Catalogue: Theology
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Nūr al-sham‘ah fī bayān zuhr al-jam‘ah
(MS A 50, item 2) - (Light of the Candle Regarding the Explanation of the Purity of Friday)
- الشمعه فى بيان ظهر الجمعه
- by Nūr al-Dīn ‘Alī ibn Ghānim al-Maqdisī al-Ḥanafī (d. 1596/1005)
- نورالدين على ابن غانم المقدسى الحنفى
This is a very short fragment of a treatise on theology and law by a professor of theology and Jurisprudence at a Ḥanafī school in Cairo at the end of the 16th century.
This fragment was copied before the author's death.
There are a number of other copies, complete, recorded in other collections. See GAL, vol. 2, p. 312.
Nūr al-sham‘ah fī bayān zuhr al-jam‘ah (MS A 50, item 2)
Physical Description
Arabic. 1 leaf. (fols. 10a). Dimensions 21 x 15.3 (text area 14.5 x 11); 9 lines. The title is given on the first line of fol. 10a, with the author given in the next two lines.
It appears to have been copied in the same hand, and on the same type of paper, as the first item in the volume, which was completed in the month of Jumadah I 1001 (= 3 February to 4 March 1593).
Only a few lines of the treatise are preserved in this fragment.
It is written in a small, awkward naskh, using dark-brown ink.
The dark-ivory, lightly glossed paper has vertical laid lines, single chain lines and watermarks. It is quite worm-eaten with some damp-staining.
The volume consists of 10 leaves. Fol. 1a is blank except for a few later miscellaneous notes and calculation and a pencilled note regarding the title and author. Fols. 1b-9a is a treatise on prophetic medicine by Ḥusayn ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Walī ibn Naṣr ibn Ḥusayn al-Ḥanafī (MS A 50, item 1). Fol. 10 is the small fragment of the theological treatise by>Nūr al-Dīn ‘Alī ibn Ghānim al-Maqdisī al-Ḥanafī here catalogued. There is also a Persian poem on fol. 10b and some other jottings on fols. 10a and 10b.
Binding
The volume is bound in a recent binding of brown leather over pasteboards that incorporates one cover from an earlier Persian/Turkish binding of the 18th or 19th century. This cover is brown leather with a scalloped mandorla panel blind-stamped in the center, with two pendants. The field of the panel stamp is filled with twisting cloud band ribbons and vines with small flower heads. There are modern paper pastedowns and endpapers.
Provenance
The volume was purchased in 1941 by the Army Medical Library from A. S. Yahuda who acquired it in Baghdad along with NLM MS A 28 (ELS 1667 Med. 108).
References
Schullian/Sommer. Cat. of incun. MSS., p. 314, entry A50 (this item is not described).
NLM Microfilm Reel: FILM 48-122 no. 2
