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How you can use Sezgin’s GAS to improve your German, learn about your field, and find Arabic manuscripts.

So you want to learn German. Or more likely, you are required to learn German for your degree in Near Eastern Studies, Middle Eastern History, or Islamic Studies. If your graduate program is like mine, you might not receive course credit for taking German courses so you are largely left to acquire reading comprehension on your own. For those of you in this situation, I have put together a strategy for gaining German reading competency that is targeted for students in our field, especially for those focused on early and medieval Islamic history and thought. This strategy is hardly foolproof; rather, it is the result of the numerous mistakes I have made while studying German in graduate school…mistakes that I hope you can benefit from.

There is a long-standing joke in Near Eastern Studies that “German is the most important Semitic language” due to the numerous field-defining contributions of scholars writing in German (h/t to @shahanshah). While many of these works have been translated into English or French or Arabic, an abundance of German scholarly literature in Near Eastern Studies, especially articles, exists only in die Muttersprache. Speaking from experience, there’s a good chance that just when you think you have accounted for the significant secondary literature concerning your dissertation topic, you will stumble upon an exhaustively researched tome in German on your topic that you cannot afford to ignore. And if you do ignore it, you can count on one of your dissertation committee members to reference it during your proposal. But enough with the fear mongering.

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If you want, or need, to gain reading competency in German, an effective and edifying way to go about it is by utilizing Fuat Sezgin’s Geschichte des Arabischen Schrifttums (GAS), an invaluable bio-bibliographical survey of Arabic literature up to the mid-fifth/- eleventh century. Why Sezgin’s GAS and not Carl Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur (GAL)? Well, Sezgin’s survey is both more current and comprehensive for classical Arabic literature, and it is much less cumbersome to use than Brockelmann. Heck, the Middle East Librarians Association published a guide to Brockelmann’s GALin 1974 because the work’s organization and constant abbreviations were so obtuse to the uninitiated. If your research is focused on the post- classical period (i.e. after 360/1050), however, you may want to use Brockelmann’s GAL rather than Sezgin’s GAS for the proposed learning method below. In 2016, Brill published an English translation of Brockelmann’s GAL, which is useful but it won’t improve your German.

Do note that If you have no prior experience with German, I recommend spending a few weeks learning grammar basics and building your vocabulary (e.g. complete the first seven chapters of Wilson’s grammar) before employing Sezgin’s GAS in your German study routine.[MOU1] 

So without further ado, here is my method:

Begin by getting your hands on the volume of Sezgin’s GAS that is most applicable to your area of focus. For instance, if your research focuses on hadith then check out Volume 1, which covers the fields of Quranic Studies, hadith, history, jurisprudence, theology (dogma), and mysticism. Brill published the first nine volumes of GAS while the rest, volumes ten through seventeen, are available from the Institut für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften.

Once you have acquired the appropriate GAS volume, grab your preferred dictionary and reading grammar and go to the section that concerns your area of focus. As for reading grammars in English, I recommend either April Wilson’s German Quickly or Karl Sandberg and John Wendel’s German for Reading, both of which are commonly used by instructors teaching German reading comprehension. I am partial to April Wilson’s grammar as it is the product of her decades of experience preparing University of Chicago graduate students for the German reading exam.

With your dictionary and grammar handy but closed—for the time being—begin reading through Sezgin’s chronologically-arranged biographies of the scholars who composed works in Arabic, both extant and lost, in your field of study. For now, just focus on reading Sezgin’s biographies, ignoring his bibliographical notes below the biographical entry. The biographies will provide you with fundamental information about the author’s life as well as the prime vocabulary necessary to read academic literature in Islamic Studies. For example, here is the biography (outlined in red) of Nāfiʿ b. Nuʿaym, the famous second-/eighth-century Medinan Quran reciter, who provided the impetus for this post.

When reading through the biographies, like the one above, write down the words— especially the verbs—that you are not familiar with. If absolutely necessary to obtain an inkling of comprehension, look up the definitions of select words while reading. But try your hardest to avoid looking up definitions at this point. Instead try to infer the meaning of unknown words from the context, an invaluable skill for gaining reading comprehension in a foreign language. Inferring the meaning of words may be easier than you think since the biographies concern individuals in your area of expertise. And you’ll get better at it with practice.

