Shifting perspectives on authorship and textual production. Two Sharafnāma derivatives as a case study in 19th-century Islamic book culture

Résumé En

The dynamic and collective nature of authorship stands out as an essential trait of early modern Islamic book culture. It is generally agreed upon that the concept of ‘plagiarism’ cannot meaningfully be used in this context and, in its stead, scholars have used terms like ‘imitative writing’ (Quinn, 2000) to speak of the reuse by authors of large parts of texts already in circulation, often without citation.In this communication, I will present two radical examples of this phenomenon, with two 19th-century texts that have come down to us as unicum manuscripts. The first is the Risālat ansāb al-Akrād (‘Treatise on the genealogy of the Kurds’), ms. D 277 of the IOM (St. Petersburg, Russia), and the second one is the Ashraf al-tawārīkh (‘Most noble of histories’), ms. FA 233 of Maulana Azad Library (Aligarh, India).Although, at first glance, these two texts are not related to each other, they were originally part of the same work, the Sharafnāma by Sharaf Khān Bidlīsī (c. 1597), from which different passages were cut out and rebranded as original compositions. Building on their specific production contexts, I will try and connect both texts with broader phenomena, such as increasing Orientalist interest in the discovery of ‘unknown’ works, and shifting perspectives on book production and patronage by courtly elites. In doing so, I will argue for the need to go beyond the imitation/plagiarism dichotomy in order to write a more precise history of the 19th-century Muslim book.