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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 March 2016
Late in 1945, officials in the U.S. government were pondering the lessons of the recently concluded wars with Germany and Japan. It is no surprise that the principal concern of policymakers was to prevent circumstances arising that would again imperil the nation and its ever-increasing interests abroad. From the Allied perspective, preventing the resurgence of German and Japanese imperialism required a prolonged military occupation. Together with a view toward deterring other military threats to U.S. power, the consequence was the building-up of a vast peacetime military apparatus, what President Eisenhower termed a “military-industrial complex,” for the first time in U.S. history. At this same time, the Librarian of Congress, Luther Harris Evans, argued that American security and hegemony demanded another kind of national commitment as well, to the acquisition and assembling of data throughout the world. In his words:
2 The Sunday Star (Washington, D.C. newspaper), 2 December 1945, quoted in Annual Report of the Library of Congress, 1948, p. 224. Evans succeeded Archibald Macleish as the Librarian of Congress, beginning his duties officially in June 1945 and serving until 1953.
3 “Annual Report—Division of Orientalia”, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Annual Report (unedited typescript), 1945 (Reference, pt. 2, p. 1).
4 This team was not perhaps the most auspicious beginning for The Library of Congress’ Near East Section. Glidden was a Princeton-trained Arabist who also served in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. In 1963 he was in Iraq, and, echoing as it were the voice of Ibn Khaldun in Franz Rosenthal’s (problematic) translation of the Muqaddima, he was quoted as saying: “If the Arabs ever took over the world, they would start instantly to tear it down.... Arab values of vengeance, prestige, and obsession with feuding are not acclimated to urban society.” See Little, Douglas, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), pp. 30-31Google Scholar. Glidden, expressed a similarly sweeping prejudice in an article on the Arabs’ alleged emotionalism and vindictiveness entitled “The Arab World” published in, of all places, The American Journal of Psychiatry (February 1972), 128:984-988.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
5 The Mansuri collection has been discussed previously by Professor ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Hilw (Department of Libraries and Information, College of Social Sciences, Muhammad b. Sa‘ud Islamic University) in “al-Makhtutat al-‘arabiyya fi maktabat al-kungris,” which appeared in ‘Alam al-kutub, 5:4, January 1985, pp. 671-685. Dr Hilw’s comments concern the general character of the collection; more significantly, his remarks about the Mansuri family’s intergenerational interest in book-collection and their Hanafi orientation are facts not found in other documents concerning the collection’s origins.
6 The details of the purchase are taken from a very full two-page report filed by Calverley, which was sent with cover letter from Charles R. Watson to the Librarian of Congress, 7 July 1945 (see appendix). The documents are found in the still unprocessed Watson papers at the AUC university archives, in a folder titled “Library of Congress Gift—Purchase of Arabic Library, 1945-46.”
7 “Tanzim al-maktaba al-azhariyya,” al-Ahram, 11 March 1945, p. 3.
8 In consulting various works on al-Azhar and notable Egyptian scholars, I have thus far been unable to procure any details about al-Mansuri’s life and work. In spite of his seniority, he seems not to have been particularly prominent.
9 Library of Congress Quarterly Journal of Acquisitions, 3:2, February 1946, p. 37.
10 Annual Report of the Library of Congress, 1948, p. 66.
11 A somewhat shorter and altered version of this description of the Mansuri collection can be found at the Library of Congress’s website description of its collections dealing with religious subject matter: http://www.loc.gov/rr/main/religion/ne.html; a briefer description of the Mansuri and other manuscript collections will be found at: http://www.loc.gov/acq/devpol/colloverviews/near-east.pdf.
12 I am mystified by this apparently idiosyncratic understanding of tarikh, which defies not only modern but also classical connotations of the term (personal communication from Prof. Yoav Di-Capua, UT-Austin). A possible parallel is supplied by Prof. Ismail Erunsal, who has noted the classification of novelized stories and poems as “history” in Ottoman Turkish libraries (personal communication from Dr. Chris Murphy, AMED).
13 Hasan ‘Ali Afandi, Ashraf al-wajibat fi islah ta‘lim al-banat (n.d.).
14 An important recent work on the subject of private libraries and the book market in Ottoman Cairo is Hanna’s, NellyIn Praise of Books: A Cultural History of Cairo’s Middle Class, Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Syracuse: Syracuse University, 2003)Google Scholar, albeit Professor Hanna is mainly interested in publishing and collecting by non-‘ulama. At the 2009 Annual History Seminar, organized by AUC’s Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations, Ms. Noha Ahmad Mukhtar, an M.A. student at Cairo University, presented an intriguing paper (“Al-Maktabat al-khassa fi misr awakhir al-qarn al-tasi‘‘ashrwa awa’il al-qarn al-‘ishrin”) on the growth in the number and size of private libraries in Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a phenomenon due, at least in part, to the new availability of less expensive printed books, accompanied by the increased availability of education and the rise of literacy over the course of preceding decades. Unfortunately, I have been unable to secure a copy of the complete paper.