Unlocking the transmission archive in Arabic manuscript cultures
Audition certificates (سماع, طبقة السماع or إجازة) are a salient feature of Arabic manuscript cultures. They are notes written on a book to document the authorised transmission of the book’s text from teacher(s) to student(s). In concrete terms, the text was read out aloud (by the teacher or one of the students) and at the end of the reading session one of the members of this reading group added the audition certificate to the book. By virtue of their participation all students now had the right to act as teacher in future reading sessions.
Users should be aware of three key characteristics of the corpus that significantly influence its potential applications: genre, region, and period.1. Most audition certificates were primarily used for transmitting hadith, with an estimated 95% being related to this field of knowledge. Other fields, such as adab, tafsir and fiqh, are much less represented. 2. Currently, most audition certificates are associated with Damascus. It is unclear so far whether this concentration is due to a bias in the modern-day libraries we have examined (especially the Syrian National Library) or whether this concentration reflects a genuine historical trend, i.e. that the practice of writing audition certificates on manuscripts was particularly prevalent in Damascus. 3. The majority of audition certificates are dated between approximately 550-750 AH (1150-1350 CE). In addition, our corpus contains hardly any certificates from before approximately 450 AH (1050 CE) or after 900 AH (1500 CE). We believe that this is not merely a result of corpus bias, but rather indicative of the historical fluctuations in cultural practices related to the transmission of knowledge, particularly in the realm of hadith.
Audition certificates are brimming with data and can include: the name of the teacher(s), the name of the student(s) (including highlighting those coming late or leaving early), the name of the reader, the name of the writer of the certificate, the name of the book’s owner, the date of the reading, the place of the reading and many other surprises (such as a writer recording the birth of his son during the reading session in the room next door). These certificates contain a wealth of historical data, in particular on persons we do not find in many other sources such as women and slaves. They are thus a source of outstanding importance for fields such as social history, history of ideas, economic history, urban history, historical topography, and biographical studies. It goes without saying that, especially in a comparative perspective with other world regions, such as Latin Europe, this copious material represents a considerable resource for widening our understanding of Middle Eastern societies.
So far, the field of Middle Eastern history has used this unparalleled source for medieval history only for individual manuscripts or small corpora. The problem is simply that audition certificates are distributed in tens of thousands of manuscripts around the globe and that no systematic project to make them available was ever started. The farthest we got was a collaborative project between German and Syrian colleagues who published in facsimile a selection of certificates from the National Syrian Library in Damascus and provided them with an enormous index:
Stefan Leder/Yāsīn Muḥammad al-Sawwās/Maʾmūn al-Ṣāġarjī, Muʿjam al-samāʿāt al-Dimashqīya. Les certificats d’audition à Damas. 550-750/1155-1349, Damascus 1996 and Stefan Leder/Yāsīn Muḥammad al-Sawwās/Maʾmūn al-Ṣāġarjī, Muʿjam al-samāʿāt al-Dimashqīya - ṣūwar al-makhṭūṭāt. Recueil de documents fac-similés des certificats d’audition à Damas. 550-750/1155-1349, Damascus 2000
ACP is the first major project aimed at unlocking the potential of this unique source corpus. We have begun reviewing the holdings of selected libraries (see versions), but we cannot claim to have identified all audition certificates in the manuscript books on their shelves. We will continue to go through further collections to enlarge this first large-scale and fully searchable corpus of audition certificates.
Audition certificates are the result of complex documentary practices and they were written by highly specialised communities. We have only started to understand many of the scribal practices, documentary logics and archival practices that shaped the various forms of certificates in different places and in different periods. The following list provides some background in order to understand the wider historical context of the certificates and the practices that shaped them:
سعید ضامن الجوماني: دلالات المصطلحات الواردة في مجالس السماع والقراءة في المخطوطات العربية
Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 11 (2020): 106-132.
سعید ضامن الجوماني: وثيقة جديدة عن نقل العِلم في التاريخ الإسلامي. تحقيق أوراق السّماع لسنن الدّارقطني, مجلة كلية الشريعة والدراسات الإسلامي 38-2 [2021], 19ـ75.
Davidson, Garrett: Carrying on the Tradition: A Social and Intellectual History of Hadith Transmission Across a Millennium, Leiden 2020.
Hirschler, Konrad: A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture: The Library of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, Edinburgh 2020.
سعید ضامن الجوماني: صور الإجازات المنقولة في المخطوطات العربية: السبب، والوظيفة
Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 9 (2018): 72-100.
Andreas Görke/Konrad Hirschler (eds), Manuscript Notes as Documentary Sources, Würzburg 2011.
Stefan Leder/Yāsīn Muḥammad al-Sawwās/Maʾmūn al-Ṣāġarjī, Muʿjam al-samāʿāt al-Dimashqīya. Les certificats d’audition à Damas. 550-750/1155-1349, Damascus 1996.
Stefan Leder/Yāsīn Muḥammad al-Sawwās/Maʾmūn al-Ṣāġarjī, Muʿjam al-samāʿāt al-Dimashqīya - ṣūwar al-makhṭūṭāt. Recueil de documents fac-similés des certificats d’audition à Damas. 550-750/1155-1349, Damascus 2000.
Leder, Stefan: ‘Hörerzertifikate als Dokumente für die islamische Lehrkultur des Mittelalters’, in R. Khoury (ed.), Urkunden und Urkundenformulare im klassischen Altertum und in den orientalischen Kulturen, Heidelberg 1999, 147-66.
Leder, Stefan: ‘Eine neue Quelle zur Stadtgeschichte von Damaskus. Zur Alltagsgeschichte der Ḥadīthwissenschaft’, in H. Preissler (ed.), Annäherung an das Fremde, Stuttgart 1998, 268-79.
صلاح الدين المنجد: إجازة السماع في المخطوطات القديمة, مجلة معهد المخطوطات العربية 1 (1955), 51-232.
Aljoumani, Said/Benedikt Reier: "The Documentary Depth of Hadith Transmission: Audition Attendance Lists." Al-ʿUsur al-Wusta 32 (2024): 142-164.
Hirschler, Konrad: “The Materiality of Hadith Scholarship in the Post-Canonical Period,” in M. Gharaibeh (ed.), Beyond Authenticity, Alternative Approaches to Hadith Narrations and Collections, Leiden 2023, 281-315.