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BY-NC-ND 4.0 license Open Access Published by De Gruyter 2023

Collecting Books in Eighteenth-Century Morocco: The Bannānī Library in Fez

From the book Libraries in the Manuscript Age

  • François Déroche and Lbachir Tahali

Abstract

A recently found waqf deed with a list of books documents the contents of a part of Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Salām Bannānī’s library. This Moroccan scholar from Fez, who died in 1163 ah/1750 ce, wrote and collected books; he established a zāwiya close to the Qarawiyyin mosque where his collection of manuscripts was kept. The deed is published in this paper. It is the starting point of a research into Muḥammad Bannānī’s library: with the documentation at hand, it is possible to identify eighty-three titles that once belonged to him, but also to study the strategies of a Moroccan scholar in the eleventh ah/eighteenth ce century to collect books and to organize the survival of his library for his children. An effort to defend the prestige of the family is also apparent since the collection helped to preserve the successive contributions of various generations of scholars related by kin.

© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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