N. A. Mansour
PhD candidate at Princeton University
Wednesday November 13ᵗʰ, 2019
N. A. Mansour, whose PhD dissertation deals with the transition from manuscripts to printed books, focused during this seminar on what is probably the most popular book in the Islamic tradition: Dalāʾil al-ḫayrāt wa-šawāriq al-anwār fī ḏikr al-ṣalāt ʿalā al-nabī al-muḫtār, a collection of prayers for the Prophet, compiled by a Moroccan Sufi and faqīh, Muḥammad b. Sulayman al-Ǧazūlī (d. 870/1465). The many manuscripts of this piety book, scholars say, would represent about 30% of all the Arabic manuscripts. It is still very popular, even if the development of Salafism was an obstacle to its diffusion. These manuscripts are often of great interest to the researcher, when they contain prayers copied at the end of the text, marginal comments (usually grammatical) or prescriptive advice on how to use this or that prayer. The success of the book makes it an important witness to the themes disseminated in popular piety: not only the place of the figure of the Prophet, but also the glorification of God through his attributes or the place of the believer in cosmology or salvation history.
