User:Xevorim/projects/Amin Almadani

Amin al-Madani (Amin b. Hasan al-Hulwani al-Madani al-Hanafi) was a teacher (mudarris) in the Prophet’s mosque in Medina. He had a wide scholarly interest. He was a learned bookseller as well and not at all averse of travelling. He thereby combined ziyara and tigara, the ‘visiting’ and ‘trade’ practised by many a Muslim scholar in search of learning and sustenance. To the East he has travelled as far as Singapore and also stayed for a while in Bombay, where some of his works were published. But it is also known that he lived for some time in Cairo. He has played an active role in polemics with the Sufi establishment in Egypt and Istanbul, who used their assumed possession of hairs of the Prophet as a means to increase their authority among their flock. When visiting The Netherlands in 1883 he even approached the Dutch government with the suggestion to establish a small mosque in Amsterdam, and to pay for the salary of its staff, as a service to the Dutch Muslim subjects from the East-Indies. Amin had come in 1883 to Amsterdam in order to participate in the Colonial Exhibition, the other stand from Egypt being that of the Cairene perfume seller Mustafa. His trade did not flourish at all, but after a while he and his collection of manuscripts were spotted by the Leiden scholars. His important manuscript library of some sevenhundred volumes was first purchased by Mr. E.J. Brill, the Leiden bookseller and publisher, who had a sales catalogue made of it by Carlo de Landberg (Catalogue de manuscrits arabes provenant d’une bibliothèque privée à el-Medina et appartenant à la Maison E.J. Brill, Leiden 1883). In the same year the Leiden library purchased the entire collection from Brill’s, with special funds alloted by the Dutch government. It is now registered as Or. 2363 - Or. 3025 (and Or. 8409). It so happened that in that same year the 6th Orientalist Congress which was held in Leiden, and Amin visited it. His account of the congress was published in issues of the newspaper al-Burhan in October and November 1883, and was later on translated into Dutch by Snouck Hurgronje. Amin al-Madani was murdered in 1898 by bedouins in the desert near Tripoli (in present-day Lebanon), where he had come to from Medina. Al-Zirikli includes in his biography the report that the bedouins suspected that he was a spy, and that they therefore killed him.

Sources: al-Zirikli, al-A`lam (2nd ed.), vol. 1, p. 357. C. Snouck Hurgronje, Het Leidsche Orientalistencongres. Indrukken van een Arabisch congreslid. Leiden 1883 (with the portrait). Reprinted in Verspreide Geschriften VI, pp. 240-272.

Amin al-Madani’s lithographed portrait made in 1883 by A.J. Wendel, copied after the photographic portrait by the Leiden photographer Goedeljee.

=S=ources==
 * http://bc.ub.leidenuniv.nl/bc/olg/portret/content.html
 * http://www.alqabas.com.kw/Final/NewspaperWebsite/NewspaperPublic/ArticlePage.aspx?ArticleID=311535