Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SICLE (Saadian Intellectual and Cultural Life)

Teaser

The SICLE project intends to investigate in a completely new way the intellectual and cultural history of the Saadian period in Morocco (1554-1660). During that period, Morocco is directly involved in international politics and exchanges: it has direct contacts with the...

Summary

The SICLE project intends to investigate in a completely new way the intellectual and cultural history of the Saadian period in Morocco (1554-1660). During that period, Morocco is directly involved in international politics and exchanges: it has direct contacts with the Ottoman empire and with various European countries (Spain and Portugal, but also France, England and the Netherlands). Under the reign of the most brilliant ruler of the dynasty, Aḥmad al-Manṣūr, it reaches Central Africa when Timbuktu and the Songhay empire are conquered by Moroccan troops. The 16th century, and above all Aḥmad al-Manṣūr’s reign (between 1578 and 1603), is also a period of economic success, with the sugar trade bringing in money from Europe.

The Saadian rulers claimed to be descendants of the prophet Muhammad. They took power at a moment when Morocco was facing a loss of control of its territory, with some coastal cities becoming Spanish and Portuguese bridge heads. A local reaction to this situation was headed by religious leaders, the most famous being al-Jazūlī (d. 1465) who became closely associated with conquest of the power by the Saadians.

The Saadian sultans’ library, exceptionally preserved as a ‘time capsule’ in the library of the El Escorial monastery in Spain, following the capture of the library in 1612 under the reign of Mulay Zaydān (1603-27), serves as a basis for this study. The manuscripts kept in El Escorial mirror the interests and the tastes of the Saadian rulers and of the elite at large. The situation is almost unique in the Islamic world, with the exception of the Ottoman Empire. We have no exact idea of the contents of Medieval or Early Modern libraries in the Islamic world and in the very few cases where a list or a catalogue has been preserved, the manuscripts are no longer available or only a handful of them. In the case of the Saadian library, we can examine the books, retrace their history and sometimes identify their readers. This information is typically found in notes or material evidence that has never been recorded in the catalogues of the collections and only occasionally in studies devoted to a specific manuscript.

During the first period of the project, the research has been focused on the retrieval of the information that would enable us to understand the history of almost every single manuscript but also of the library as a whole. A complete survey of the manuscripts has been completed, focusing on the data that were not available until now: the identification of the materials used (paper, bindings for instance), the decorative elements found on some of the manuscripts and all the marks, notes and seal impressions. As a first result, we have now an accurate picture of the contents of the Saadian library, after identification of those belonging for instance to Philip II of Spain or of the few additions made after the integration of the Saadian library into the Escorial library.

The materiality of the manuscripts is providing now new elements for the cultural history of Saadian Morocco. A particularly significant example is that of the bindings. In Morocco, the 16th century witnessed a technical change in their decoration. Instead of tooling the covers with small tools requiring to be stamped many times in order to produce an ornament, Moroccan binders began to use engraved plates that allowed to print directly a complete composition. The technique as well as the style of the decoration are clearly borrowed from Ottoman binders. Actually, the plates (or at least some of them) were imported from the Ottoman Empire. This is a new proof of the taste for Ottoman fashions in Saadian Morocco. However, the bindings produced for the Saadian library keep a “Moroccan touch” and some of them show a tendency to reinterpret in a specific way the Ottoman models.


Fig. 1. Central ornament from two bindings in the San Lorenzo de El Escorial collection.
Left: Ottoman ornament. Right: Morocc

