al-Asa - Dimn Nawadir al-Makhtutat
- Author died
- 584 AH
- Editions
- Sharikat Maktabat wa-Maṭba‘at Muṣṭafá al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī wa-Awlāduh
Kitab al-Asa (The Book of the Staff) is an Arabic literary anthology by the Syrian prince and man of letters Usama ibn Munqidh (488–584 AH / 1095–1188 CE), dedicated to the lore, poetry, proverbs, and accounts concerning the staff (al-Asa - Dimn Nawadir al-Makhtutat) .
Background and Composition
Usama relates in the book's preface that the impetus for composing the work originated from an anecdote told by his father, Murshid ibn Ali . During a journey to Isfahan to attend the court of the Seljuk sultan Malikshah I, his father visited the judge Abu Yusuf al-Qazwini, who saw a visitor holding an earlier book titled al-Asa by an anonymous author and made a witty remark about it . Usama spent approximately sixty years searching for that lost treatise across Syria, Egypt, Iraq, the Hejaz, Upper Mesopotamia (al-Jazira), and Diyar Bakr without success . When despair of locating it set in, he compiled his own work on the subject under the same title, assembling literary passages, poetic verses, and personal reflections on old age and leaning upon a walking stick . Al-Imad al-Isfahani recorded in Kharidat al-Qasr epistolary exchanges concerning the book between Usama and the Ayyubid vizier al-Qadi al-Fadil .
Manuscripts and Publication
Extracts from the work were first published in Paris in 1893 by Hartwig Derenbourg in his Anthologie de textes arabes inédits par Ousama et sur Ousama, based on Leiden manuscript MS 370 (dated 1094 AH) . Another manuscript is preserved at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan (MS 125, dated 1067 AH) .
The Egyptian scholar Ahmad Amin obtained a late manuscript copy of the work from the library of al-Khanji, which suffered minor rodent damage along the margins . Although Ahmad Muhammad Shakir had previously conjectured in his introduction to Usama's Lubab al-Adab (The Core of Manners) that the title might be al-Qada rather than al-Asa, Ahmad Amin confirmed the title al-Asa in an article in al-Thaqafa magazine . At Ahmad Amin's suggestion, the text was edited by Abd al-Salam Harun and included in the second volume of the multi-treatise series Nawadir al-Makhtutat (Rare Manuscripts) . The original manuscript was subsequently donated to the National Library of Egypt (Dar al-Kutub) under shelfmark 9813 Z during the directorship of Tawfiq al-Hakim .
A more complete manuscript of the work was later identified at the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library in Patna, with a photographic facsimile deposited at the Institute of Arabic Manuscripts in Cairo, revealing that the earlier printed version in Nawadir al-Makhtutat was an abridgment; Harun utilized the Patna manuscript to collate selected passages for the second edition of the collection .
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