The first Arabic printing of Avicenna's Qanun in the Muslim world, complete and in moveable type

Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Kitab al-kanun fi'l-tibb [Canon of Medicine].

€ 18.000,00

The Bulaq printing of the greatest work of Abu 'Ali al-Husayn Ibn Sina (also known by his Latinized name Avicenna, 980-1037 CE): the first Muslim-printed complete edition of the standard text that dominated medical science in the Muslim and Christian world alike for over five hundred years.

While the first printed edition in the original Arabic was produced by the papally-backed Medicean Press as early as 1593, that Roman edition remained for nearly 400 years the only effort to print the entire work in all its five books. Thus, the Bulaq issue has the twofold distinction of being the first complete edition since then, and also the first to be produced in the Muslim world. The few previous partial publications in the Orient had always been lithographed, due to aesthetic as well as theological misgivings about the use of moveable type for Arabic.

Founded by Muhammad 'Ali in 1821, the Bulaq press was the first Muslim printing press in the Arab world. It was thoroughly modernised under Khedive Isma'il between 1866 and 1872, and the present publication reflects the new importance Egyptian printing accorded to classical Arabic literature in those years, rather neglected under the rule of Muhammad 'Ali (cf. Glass/Roper).

Ibn Sina was one of the most prominent intellectuals of the medieval period and of the Islamic Golden Age. While his works cover an incredible span of subjects, including philosophy, medicine, astronomy, geography, psychology, Islamic theology, physics, and even poetry, it was the "Canon of Medicine" which most thoroughly immortalized him.

Rare; OCLC lists only a dozen complete copies in institutional collections; no copies in auction records.