument is that Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi launched a massive project to bring back to life and memorialize the short, thematically oriented booklets that were at the heart of oral transmission during its golden age in Salihiya and, even more particularly, among his ancestors. Thus the “monument” in Hirschler’s title: “the Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi endowment [catalog] in its textual configuration and its material form was an attempt to monumentalize a bygone era of scholarly practices, namely ‘post-canonical’ hadith transmission” (4). Hirschler uncovers a host of strategies employed by Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi in the course of building this monument of paper, ink, glue, string, and leather. He used questionable means for linking breaks in the oral transmission of hadith, organized ritual “reading binges” with his family to extend newly created chains of oral transmission, and combed Damascus—even its trinket market—for discarded booklets. In creating his “monument,” Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi innovated the inclusion of personal archival materials and revised practices related to the use of title pages and the placement of notes.Hirschler identifies the relatively unstudied (but widely practiced) phenomenon of “composite” manuscripts as the “central axis” of Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s project. Here Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s creative powers and agency as a memorialist come to the fore. Majmu’ is Arabic for “miscellany,” a collection of separate individual titles bound together as a new manuscript. Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s catalog of the collection consists of 576 entries made up of 665 manuscripts (including multivolume titles), which encompass a whopping 2,919 titles because he combined and physically rebound so many titles into majmu’. Forty-eight percent of manuscripts are composite and 90 percent of titles are in manuscripts with multiple titles. By collecting, reconfiguring, and preserving these texts (more than 60 percent of which are postcanonical hadith collections), Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi succeeded in salvaging deteriorating material objects otherwise destined for the literal dustbin of history. His was what we call “a cultural heritage safeguarding mission” (142).Because of the care Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi devoted to this project and, ironically, because of the marginality of the texts and the time and place they represented, most of the collection survived intact for 400 years until the creation of Syria’s national library beginning in 1878. What distinguishes this collection from so many others is that almost 50 percent of the actual manuscripts could be located in Syria’s national library and in other collections around the world. Many of Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s hadith collections have been edited and published and are being read in conjunction with twentieth-century Islamic revivalism. For Hirschler’s own monumentalizing project, the survival of so many manuscripts allows him to trace a half millennium in the life cycles of manuscripts that tell “the multifaceted stories of production, usage, ownership, and endowment” (165).As with his study of the Ashrafiya library, Hirschler complements his analysis with a bevy of supporting documentation that will be invaluable for future scholarship. His book includes a diplomatic edition of the sole autograph manuscript of the catalog. In preparing the annotated translation of the catalog he has identified 99% of the titles (a gargantuan feat given Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s sloppy handwriting and tendency to abbreviate); 90% of their authors; 87% of their subject categories; and he has matched close to 50% with extant manuscripts (noting their present-day locations). This information (as well as that for the Ashrafiya catalog are available on-line at “The Historical Arabic Libraries Database”). Two sets of plates (one documenting Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s innovations and the second a facsimile of the original manuscript), a bibliography, a general index, and indices of titles and authors round out what can only be described as a book monument to a monument of books and will be of special interest to those interested in the history of books and libraries.