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Solís, was in charge of incorporating new data into the HATA archive, together with information
17
from the Biblioteca de al-Andalus, whose volumes were then in publication. Other members of
the project who collaborated at this stage were Adday Hernández, Omayra Herrero, Mercedes
Melchor, Amina Naciri, Estrella Samba and Jesús Téllez, as well as Virginia Vázquez.
2. The concept of the Historia de los Autores y Transmisores Andalusíes (HATA).
While I was writing my study of Muḥammad b. Waḍḍāḥ, a ,alim from Cordova who died
in 287/900, I was faced with questions such as the following: What had Ibn Waḍḍāḥ learned
from his Andalusi teachers before he left for the East? What works had been brought to al-
Andalus in the first half of the third/ninth century, and what works had been composed by
Andalusi ,ulamā’? What were the intellectual concerns of Ibn Waḍḍāḥ’s contemporaries? To
what extent did Ibn Waḍḍāḥ share those concerns, and to what extent could his own work be
considered innovative? What books occupied his library shelves and those of his
18
contemporaries? D. Millet-Gérard had asked this last question while studying the Mozarabic
culture of Ibn Waḍḍāḥ’s own period; he insisted that in order to understand that culture we
19
would need to know what Arabic books were circulating at the time.
None of this comes as a surprise to those who, in pursuing their research, have needed to
determine the intellectual atmosphere of a given historical period and what certain individuals
contributed to it, while studying the intellectual formation of particular authors. To answer these
questions we can draw on a number of sources that offer general guidance about what works
were written or transmitted at each stage of the history of al-Andalus: for example, the studies by
F. Pons Boigues and K. Boiko on the historical-geographical genre, J. López Ortiz’s monograph
17 On this work, see the next section.
18 For examples of other studies that ask similar questions about different periods and places, see C. Sánchez
Albornoz, “Notas sobre los libros leídos en el reino de León hace mil años,” Cuadernos de Historia de España 1-2
(1944), pp. 222-38; M. C. Díaz y Díaz, Libros y librerías en la Rioja altomedieval (Logroño, 1979); U. Haarmann,
“The Library of a Fourteenth-Century Jerusalem Scholar,” Der Islam 61 (1984), pp. 327-33; C. Gilliot, “La
formation intellectuelle de Ṭabarī (224/5-310/839-923),” JA 276 (1988), pp. 203-44; E. Kohlberg, A Medieval
Muslim Scholar at Work. Ibn Ṭāwūs and his Library (Leiden: Brill, 1992); A. al-Yazīdī, Abū l-Walīd b. al-Faraḍī
al-Qurṭubī, 2 vols. (Rabat: Wizārat al-awqāf wa-l-shu’ūn al-islāmiyya, 1415/1995), II, 313-76 (which lists 90 works
in the “library” of Ibn al-Faraḍī); and ᶜAbd al-Raḥmān ᶜAlī Ḥayyī, Al-Kutub wa-l-maktabāt fī-l-Andalus (Abu Dhabi,
2007).
19 D. Millet-Gérard, Chrétiens mozarabes et culture islamique dans l’Espagne des VIIIe-IXe siècles (Paris, 1984)
(reviewed by M. Fierro, AQ, 6 [1985], pp. 560-65). See also F. González Muñoz, “El conocimiento del Corán entre
los mozárabes del siglo IX,” Sub luce florentis calami. Homenaje a Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz (Santiago de
Compostela: Universidad, 2002), pp. 390-409.
Solís, was in charge of incorporating new data into the HATA archive, together with information
17
from the Biblioteca de al-Andalus, whose volumes were then in publication. Other members of
the project who collaborated at this stage were Adday Hernández, Omayra Herrero, Mercedes
Melchor, Amina Naciri, Estrella Samba and Jesús Téllez, as well as Virginia Vázquez.
2. The concept of the Historia de los Autores y Transmisores Andalusíes (HATA).
While I was writing my study of Muḥammad b. Waḍḍāḥ, a ,alim from Cordova who died
in 287/900, I was faced with questions such as the following: What had Ibn Waḍḍāḥ learned
from his Andalusi teachers before he left for the East? What works had been brought to al-
Andalus in the first half of the third/ninth century, and what works had been composed by
Andalusi ,ulamā’? What were the intellectual concerns of Ibn Waḍḍāḥ’s contemporaries? To
what extent did Ibn Waḍḍāḥ share those concerns, and to what extent could his own work be
considered innovative? What books occupied his library shelves and those of his
18
contemporaries? D. Millet-Gérard had asked this last question while studying the Mozarabic
culture of Ibn Waḍḍāḥ’s own period; he insisted that in order to understand that culture we
19
would need to know what Arabic books were circulating at the time.
None of this comes as a surprise to those who, in pursuing their research, have needed to
determine the intellectual atmosphere of a given historical period and what certain individuals
contributed to it, while studying the intellectual formation of particular authors. To answer these
questions we can draw on a number of sources that offer general guidance about what works
were written or transmitted at each stage of the history of al-Andalus: for example, the studies by
F. Pons Boigues and K. Boiko on the historical-geographical genre, J. López Ortiz’s monograph
17 On this work, see the next section.
18 For examples of other studies that ask similar questions about different periods and places, see C. Sánchez
Albornoz, “Notas sobre los libros leídos en el reino de León hace mil años,” Cuadernos de Historia de España 1-2
(1944), pp. 222-38; M. C. Díaz y Díaz, Libros y librerías en la Rioja altomedieval (Logroño, 1979); U. Haarmann,
“The Library of a Fourteenth-Century Jerusalem Scholar,” Der Islam 61 (1984), pp. 327-33; C. Gilliot, “La
formation intellectuelle de Ṭabarī (224/5-310/839-923),” JA 276 (1988), pp. 203-44; E. Kohlberg, A Medieval
Muslim Scholar at Work. Ibn Ṭāwūs and his Library (Leiden: Brill, 1992); A. al-Yazīdī, Abū l-Walīd b. al-Faraḍī
al-Qurṭubī, 2 vols. (Rabat: Wizārat al-awqāf wa-l-shu’ūn al-islāmiyya, 1415/1995), II, 313-76 (which lists 90 works
in the “library” of Ibn al-Faraḍī); and ᶜAbd al-Raḥmān ᶜAlī Ḥayyī, Al-Kutub wa-l-maktabāt fī-l-Andalus (Abu Dhabi,
2007).
19 D. Millet-Gérard, Chrétiens mozarabes et culture islamique dans l’Espagne des VIIIe-IXe siècles (Paris, 1984)
(reviewed by M. Fierro, AQ, 6 [1985], pp. 560-65). See also F. González Muñoz, “El conocimiento del Corán entre
los mozárabes del siglo IX,” Sub luce florentis calami. Homenaje a Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz (Santiago de
Compostela: Universidad, 2002), pp. 390-409.
