P.J. Vecht belichaamt in de Nederlandse wetenschappelijke en koloniale context dexelfde degelijkheid die in het Victoriaanse Engeland gelei heeft tot de immernse vooruitgang van de wetenschap en de reusachtige vermeerdering van onze kennis van de niet-schristelijke beschaving in Azie en Afrika. Toen Veth als Arabist begon stond hij in de traditie van de achtiende- en vroeg negentiende-eeuwse wetenschap. De editie Lubb al-Lubab een biografisch woordenboek door de Egyptische polygraaf al-Suyuti (gest. 1505), die hij tussen 1840 en 1851 bezorgde, getuigt al vroeg van zijn streven om een nuttig werk te verrichten, maar wel vanuit zijn studeerkamer. En zo zou het blijven.

With the invention of printing – which is a combination of the production of movable type, typesetting and printing – in the fifteenth century, the ways of traditional book production changed drastically. Printing itself was not revolutuionary. This had been done from woodblocks in the Far East and also in the Middel East from around the turn of the first millennium.

Halverwege de vijftiende eeuw bracht de uitvinding van de boekdrukkunst – een combinatie van vervaardigen van los lettermateriaal, daarmee een tekst zetten en die vervolgens afdrukken – daar drastisch verandering in. Boeken konden nu in grotere of kleinere oplagen geproduceerd worden en in principe waren alle exemplaren avn een oplage aan elkaar gelijk. Eigenlijk was het niet zo zeer de uitvinding van het afdrukken die revolutionair was, want afdrukken werd veel eerder gedaan dan de vijftiende eeuw. In het Midden-Oosten werd blokdruk – afdrukken van een hele bladzijde tegelijk die in hout was uitgesneden – op papier al toegepast rond het jaar 1000 voor vervaardiging van amulet-teksten.

20 July 1997 marks the four-hundredth anniversary of Franciscus Raphelengius’s death. He may be rembered for several reasons. He lives on first and foremost as the Leiden scholar appointed extraordanry professor of the Hebrew language as successor to Johannes Drusius in 1586. The tangible profit today’s scholar still derives from Raphelengius’s activities is twofold. As the generous benefactor who presented manuscripts to the library, he will not be forgotten, nor on a wider scale in his capacity as the owner of the Academy’s bookshop through which the University was able to purchase considerable quantities of important publcations.

When Albert Hotz, in the 1890’s, made photographs of Iran and collected the images taken by other photographers (Ernst Hoeltzer and Antoin Sevruguin, to name but the two most important ones), he had in mind to document the country and its inhabitants as much as possible. It is not suprising that Hotz, being an entrepreneur, would give much attention to indigenous products that might be useful to his activities and advantagehous to his commercial interests. Agricultural products (including opium), textiles, minerals, finance, transport and communications.

The payer-book Dala’il al-Khayrat by the Moroccan mystical activist Abu Abdallah Muhammad b. Sulayman al-Jazuli (d. 870/1465) is one of the most successful books in Sunni Islam, after the Qur’an itself. It is known from the Islamic West, where it was written more than five hundred years ago, till far in South-East Asia, and everywhere in between. There must be many thousands of manuscripts of it all over the world, and many hundreds in printed versions. The numerous editions which are currently available in the entire Islamic world prove that the book has lost nothing of its appeal. Most manuscripts and all printed editions of the Dala’il al-Khayrat are provided with two illustrations, showing either elements of the Prophet’s Mosque or views of the Great Mosque of Mekka and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. Why these illustrations came to be inserted into al-Jazuli’s prayer-book in the first place, and how they changed from one representation into another is the subject of the present paper.

It is a well-known fact that the Oriental Collections in Leiden University Library contain more than the Oriental manuscripts by which that institution has justly became famous. Its expensive collections of printed materials of all periods and regions, its audio-visual collections, and its vast collections of historical photographs are valuable resources in there own right. It is from the latter tha the present book was composed.