To browse Academia. Manuscript libraries in major European cities with strong holdings of Arabic, Turkish and Persian texts often include dictionaries, vocabularies, little conversation booklets and the occasional grammar in one or more of these three languages. A number of the surviving texts, in particular dictionaries, are linked to university teaching of those languages or to major research and publication projects of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as the Polyglott Bible.
Many of those objects do not belong in these two intellectual circles but rather are anonymous products whose origins cannot be determined with certainty. Most of them were written by authors who had not grown up in the Middle East and had no substantial training in writing in one of the scripts used there. Others clearly come from Arab Christians who had moved to Europe, as a good number had done in those two centuries working for university scholars or the big research and publication projects.
The majority of those rarely studied and often unfinished collections of efforts to learn some Arabic, Turkish or Persian were compiled by travelers to and residents in the Ottoman and Safavid Empires or North African cities.
These texts comprise fifty-three of the inventory's folios-nearly fifteen percent-indicating the importance of arabic philology and literature to the ottoman educational program. The question, then, is why this particular category of texts is so abundant. We can begin to approach the answer by evaluating to what purpose these copious materials were harnessed.
The contents of the arabic philology and literature materials signal a two-pronged focus on religion and the chancery. Though often identified with the Arabs and the Islamic religious tradition, Arabic language and literature has enjoyed widespread popularity for over a millennium among numerous different peoples, including not only Muslims but also Christians and Jews. This article explores a number of key examples that demonstrate the global impact of Arabic language and literature.
