The historicity of books – their role as a force in history – has been addressed in post-war literary studies from different perspectives and across various disciplines. Nevertheless, the scholarship on the history of the book in medieval Islam is still relatively sparse, even though this society underwent a thorough process of textualization. But even authors who do consider the social and cultural role of books in medieval Islam look only at the production and consumption of Arabic books within the boundaries of Muslim society, relying on Islamic sources which reflect mainly the courtly milieu of scribes and secretariats. None discuss books produced and consumed by the religious minorities that were an indispensable part of this society, and none have made use of the abundant Genizah documents as source material. In the present programmatic article, I call attention to the many book lists found in the Cairo Genizah and to their potential as significant tools for developing a better understanding of the cultural and social history of the medieval Islamicate world.

Ibn Jazlah was born and raised as a Christian in Karkh (Baghdad) and died in the year 1100. He acquired his medical education in Baghdad, worked at the ʿAḍuḍi hospital, and was appointed as a registrar and physician for the court at the ʿAbbāsid capital and later became a court physician of Caliph al-Muqtadī. Ibn Jazlah wrote several books on various subjects, mainly on medicine. During the process of reconstructing the medical library of the medieval Jewish practitioners in Cairo, a Genizah fragment of a unique tabular medical book in Arabic was identified as Ibn Jazlah's tabulated manual “Taqwīm al-abdān”, which is most probably part of the earliest known copy of the text. A study of the T-S Ar.41.137 clearly shows that it was an uncompleted draft, and can therefore teach us how the medieval copier worked. The image of the fragment is presented here, as well as its transliteration, translation and analysis.