Five centuries earlier, in Iraq, the renowned judge Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Khalikan had compiled a similar "mirror of the world." His Obituaries of Celebrities and Reports of the Sons of Their Time encompassed 826 biographies of poets, rulers, generals, philologists, historians, prose writers, traditionalists, preachers, ascetics, viziers, Koranic expositors, philosophers, physicians, theologians, musicians and judges—providing, among other features, the subject's sexual preferences, professional merits and social standing. Because Khalikan's "biographical library" was meant to "entertain as well as edify," he omitted from his great work entries on the Prophet and his companions.46 Unlike the Chinese encyclopedias, Khalikan's opus was arranged in alphabetical order.
The alphabetical classification of books was first used over twenty-two centuries ago, by Callimachus, one of the most notable librarians of Alexandria, a poet admired by Propertius and Ovid, and the author of over eight hundred books, including a 120-volume catalogue of the most important Greek authors in the Library.47 Ironically, given that he so laboriously strove to preserve the works of the past for future readers, all that remains of Callimachus's own work today is six hymns, sixty-four epigrams, a fragment of a little epic and, most important, the method he used to catalogue his voluminous readings. Callimachus had devised a system for his critical inventory of Greek literature that divided the material into tables or pinakes, one for each genre: epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, philosophy, medicine, rhetoric, law and, finally, a grab-bag of miscellany.48 Callimachus's main contribution to the art of keeping books, inspired perhaps by methods employed in the vanished Mesopotamian libraries, was to list the chosen authors alphabetically, with biographical notes and a bibliography (also alphabetically ordered) appended to each consecrated name. I find it moving to think that, were Callimachus to wander into my library, he would be able to find the two volumes of what remains of his own works, in the Loeb series, by following the method he himself conceived to shelve the works of others.
The alphabetical system entered the libraries of Islam by way of Callimachus's catalogues. The first such work composed in the Arab world, in imitation of the pinakes, was the Book of Authors, by the Baghdad bookseller Abu Tahir Tayfur, who died in a.d. 893. Though only the title has come down to us, we know that the writers selected by Tayfur were each given a short biography and a catalogue of important works listed in alphabetical order.49 About the same time, Arab scholars in various learning centres, concerned with lending order to Plato's dialogues so as to facilitate translation and commentaries, discovered that Callimachus's alphabetic method, which enabled readers to find a certain author in his allotted shelf, did not lend the same rigour to the placement of the texts themselves. Consulting the various bibliographies of Plato's work compiled by the long-gone librarians of Alexandria, they discovered to their astonishment that these ancient sages, in spite of following Callimachus's system, had rarely been in agreement as to what went where. All had agreed that Plato's works, for example, were to be classified under "P," but in what order or within which subgroup- ings? The scholarly Aristophanes of Byzantium, for instance, had gathered Plato's work in triads (excluding several dialogues for no clear reason), while the learned Thrasylus had divided what he assumed to be "the genuine dialogues" into sets of four, saying that Plato himself had always "published his dialogues in tetralogies."50 Other librarians had listed the collected works in one single grouping but in different sequences, some beginning with the Apology, others with the Republic, others still with Phaedrus or Timaeus. My library suffers from the same confusion. Since my authors are listed in alphabetical order, all of Margaret Atwood's books are to be found under the letter "A," on the third shelf down of the English language section, but I don't pay much attention to whether Life before Man precedes Cat's Eye (for the sake of respecting the chronology), or Morning in the Burned House follows Oryx and Crake (separating her poetry from her fiction).
In spite of such minor frailties, the Arab libraries that flourished in the late Middle Ages were catalogued using alphabetical order. It would otherwise have been impossible to consult a repertoire of books as lengthy as that of the Nizamiyya College in Damascus, where, we are told, a Christian scholar was able to peruse, in 1267, the fifty- sixth volume of a catalogue that listed nothing but works on several subjects "written during the Islamic period up to the reign of Caliph Mustansir in 1241."51
If a library is a mirror of the universe, then a catalogue is a mirror of that mirror. While in China the notion of listing all a library's books between the covers of a single book was imagined almost from the start, in the Arab world it did not become common until the fifteenth century, when catalogues and encyclopedias frequently bore the name "Library." The greatest of these annotated catalogues, however, was compiled at a much earlier date. In 987, Ibn al-Nadim (of whom we know little, except that he was probably a booksellerin the service of the Abbasid rulers of Baghdad) set out to assemble
the catalogue of all the books of all peoples, Arab and foreigners, existing in the Arab tongue, as well as their writings on the various sciences, together with an account of the life of those who composed them and the social standing of these authors with their genealogies, the date of their birth, the length of their life, the time of their death, and their cities of origin, their virtues and their faults, from the beginning of the invention of each science up to our own age, the year 377 of the Hegira.
Al-Nadim did not work only from previous bibliographies; his intention, he tells us in his preface, is to "see for himself " the works in question. For this purpose he visited as many libraries as he had knowledge of, "opening volume after volume and reading through scroll after scroll." This all-encompassing work, known as the Fihrist, is in fact the best compendium we have of medieval Arab knowledge; it combines in one volume "memory and inventory" and is "a library in its own right."52
The Fihrist is a unique literary creation. It does not follow Callimachus's alphabetical order, nor is it divided according to the location of the volumes it lists. Meticulously chaotic and delightfully arbitrary, it is the bibliographical record of a boundless library dispersed throughout the world and visible only in the shape al- Nadim chose to give it. In its pages, religious texts sit side by side with profane ones, scientific works grounded in arguments of authority are listed together with writings belonging to what al-Nadim called the rational sciences, while Islamic studies are paired with studies of the beliefs of foreign nations.53 Both the unity and the variety of the Fihrist lie in the eye and mind of its omnivorous author.