Is this the title page of Abu’l Makarem?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Sometimes it is a pain not knowing Arabic, and this is one of those times.  Below is a page from a PDF which has reached me, containing a file named “abu.makarim_tarikh.i.pdf”.  The book is entirely in Arabic, in a directory labelled “Christian Arabic”, and has a picture of a Coptic bishop at the front.  It is 125 pages long.  So… what is it?

Some people will remember my interest in the Coptic-Arabic history of “Abu Salih”, or Abu’l Makarem as it turns out to be.  One portion was published with an English translation; another third has been published in Arabic; and a final chunk remains unpublished.  Is this PDF part of the Arabic portion, I wonder?

Can anyone tell me what the page says?  (Click on the image for the full size image).

Page from unknown PDF
Page from unknown PDF
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7 thoughts on “Is this the title page of Abu’l Makarem?”

  1. Roger, it reads:

    History of the Churches and Monasteries in the Twelfth Century by Abu Al Makarim which has been wrongly attributed to Abu Salih Al Armani (the Armenian); the First Part: Lower Egypt and Cairo. Prepared and annotated by the monk Samuel Al Siriani.

  2. If it is at all possible, could you send me a copy of the PDF? With kind regards.

    Dioscorus Boles

  3. Wonderful – thank you! This, then, is the portion of the work that corresponds to Evetts publication of “Abu Salih.”

    The item is probably in copyright, so of course I can’t pass it around.

  4. 🙂

    I will give you nice surprise: I am not sure that this part is included in Evett’s publication. Evett published only what corresponds to Samuel’s part 2, 3 and part of part4!

    You have a valuable part in your hands which is missing from Evett’s publication! I have translated a few paragraphs from it before which you included under “How the Moslems handled the defeated Franks”. I remember you found that that part was actually translated in full by somebody in the American universities (I remember the name Mina), as ? part of a PhD. It would be good to have that translation available to readers.
    Dioscorus Boles

  5. Aha! Now that is good news, then. Well, it might be worth doing something with this.

    I need to go back over the posts I made on this subject (all tagged, tho, as this one is) and see what I said.

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