Arabic Manuscript Book Traditions: Script, Space Arrangement of the Text and Bibliographical Description

Abstract

The article deals with the phenomenon of medieval Arabic manuscript book or a book written in Arabic script in non-Arabic language. Despite the large number of works where this phenomenon was analyzed, their authors did not provide a clear list of the criteria, which are specific to the Arabic manuscript book tradition in comparison to other medieval manuscript traditions of the West and East. Methodologically, the work is based on the principles of the “immanent analysis” of the phenomenon developed by the Russian and Soviet philological schools at the beginning of the last century in relation to the analysis of literary works. The authors of this article came to the conclusion that the structure-forming components of the phenomenon of the Arabic medieval manuscript book were as follows: 1) the Arabic script, as well as 2) the architectonics of the text of the Arabic manuscript book and 3) the specific features of the Arabic bibliographic description. The authors believe that these three components identified the Arabic (arabographic) handwritten book throughout its existence: from the 9th century AD to the present and from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. The results allow us to clearly understand what distinguished a book belonging to the Arabic manuscript tradition from manuscript books that were transcribed at the same time and in the same region, such as Coptic or Syriac.