The Library of the Great Mosque of Kairouan

The collection it solved

It is a mosque collection and its contents follow from that, with one great exception.

The core is religious and legal: Qur'ans, hadith, and above all Maliki jurisprudence, the school that dominates North and West Africa. Kairouan was the intellectual centre of that tradition and the collection is a primary source for its early development.

Beyond that, grammar, lexicography, medicine, and some history.

The exception is the Qur'ans themselves, which are objects of the first rank. The Blue Qur'an — gold Kufic on parchment dyed deep indigo — is among the most striking manuscripts ever made anywhere, and leaves of it are now in a dozen collections worldwide. Whether it was made for Kairouan is argued; that it was there is not.

The parchment is a technical point worth noting. North African Qur'ans of this period are on parchment long after the eastern Islamic world had moved to paper, which makes them physically distinct and, as it happens, more durable.

The count is genuinely evidenced and it is unusual in this band. There is a 1293 inventory. There are waqf inscriptions dated across four centuries. And there is a modern catalogue of what survives: some 40,000 folios from around 4,500 manuscripts, a large proportion fragmentary.

The gap between 4,500 manuscripts and 40,000 folios tells its own story. Much of what survives is loose leaves, disbound, incomplete — the condition of a collection that sat in a storeroom for several hundred years without a custodian.

The women donors are worth drawing out. Waqf inscriptions at Kairouan record women endowing books in their own names, commissioning Qur'ans and specifying their production — which is documentary evidence of female patronage in a ninth and tenth-century context where such evidence is otherwise scarce.

The Maliki legal texts are the collection's scholarly heart and the least glamorous part of it. They are also why the library mattered: this is where a legal school that now governs the private lives of tens of millions of people worked out its positions.

The room and the rules

For most of its history the books were in a room off the prayer hall of the Great Mosque, which is itself one of the oldest and most important mosques in the Islamic world.

The waqf model is the room's operating principle and it deserves explanation, because it governs most of the Islamic collections in this section. A waqf is an irrevocable charitable endowment. A book given as waqf to a mosque cannot be sold, inherited or removed; the donor may specify who may read it and under what conditions; and the inscription on the book is the legal instrument.

That produces a different kind of library from a royal one. It grows by many small gifts rather than by purchase. It cannot be dispersed by an heir. And its access rules are written by the donors rather than by the institution.

Access here is `religious` — the mosque community, its jurists and students. Kairouan was a teaching centre and the books were used.

The physical history after the collection's active life is less happy. The manuscripts sat in the mosque storeroom for centuries, damaged by damp and neglect, and were rediscovered in a serious way only in the twentieth century. French colonial scholars catalogued some. In 1948 the material was moved out of the mosque, and it is now held at the Raqqada museum a few miles away, where conservation and cataloguing continue.

The `fate` field says dispersed because leaves are in collections around the world and the collection no longer sits where it was endowed to sit.

The storeroom centuries are also the reason so much survives in fragments rather than volumes. Damp and neglect disbind a book; they rarely destroy every leaf. A collection that was ignored is in worse condition than one that was used, and larger than one that was looted.

What followed

The waqf model is the legacy, and it is the answer to a question this section otherwise struggles with.

European libraries in this period depend on a monastery's continuity or a ruler's interest, and both fail. The waqf provided a legal mechanism by which a book could be permanently attached to an institution, funded by an endowment that generated income, with the terms binding on everyone afterwards. It is why madrasas, mosques and hospitals across the Islamic world could hold collections for centuries without a wealthy patron in each generation.

Al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, the Nizamiyya in Baghdad, al-Azhar in Cairo and the Timbuktu family libraries all operate on it in some form, and it appears in four more entries in this section.

Kairouan's scholarly value is the documentary record. Dated waqf inscriptions across four centuries let historians reconstruct who was giving books, what they were giving, and how a library actually accumulated — the kind of evidence that is missing for almost every collection before this one.

The Blue Qur'an is the collection's most visible export, and its dispersal is a small case study in how a manuscript becomes many objects. Single leaves are in the Metropolitan Museum, the Chester Beatty, the Bibliothèque nationale, private hands and the salerooms. It is worth more in pieces than whole, which is the economics that dismembers manuscripts everywhere.

Raqqada continues to catalogue. A collection that spent five hundred years in a storeroom is still being read for the first time.

For the `access` field this entry is the clearest illustration of what `religious` means at its widest. A mosque collection in a teaching city, endowed by ordinary donors for the use of students, is a good deal closer to public than a palace library — and the terms were set by the givers, not by a ruler.