** Brief aside: You will notice that Sezgin regularly uses abbreviations, especially for names, which he derives from Brockelmann. You can find the key for Sezgin’s abbreviation system at the beginning of each volume, pictured below. Sezgin also regularly provides the citation for Brockelmann’s GAL entry. For example, see the beginning of Nāfiʿ’s biography above where we find: von Br. S I, 328 = “from Brockelmann, Supplement 1, page 328. Don’t worry, you will quickly become familiar with the abbreviations, some of which are just basic German abbreviations—e.g. “s.” = siehe / see; “S.” = Seite / page; “Jh.” = Jahrhundert / century; “vgl.” = vergleiche / compare; “eb.” = ebenda / ibidem. **

After you’ve read through a handful of biographies, look up the definitions for the list of unknown words that you wrote down and make vocab cards for each word or phrase. I still prefer handwritten vocab cards as the act of writing aids my memorization of definitions—and there’s evidence for this. Nevertheless, handwritten vocab cards can be inconvenient, so you may prefer to use a digital app such as Anki or iFlash, both of which I’ve enjoyed using for studying vocab on the go. Whether you are using handwritten cards or an app, the key to vocab acquisition is to review your Sezgin cards on a daily basis. Look at the L1, your native or stronger language, side of the card first and attempt to recall the German word from memory.

If you opt for handwritten vocab cards, I recommend this system: the day after you begin making German vocab cards from reading Sezgin’s GAS, review your cards. The ones you get right move to a second pile; the ones you get wrong or can’t remember stay in the original pile. Each day review your German vocab, moving the cards you remember correctly one pile to the right and the ones you don’t one pile to the left. I employ a five-pile system—an honest week’s work if you remember them correctly every day—and when I remember the words in the fifth pile correctly they get put in the “memorized box,” which contains vocab cards that I now know well, but still review on a monthly basis.

My box of Arabic vocab cards from studying in Sana’a in 2007.

So what does this have to do with Sezgin’s GAS? Well, Sezgin’s biographies of scholars abound with German vocabulary that is particularly relevant for the study of Arab-Islamic history and thought. His biographies also tend to be concise, his syntax is quite simple, and his sentences are short. For all these reasons, Sezgin’s GAS is excellent for practicing your German and learning field-specific vocabulary while also learning about the bio-bibliographic history of your specific research area.

You can, and should, also practice your grammar when reading Sezgin’s biographies. An effective way to do this is by applying the lessons from your chosen German grammar book to your reading. For instance, if you just completed a lesson on German pronouns and their declensions, then apply this lesson by identifying all the pronouns and their respective cases (i.e. nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative) in a few biographies. Or break down sentences into their component parts, identifying the verbs, adverbs, adjectives, nouns, and prepositions while noting verb tenses, gender, number, cases, and case endings.

If you are required to take a German reading exam, begin attempting to translate Sezgin’s biographies. When you are struggling with your translation, look at other biographies of the scholar from the Encyclopaedia of Islam or Encyclopedia Iranica or Wikipedia to look for clues on what Sezgin might be saying. And don’t get too hung up on translating the exact meaning of the biography at this point, instead shoot for the general meaning (al-riwāya bi-l-maʿnā) rather than a word-for-word translation (al-riwāya bi-l-lafẓ).  There is also an Arabic translation of Sezgin’s GAS, which you can use to check your translations.

After you have read through Sezgin’s biographies in your area of focus, move on to reading his introduction to that section. This will be much more difficult than reading his short biographies, but you should now be familiar with the major figures in your respective field and with the pertinent vocabulary and terminology.

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Now comes the fun part: Diving into Sezgin’s bibliographical notes that are under every biography. My fellow graduate students, there are thousands, nay tens of thousands, of potential dissertation topics buried in these bibliographical notes.

For an example of how Sezgin structures his bio-bibliographical entries, let’s return to Nāfiʿ b. Abī Nuʿaym’s biography. From Sezgin’s biography we learn the citation for Brockelmann’s entry on Nāfiʿ, Nāfiʿ’s name, and select details about his life: Nāfiʿ was one of the seven canonical Quran readers, he grew up in Medina, he supposedly learned Quranic recitation from seventy Successors yet he wasn’t considered reliable (in hadith transmission), among his prominent students were al-Aṣmāʿī and Qālūn, and he died in 169/785.

