XI

INTRODUCTION

The legacy of about 1000 Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Hebrew manuscripts bequeathed by Levinus Warner to the University of Lei den in 1665 made the library of this university one of the important depositories of oriental manuscripts in Europe. For this reason the oriental collections of our library have been known until the present day under the name of Legatum Warnerianum, even though manu scripts of other provenance now far surpass in number those given by Warner. Since 1729 the task of making these treasures accessible to schol ars has been confided to one of the professors of oriental languages in our University with the title of Interpres Legati Warneriani. In the 19th century he had, as assistants, one or sometimes two orientalists with the title adiutor Interpretis. At present these assistants belong to the library staff and the Legatum Warnerianum no longer has a separate administration, but in matters of scholarship the direction of affairs still rests with the Interpres, who since 1954 has been Dr. G. W. J. Drewes, professor of Islamic studies. The idea of publishing a handlist of Arabic manuscripts was first conceived by the late Prof. dr. J.H. Kramers, who was Interpres Legati Warneriani from 1940 until his death in December 1951. The main work in cataloguing the Leiden collection of oriental manu scripts had been done by Dozy and De Goeje. Their Catalogus Codicum Orientalium (CCO) was finished in 1873 and completed by an index volume by Houtsma in 1877 1). In 1883 the important collection of Arabic manuscripts brought to Holland by Amin al-Madani was ac quired for the library from the house of Brill. It had been quickly but inadequately catalogued for this firm by C. Landberg (Lb.). De Goeje found it necessary to publish a new edition of the parts of CCO dealing with Arabic manuscripts, including the Amin collection and minor accessions. Together with his adiutor Houtsma, he published the first volume of the Catalogus Codicum Arabicorum (CCA) in 1888; the first half of the second volume followed in 1907, this time by De Goeje and the adiutor Th. W. Juynboll. De Goeje died in 1909 and in 1917 Juynboll was appointed professor in Utrecht. De Goeje's successor as Inter pres was C. Snouck Hurgronje, a man of genius and wide learning. He collected manuscripts on a large scale, but he valued them primarily as human documents, not as historical treasures. Islam as a living force in the life of today was first disclosed by him to Dutch oriental ists; the problems it put were so numerous and so urgent that the publication of philological work had to wait. In 1917 C.van Arendonk was appointed adiutor Interpretis Legati Warneriani. Soon he had the collection at his finger-tips.. His pro found learning and thorough philological and historical training would doubtlessly have enabled him to finish the Arabic Catalogue. But there were several reasons for not doing this. The growth of oriental studies made the task of keeping the collection of printed books up to par more and more laborious. The Encyclopaedia of Islam took much of. Van 1) The second part of this sixth volume was never published; it was planned to contain the description of the Indonesian MSS. Most of these have been described afterwards in separate catalogues in Dutch (not in Latin).