IN OCTOBER 1691, TEN months after the death of the Amsterdam mathematics professor Alexander de Bie, his widow, Maria van Dijck, put up for sale his library of some 1,200 books. The auction took place on the afternoon of 3 October in De Bie's canal house on the Beschuit-markt (in Amsterdam's present-day Red Light district, on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal). Described on the title page as ‘Clarissimi ac Doctissimi Viri D. ALEXANDRI de BIE.P.M. Philosophiae ac Mathematices Professoris Amstelaedamensis Expertissimi’, de Bie had accumulated a largely typical professorial book collection that, as might be expected, contained sizeable numbers of books on mathematics, astronomy and related topics. Besides books, however, the catalogue also listed thirty-three lots of mathemat-ical and astronomical instruments and a small but noteworthy collec-tion of Oriental manuscripts: fifty manuscripts in Arabic, an additional twenty-four incomplete Arabic manuscripts in quarto, fifty-nine Persian manuscripts and four quarto manuscripts whose language the cataloguer – presumably the publisher, the Amsterdam academic bookseller Petrus van den Berge – was unable to identify (‘mss. libri lingua oriental in-4 incogni-tio Charactere’).

Among De Bie's manuscripts, the catalogue listed four Arabic copies of the Qur’an, two in folio format (‘Alkoran Arabicae’), one of which carried supplementary notes, and two in quarto (both ‘Alkoran Arabicae’). In addition, the catalogue reported one copy of Theodor Bibliander's 1543 Latin translation of the Qur’an, which was in fact a reissue of a medieval paraphrase in an undated Basel edition, Leiden University professor Thomas Erpenius's 1617 edition and translation of the twelfth sura (sūrat Yūsuf) and Christian Ravius's bilingual version of the first two suras, originally published in Amsterdam in 1646.

What exactly does the presence in De Bie's library of these five Qur’ans – seven if we include the partial editions – represent? De Bie's biography provides some initial clues. Following his appointment in 1653, supposedly at the instigation of Christian Huygens, as mathematics professor at Amsterdam's Atheneum Illustre – the predecessor of today's University of Amsterdam – De Bie lectured on logic, philosophy, navigation and astronomy as part of his teaching duties. But besides his position as professor of mathematics, De Bie also tutored students in private, specializing in the Oriental languages.