A groundbreaking study of one of the greatest encyclopedias of the medieval Islamic world--al-Nuwayri's The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition

Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri was a fourteenth-century Egyptian polymath and the author of one of the greatest encyclopedias of the medieval Islamic world--a thirty-one-volume work entitled The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition. A storehouse of knowledge, this enormous book brought together materials on nearly every conceivable subject, from cosmology, zoology, and botany to philosophy, poetry, ethics, statecraft, and history. Composed in Cairo during the golden age of Islamic encyclopedic activity, the Ultimate Ambition was one of hundreds of large-scale compendia, literary anthologies, dictionaries, and chronicles produced at this time--an effort that was instrumental in organizing the archive of medieval Islamic thought.

In the first study of this landmark work in a European language, Elias Muhanna explores its structure and contents, sources and influences, and reception and impact in the Islamic world and Europe. He sheds new light on the rise of encyclopedic literature in the learned cities of the Mamluk Empire and situates this intellectual movement alongside other encyclopedic traditions in the ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment periods. He also uncovers al-Nuwayri's world: a scene of bustling colleges, imperial chanceries, crowded libraries, and religious politics.

Based on award-winning scholarship, The World in a Book opens up new areas in the comparative study of encyclopedic production and the transmission of knowledge.

Elias Muhanna is a scholar of classical Arabic literature and Islamic intellectual history at Brown University. His research focuses on the history of encyclopedic writing in the Islamic world and Europe, the cultural production of the Mamluk Empire, and the problem of the vernacular in different literary traditions.

Muhanna's recent publications include The World in a Book: al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2018), winner of the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas. He translated Hanna Diyab's 18th-century memoir, The Book of Travels for the Library of Arabic Literature (NYU Press, 2021) and his selected translation of Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri's 14th-century Arabic compendium, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition (Penguin, 2016) was chosen as a "Best Book of 2016" by NPR and The Guardian. He is also the editor of a volume of collected essays, The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies (De Gruyter, 2016).

Muhanna’s essays and criticism appear regularly in the mainstream press. He writes frequently for The New York Times, The New Yorker,  The Nation, and other periodicals. Between 2008-2013, he maintained a widely-read blog about Levantine politics, Qifa Nabki.

Source: Brown University