This data set supports an experiment conducted by Sarah Bowen Savant and Sohail Merchant, who wanted to understand potentially how, and from what, Shihāb al-Dīn al-Nuwayrī (d. 733/1333) created his Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab (The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition), one of the best-known and most highly regarded encyclopaedias of the medieval Islamic world. The work has been studied extensively by Elias Muhanna and other scholars. Muhanna produced an abridged translation (with the above title) and also a 2018 study of the book: The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition (Princeton University Press). 

The data is based on the text reuse alignments (generated by the KITAB project) between the Nihāya and all other works in the OpenITI corpus (version 2022.1.6), where the death date of the author precedes 735 AH. The data will be analysed by Sarah Bowen Savant in a forthcoming monograph under contract with Edinburgh University Press. Specifically, she wanted to understand how an author such as al-Nuwayrī picked up and put down sources when writing across a long work such as the Nihāya. She also wanted to be able to judge which of two or more sources an author most likely used, when there are multiple alignments to different sources for the same milestone within a work. As she will argue with the data and visualisations, with the Nihāya, there is significant pass-through reuse where al-Nuwayrī reuses an earlier author’s writing through an intermediary’s work, but al-Nuwayrī sometimes also will go straight back to the earlier work. 

KITAB is funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, awarded to the KITAB project (Grant Agreement No. 772989, PI Sarah Bowen Savant), hosted at Aga Khan University, London. In addition, it has received funding from the Qatar National Library to aid in the adaptation of the passim algorithm for Arabic.