Local scholars in a global work: Andalusi biographical dictionaries in Ḥajjī Khalīfa’s "Kashf al-ẓunūn"

Abstract

As part of a project to assess why, how and when works from the Islamic West (al-Andalus and the Maghrib, understood here as covering the whole of North Africa west of Egypt) found a way out of their place of origin and arose interest in other regions of the Islamic world, in this paper I focus on the ṭabaqāt genre. The spread of works belonging to this genre outside the area for which they were written implies an interest for the world of scholarship that produced them. In this article I establish which Andalusi biographical dictionaries were included in one of the most famous Islamic bibliographical repertoires, Kātib Çelebī’s (d. 1067/1657) Kashf al-ẓunūn with the aim of shedding light not only on the specific Western Islamic case but also in order to discuss more generally ‘local/global’ dynamics of knowledge transfer in the pre-modern Islamic world.