Organizing knowledge : encyclopaedic activities in the pre-eighteenth century Islamic world / edited by Gerhard Endress ; preface by Abou Filali-Ansary.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 217-226) and index.

Preface -- Editor's Note -- The Contributors -- The Concept of Encyclopaedia -- Encyclopadeic Activities in the Islamic World: A Few Questions, and No Answers -- The Arabic Islamic Traditions -- Biographical Dictionaries as the Scholars' Alternative History of the Muslim Community -- Encyclopaedic Activities in Islamic Jurisprudence -- The Iranian and Greek Traditions -- The Greek and Persian Background of Early Arabic Encyclopedism -- The Cycle of Knowledge: Intellectual Traditions and Encyclopaedias of the Rational Sciences in Arabic Islamic Hellenism -- Organizing Scientific Knowledge: The 'Mixed' Sciences in Early Classifications -- The Brethen of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa') and Their Philosophical Treatises (Rasa'il) -- Integrative Concepts -- Al-Qazwini's 'Aja'ib al-makhluqat: An Encyclopaedia of Natural History? -- L'encyclopedisme dans l'historiographie: Reflexions sur le cas d'Ibn Khaldun -- A Europeanist's Perspective.

The contributions in this volume offer the first comprehensive effort to describe and analyse the collection, classification, presentation and methodology of information in the knowledge society of mediaeval Islam in the disciplines of religious and legal learning, as well as the rational sciences of Hellenistic origin - philosophy, mathematical and medical sciences. The volume begins with a general discussion of the concept of encyclopaedia. Successive chapters explore the bases of authority in the institutions of religion and law; biographical literature and handbooks of law; compendia of scientific and philosophical learning based on Iranian and Greek sources; and the more specialised expositions of mathematics and philosophy. The special character of Muslim institutions, their teaching traditions and syllabi is also put into perspective. This is a reference work for the principal genres of 'enyclopaedic' outlines and manuals - biography, legal handbooks, historiography of knowledge transmission, cosmography, and the philosophical sciences - and a major contribution to the literary and intellectual history of scholarly writing in the pre-modern Islamic world.

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