A Turkish bibliographer’s catalog shaped European Orientalism’s image of Islam

Evidence

This was the Kashf al-Zunun by Hajji Khalifa, also known as KatibCelebi. Hajji Khalifa was a seventeenth-century Turkish historian and bibliographer of manuscripts and his Kashf al-Zunun listed and briefly described 14,500 works in Arabic, Persian and Turkish. This was the great discovery and reference resource of seventeenth-century Orientalism and it was translated into Latin much later by Gustav Flugel (in 1853–8). The Kashf al-Zunun decisively shaped Orientalists’ image of Islamic culture. Among other things, Hajji Khalifa’s alphabetical organization may have influenced d’Herbelot’s decision to organize his material in the same way. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 201

Categorization

• XREF: A Muslim scholar’s organizing categories silently transmitted into European encyclopedias — an early instance of native informant shaping the ‘expert’ product, prefiguring today’s knowledge pipelines.