5 - From the Deccan to Istanbul

Summary

The fifth chapter focuses on manuscript versions of al-Damāmīnī’s texts to trace their spread across the western Indian Ocean and beyond over the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. It argues that at this point a broad transoceanic community of readers shaped the circulation and reading of al-Damāmīnī’s grammar commentaries by developing new strategies of appropriating and accessing Arabic texts. New paratextual profiles emerged to enable the transregional spread of his scholarship through textual reproductions. Most significantly, the ‘table of contents’ (fihrist) appeared by the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a new reader-centred device employed in a range of philological texts (as a broad manuscript survey shows) to facilitate the study of Arabic, turn manuscript copies into works of reference, and individualise studying pursuits. Building on previous scholarship, the manuscript materials corroborate the emergence of new textual practices and show how the communities of the transregional formation across the western Indian Ocean became part of these transformations in the field of Arabic learned encounters.