Underneath the biography, Sezgin provides a list of secondary-source studies that discuss the biographee (I’ve outlined them in blue). Many of these studies are in German, so you can keep practicing with more difficult texts. Sezgin’s lists are obviously outdated—the first volume of GAS was published in 1967—yet many of the studies that he references still hold water. Typically Sezgin provides a list of the extant medieval Arabic biographies of the scholar along with more recent biographies (outlined here in orange) directly after his short biographical entry; however, in the case of Nāfiʿ he switches the order. Sezgin’s list of biographies for each scholar tends to be relatively comprehensive and is an informative roadmap for further research into the respective scholar’s background.

Next Sezgin provides a list of manuscripts written by, or attributed to, the scholar. As you’ll see below in the case of Nāfiʿ b. Abī Nuʿaym, Sezgin mentions works reportedly written by the scholar that are no longer extant. First, in green, we find the second part of Nāfiʿ’s treatise on the proper reading of the Quran, al-Qirāʾa, which is a fifteen-folio manuscript written down in the sixth/twelfth century and housed at the Ẓāhiriyya Library in Damascus. (Photocopies of the Ẓāhiriyya Library’s collection of majmuʿāt manuscripts can be found online here, and here is the link to Nāfiʿ’s al-Qirāʾa manuscript, which is located at the end of the majmuʿa.)

The second work (outlined in magenta) that Sezgin references is a fragment from Nāfiʿ’s Tafsīr, which is once again located among the majmuʿāt at the Ẓāhiriyya library. The  final work is a hadith collection of Nāfiʿ (outlined in yellow). Sezgin first notes that al- Dhahabī referenced a nuskha of Nāfiʿ’s hadith transmitted by ʿAlī b. ʿAdī b. al-Qaṭṭān (d. 365/976) in the fourth/tenth century, which is no longer extant, before going on to cite two extant manuscripts of Ibn al-Muqrīʾ al-Isfahānī (d. 381/991), preserved in Cairo and Damascus, that contain a selection of Nāfiʿ’s musnad hadith collection. The Cairo MS of Ibn al-Muqrīʾ’s work was edited and published in 1991, a PDF of which can be found here. When applicable, Sezgin notes the edited editions of works, however, since the publication of the early volumes of GAS an incredible amount of manuscripts have been edited and published so it is always good to check whether a previously unedited MS has been published. The easiest way to do this is by doing a search on WorldCat and there’s a chance the published edition of the text may be available online at Waqfeya.

And just like that you’ve gone from working on your German reading comprehension using Fuat Sezgin’s GAS to finding unpublished manuscripts that may be central to your next research project. If you don’t have much experience working with Arabic manuscripts, I urge you not to be intimidated. For years I put off engaging with the expansive corpus of Arabic manuscripts because I thought that I needed formal instruction in codicology. Don’t make the same mistake as me![1][AH2] 

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So to recap, if you are a student of Islamic history and thought who needs, or wants, to learn German, Fuat Sezgin’s Geschichte des Arabischen Schrifttums is a fantastic source for improving your reading comprehension because it uses vocabulary pertinent to the field, his syntax and prose is simple, and his sentences are short. By reading Sezgin’s GAS you will also get an overview of the first four-hundred years of scholarly history in your area of focus while learning about loads of unedited Arabic manuscripts that are begging for your attention. You may even alight upon your dissertation topic or next research project. And, frankly, we need more scholars to work on the Islamic manuscript tradition, so learn enough German to utilize Sezgin and throw yourself into the vast world of Arabic manuscripts.

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Rich Heffron (@richheffron) is a Ph.D. candidate in Islamic history at the University of Chicago and a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Ithaca College. His research focuses on the history of the Muslim scholarly community in early Islamic Syria.

[1] A good way to begin working with Arabic manuscripts is to find an entry in Sezgin’s GAS of a scholar who is of particular interest to you. Go to Sezgin’s bibliographical notes for the scholar and see if any of the manuscripts attributed to them are available online (e.g. the majmuʿāt collection of Ẓāhiriyya) and have been edited and published. Once you’ve gotten your hands on the manuscript and the published edition based off the respective manuscript, start reading through the manuscript and transcribing the portions you can make out. Then check your transcription of the manuscript against the published edition while noting the different editing decisions the editor has made. Read through a few folios a week in this fashion and you’ll quickly get accustomed to the scribe’s hand and you will be able to decipher more and more of the manuscript with less and less effort. If you want a broad introduction to the world of Islamic manuscripts, I highly recommend Evyn Kropf’s (@eckropf) meticulous and up-to-date research guide.