The Stationers' Market of Baghdad

Around 830 (215 AH), in the reign of the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun (rahimahu Allah), Baghdad on the Tigris was the largest city of the Muslim world and the centre of an extraordinary culture of books and learning. The making of paper, a craft that had spread westward from China through Samarqand in the previous century, had taken firm root in the capital, where paper mills supplied a material far cheaper and more abundant than the parchment and papyrus it replaced, and the result was a flood of books. At the heart of this culture stood the warraqun, the stationers, who were at once paper-sellers, copyists, illuminators, binders and booksellers, and whose shops clustered in the Suq al-Warraqin, the stationers' market, near the great mosque. Later writers record that the market held scores of shops, and one of the warraqun of Baghdad, Ibn al-Nadim, would in the next century compile in his Fihrist a catalogue of the books available in the trade. The crafts of the market are those shown here: the copyist with his reed pen, the burnishing of paper smooth with a stone, the binding of folded quires in a press, and the laying of gold leaf in illumination. This book trade was the practical foundation of the age's scholarship, the copying and circulation of works of Qur'anic study, hadith, jurisprudence, grammar, poetry, history, medicine, mathematics and the translated philosophy and science of the Greeks that the translation movement was rendering into Arabic in the same decades. This scene depicts the stationers' market in full activity, the making and selling of books in the Abbasid capital.