The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition

(Paperback)

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This groundbreaking translation of a remarkable Arabic text-expertly abridged and annotated-offers a look at the world through the highly literary and impressively knowledgeable societies of the classical Islamic world. Meticulously arranged and delightfully eclectic, it is a compendium to be treasured-a true monument of erudition. For the first time in English, a catalog of the world through fourteenth-century Arab eyes-a kind of Schott's Miscellany for the Islamic Golden Age An astonishing record of the knowledge of a civilization, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition catalogs everything known to exist from the perspective of a fourteenth-century Egyptian scholar and litterateur. More than 9,000 pages and thirty volumes-here abridged to one volume, and translated into English for the first time-it contains entries on everything from medieval moon-worshipping cults, sexual aphrodisiacs, and the substance of clouds, to how to get the smell of alcohol off one's breath, the deliciousness of cheese made from buffalo milk, and the nesting habits of flamingos. Similar works by Western authors, including Pliny's Natural History and Diderot'sEncyclopedie,have been available in English for centuries. This groundbreaking translation of a remarkable Arabic text-expertly abridged and annotated-offers a look at the world through the highly literary and impressively knowledgeable societies of the classical Islamic world. Meticulously arranged and delightfully eclectic, it is a compendium to be treasured-a true monument of erudition. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Reviews

One of NPRs Best Books of the Year
One of The Guardians Best Books of the Year

Sparkling . . . Marvelous . . . Wondrous . . . A monument of classical Islamic learning . . .Muhanna renders what might have been a rather baroque text in elegant prose. . . .The text opens a window into a lively and eclectic world of scholarship, a realm of humanist scribes and poetry-spouting polymaths. . . .Reading this compendium is like exploring a cabinet of curiosities, each section home to uncanny and startling mirabilia. . . . The pleasure of The Ultimate Ambition lies in exploring its bewildering scope, a range emblematic of the broad imaginations and curiosities of the 14th-century Islamic world. The New York Times Book Review

This bizarre, fascinating book . . . illustrate[s] the sprawlingly heterodox reality of the early centuries of Islam, so different from the crude puritanical myths purveyed by modern-day jihadis. . . . Reading it is like stumbling into a cavernous attic full of unimaginably strange artifacts, some of them unforgettable. . . . The book is full of strange myths and nostrums that hint at what mattered to people in the fourteenth century: sex, money, power, perfume. . . . From the alleged self-fellation of monkeys to the many lovely Bedouin words for the night sky . . . nothing seems to escape Nuwayris taxonomic ambitions. The New York Review of Books

This energetic primer to a staggeringly rich moment in timemight end up being an indispensable addition to your library. . . . [It] is a celebration of knowledge for its own sake. . . . For feeding your curiosity, it handily succeeds. NPR.org

Ultimate Ambitionlives up to its bold titleits eclectic, protean entries cover lunar cults, the sugary drinks in the sultans buttery, and how to attract your dream woman by burying a crows head.The Paris Review Daily

[It] spills over with insatiable curiosity at its most irrepressible: an elixir for dark days. Marina Warner, The Guardian, Best Books of the Year

A reader-friendly translation . . . with an extensive introduction and explanatory notes . . . There seems no reason why Al-Nuwayris vast compendium of useful, useless and curious knowledge should remain the province of scholars alone. Al-Ahram Weekly

A fascinating peek at the minds of our ancestors. You can see how mans understanding of the world has changed drastically in some ways and remained startlingly constant in others. Plus the book is just plain fun to read. A. J. Jacobs, New York Times bestselling author of The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically

A smart, exhilarating selection from a vast work. The scholarship is solid but unobtrusive, and the style, clear andflavorful, draws the reader in. Al-Nuwayris encyclopedia, somewhat like Vincent of Beauvaissa hundred years before him, delights as it moves between learned tradition, jaw-droppinganecdote, and elegant (and elegantly translated) poetry. Dip in,and a distant world, endlessly colorful, comes to sparkling life. Andras P. Hamori, Princeton University

From the structure of the heavens to the curious anatomy of the hippopotamus, with stops to view everything from book-keeping to aphrodisiacs, this charming fourteenth-century encyclopedia gives a glimpse of the entire world as seen by a very learned Egyptian summing up the powerful tradition of medieval Islamic scholarship known in his time. Elias Muhannas very readable translation allows the reader to gain a rounded experience of a deeply interesting bygone world. Roy P. Mottahedeh, Harvard University

Finally, thanks to Elias Muhannas expert translation, editing, and explanatory notes, we have access to a real encyclopedia to place alongside Borgess mythical Chinese text. An extraordinary work, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition strives for nothing less than an orderly, total account of the world, and Al-Nuwayris unique accomplishment in the encyclopedic tradition is not to suggest that wonder is to be found in the many oddities, rarities, and exceptions of the given world, but to show how, beneath these features, there is a deeper and more marvelous order. Elliott Colla, Georgetown University

This engaging volume lets you dip into the world of a fourteenth-century Egyptian encyclopedist who knew about the endless rain in England, the skillfulness of artists in China, how a woman can get away with claiming to be a prophetess, why a bureaucrat should never commit the size of the army to writing, and anything else worth knowing. Michael Cook, Princeton University

This delightful volume offers readers of English the first opportunity to sample the vast and varied literature of Arabic encyclopedism. Under Elias Muhannas expert guidance you will encounter advice and information strangely foreign and occasionally familiar, drawn from al-Nuwayris 14th-century perspective on history and politics, medicine and the natural world. Ann Blair, Harvard University

A veritable Wikipedia of its time . . . The erudition and breadth of the book is staggering, and it is a positively entertaining collection. . . . A valuable addition to the library of those who are interested in medieval miscellany [and] a corrective to narratives that might isolate the Islamic world from the wider cosmos of medieval thinking. Publishers Weekly

Fascinating . . . This condensed, abbreviated English-language rendition more than does justice to the Arabic text. . . . [A] clear, accessible translation . . . with copious notes and suggested further readings. Library Journal

In a time like ours, when one of the worlds great religions and cultures is under attack in the west, it might feel like a civic duty to learn more about the texture and history of Islamic tradition, but dont read this book only for that reason. Read it because it is profoundly poetic and filled with sublime passages of the most extraordinary delicacy. For instance, The enmity between the wolf and the sheep is so great that if some bowstrings are plucked togetherone made from the intestines of a wolf, and several others from the intestines of a sheepthey will not make any sound. Or, The night is divided into twelve hours, each with its own name given to it by the Bedouin Arabs: Sunset, dusk, darkness, blackness, the enfeebling hour, midnight, the heart of the night, the disgracing hour, the foretokens of morning, the first dawn, the second dawn, the widespread dawn. An accessible, delightful, and stirring record of 14th-century Islamic thought. Jeff Deutsch, Seminary Co-op Bookstore

Author Bio

Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri(1279-1333) was an Egyptian scholar and civil servant in the Mamluk Empire. His nine-thousand-page, thirty-three-volume encyclopedia, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, is one of the most important medieval collections of Arabic literature and Islamic thought. Elias Muhanna(editor/translator) is the Manning Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University and the author of The World in a Book- Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition. A scholar of classical Arabic literature and Islamic intellectual history, he has written for TheNew York Times, TheNew Yorker, The Nation, andForeign Policy, and he runs the blogQifa Nabki, about the contemporary Middle East. Born in Lebanon, he now lives in Providence, Rhode Island.