Essay
الوسيط في تراجم أدباء شنقيط
Not translated into English
Synopsis
The book gathers notices on some fifty poets and men of letters of the Chinguetti country, with large extracts from their verse, in a language close to that of the ancient Arab poets. It also describes the country: its geography, its villages and encampments, its watering places and wells, the stages of its routes, its customs and manners, its popular proverbs set beside Arabic proverbs, and words from the Berber and Hassaniyya dialects. Historians still draw on it for the scholars and the trade of Chinguetti.
Context
The book appeared in Cairo in 1911. Ahmad Taymour Pasha, whose library now forms a major collection of the Egyptian National Library, procured for him an ancient poem by Humayd ibn Thawr that he had long been seeking, and which he placed in the work with its Mauritanian imitations. The preacher Muhibb al-Din al-Khatib reports that he wrote it from memory, from beginning to end. The book was reissued in 1958, in 1961, in Cairo in 1989, and again in 2017.
Who it is for
A compendium in Arabic, never translated; one enters it through the name of a poet or a place, as in a directory.
Prizes and reception
Later studies of Mauritanian poetry have made it their main reference, and historians of the Sahara still cite it.