Work performed

The first period of the SICLE project has been dominated by the Work on the Escorial collection, more precisely its Survey, the most important step towards the implementation of the research on Saadian cultural and intellectual life. As it had been scheduled to integrate the data collected into a database that would later be extended to other Saadian manuscripts, a short descriptive template has been devised, covering in priority the fields that were left unexplored by previous catalogues and publications. Two major fields were concerned:
1- The materiality of the book.
The entries concern codicological and palaeographical elements, such as paper, constitution of the codex (quires, marks related to their order, inks, binding, etc.) and the kind of script used for the main text as well as data about the ancillary marks employed by the copyist.
2- The paratextual elements.
It was decided to collect more precisely than our predecessors the information found in the colophons. The names of the copyists were not indicated in the catalogue, an information that is highly relevant for the intellectual history as some of the copyists are also scholars known from other sources. The title pages were taken separately into account as they turned to reflect local practices that could be used at a later stage of the research. The various notes were also meticulously recorded: ownership statements, waqf, reading/hearing certificates, but also dates of birth or records of astronomical peculiarities. A category was added during a second stage it turned out that some prices turned had been recorded on some of the manuscripts and could provide evidence for a groundbreaking research on the economy of the book. Finally, the decoration of the manuscripts was summarily described.

When dealing with multiple text manuscripts, it has been necessary to add some information about the texts themselves, since the catalogue by H. Dérenbourg and his continuators failed to provide accurate data about the folios where a text had been transcribed, particularly when the foliotation added by the Escorial librarians was inaccurate to the point that some features of the copyist work or the history of the manuscript could not be properly understood.

The survey could not be prepared with the use of available photographic coverage of the collection as many relevant features were not photographed or could not be properly observed on the pictures. The PI and the SC had to work in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, looking at each manuscript and taking the notes on files prepared on the basis of the template. Both devoted various periods of work to the survey at the Escorial library. Thanks to the help of the librarian, they were allowed to get access daily to a larger number of manuscripts than is usually the rule of the library.

The Survey was completed more than six months ahead of schedule, by the end of December 2016. Various reasons explain this:
1- The preparatory exploration had identified precisely the features that had to be observed and produced a performant description template.
2- The manuscripts were made available at a higher cadence as foreseen (see above).
3- The appointment of the SC to a position in Paris led the PI to devote more time than scheduled to the project (60% instead of 50%), as the completion of the survey was crucial for the whole project.

While the survey was underway, we started ordering the pictures and a first batch became available in September 2017. As the work on Paratexts had to be shared between the PI, the TA and a part time ST, some preparation was required in order to have the tasks clearly defined. For this reason, the PI had to invest extra time in the preparation of this step and the work could begin in November 2016, ahead of schedule. In January 2017, the last order was submitted, but the large number of pictures, involving the manipulation of hundreds of manuscripts, could not be fully handled by the Escorial library befo

Final results

The project aims at producing a comprehensive view of the cultural and intellectual life in Saadian Morocco relying primarily on the global study of its books. The intellectual production, as it can be grasped through the literary works of the time, will be complemented by a full presentation of the texts which mattered for the contemporaries, either earlier compositions or works imported from abroad. In addition to the sources which have been used by M. Hajji in his Activité intellectuelle au Maroc à l’époque sa’dide (Rabat, 1976), we shall use not only the manuscripts of Mulay Zaydān’s library, but also the other Saadian manuscripts kept in Morocco –with a special attention for those which were part of libraries.

Instead of looking at discrete items kept under the same roof, SICLE considers the collections as a whole and try to discover the relationship between the books as well as between them and the contemporary intellectual production. In this way, the study of the contents of the sultans’ library, taken in a comprehensive way, opens the way to an understanding of their interests and tastes. As the library also mirrors the intellectual exchanges of Saadian Morocco with the outside world, it will be possible to gauge the reception of the external output from the Ottoman empire, from Europe but also from the last Muslim communities of Spain, the Moriscos. In the expanded context in which Moroccan rulers and elites had to move, education was of course of prime importance and the manuscripts and documents related to the educative process will receive special attention. At a higher level, SICLE intends to offer a broader view of the interactions between intellectual production, seen through the books, and the readers in an anthropological perspective.

As Saadian times are a formative period of contemporary Morocco, understanding its culture and its intellectual life helps our understanding of the process leading to the emergence of modern Morocco. At a more general level, this research will provide completely new elements on the exchanges between Western Islam and the Central Islamic lands and on the various aspects of the history of the book in the Islamic world.

Website & more info

More info: https://sicle.hypotheses.org/.