The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition: A Compendium of Knowledge from the Classical Islamic World

Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri

Aug 2016 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

For the first time in English, a catalog of the world through fourteenth-century Arab eyes—a kind of Schott’s Miscellany for the Islamic Golden Age
 
An astonishing record of the knowledge of a civilization, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition catalogs everything known to exist from the perspective of a fourteenth-century Egyptian scholar and litterateur. More than 9,000 pages and thirty volumes—here abridged to one volume, and translated into English for the first time—it contains entries on everything from medieval moon-worshipping cults, sexual aphrodisiacs, and the substance of clouds, to how to get the smell of alcohol off one’s breath, the deliciousness of cheese made from buffalo milk, and the nesting habits of flamingos.
 
Similar works by Western authors, including Pliny’s Natural History and Diderot’s Encyclopédie, have been available in English for centuries. This groundbreaking translation of a remarkable Arabic text—expertly abridged and annotated—offers a look at the world through the highly literary and impressively knowledgeable societies of the classical Islamic world. Meticulously arranged and delightfully eclectic, it is a compendium to be treasured—a true monument of erudition.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

About the author

Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri (1279–1333) was an Egyptian scholar and civil servant in the Mamluk Empire. His nine-thousand-page, thirty-three-volume encyclopedia, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, is one of the most important medieval collections of Arabic literature and Islamic thought.

Elias Muhanna (editor/translator) is the Manning Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University and the author of The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition. A scholar of classical Arabic literature and Islamic intellectual history, he has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Nation, and Foreign Policy, and he runs the blog Qifa Nabki, about the contemporary Middle East. Born in Lebanon, he now lives in Providence, Rhode Island.