I received an interesting email this morning:
Arabic manuscript of Elmacin’s history
Dear Sir,
My search for Elmacin led me to your most interesting blog, namely to this post.
I am working on a translation of Edward William Lane’s Description of Egypt [into Arabic], and he quotes Elmacin. I’ll of course need to use Elmacin’s Arabic original instead of translating back which as you can see is not a preferable option.
Would please share with me any digitized versions you may have?
It is extremely frustrating to decline such requests. But of course the PDF’s of manuscripts that I have are all supposedly copyright of this library or that, and I can’t give them away to all and sundry, much as I would like to.
What we need, perhaps, is to create an electronic text that can be freely available. Does anyone have any ideas of how we might get one of these manuscripts transcribed?
The reader will find Elmacin’s history (the part that deals with the Ayyubids) here, in this scanned Cairo edition:
http://al-mostafa.info/data/arabic/depot2/gap.php?file=012429.pdf
The site by the way contains many excellent books and manuscripts.
Dioscorus Boles
Thank you for this, Dioscorus. Although that’s only a small part of the text, I believe?