THE BOOK BINDING OF HARAR

DR. RICHARD PANKHRUST

INVESTIGATES AN IMPORTANT FEATURE OF THE OLD- TIME ETHIOPIAN CULTURE.

SELAMTA MAGAZINE

ETHIOPIAN AIRLINES VOLUME 15, NO.2

APRIL- JUNE, 1998

The old walled city of Harar, in eastern Ethiopia, has long history of book binding. Founded in early medireview times the settlement soon emerged as an important center of Islamic learning, but was for centuries virtually unknown to Westerners, few if any of whom were allowed to pass through its stout surrounding walls.

One of the first to do so was British Orientalist, Sir Richard Burton, best known as the translator of the Arabian Nights, who spent ten brief but rewarding days in Harar in 1855. He expressed himself mush impressed with the city’s manuscript bindings. "No Eastern country save Persia", he wrote, "could surpass them, either in strength or appearance."

Until recent times, however, few Harari manuscripts were seen outside the city. Virtually unrepresented in any of the great European collection of Oriental manuscripts, they received only minimal attention from international world of scholarship.

In the last quarter of a century, however, many Harari manuscripts have come to light. The largest collections are today in Ethiopia. At the Library of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa, and in the Harar Cultural Museum in Harar itself. The institutions between them house well over 100 Harari manuscripts, which provide a fair knowledge of their style of binding.

Harari literature, it should be noted, is primarily Islamic. It consists for the most part of Qurans or sections of the Quran, as well as other religious texts. However it also includes some secular material, such as local chronicles, records of marriages, land ownership, etc. Most Harari manuscripts are written, like the Quran in Arabic, but a few in Adare, also know as Harari, a southern Ethiopian Semitic Language, which is notable in being traditionally spoken with in city walls. It too is written in Arabic script.

Invariably, Harari manuscripts were written on imported paper, and in this respect differ from the Christian manuscripts of the Ethiopian Highlands, which are almost always made of parchment. The paper of Harari manuscripts has still to be systematically studied for watermarks, which should help to establish whence it was imported.

Harari manuscripts binding, as Burton observed over a century ago are, in the main, exceedingly well produced fashioned from brownish leather, and firmly pressed in a stout vice tightened by means of a wooden screw, they consist of two covers, held together by the spine of the book. Some bindings also have an attached flap, on one side, locally known as an alaqa,, which helps to protect the pages and keep them free from dust. Harari manuscripts decoration, which is confined to the outside surface to the cover, is based on block-printing and the etching of straight lines. Decoration, through occasionally ornate, is more often austere, and arranged in a systematic and orderly manner, the design on the front cover being almost invariably repeated on the back. For the most part of ornamentation is restricted to these two covers, but is sometimes also found both on the flap and the spine.

The cover decoration tends to consists of four basic features: a bock-printed sometimes fairly complex central motif, usually oval, but sometimes round, two smaller, much simpler, identical devices also block-printed, above and below the central design, four slightly more decorative, identical right angled block printed corner pieces and a simple border consisting of several tooled parallel lines. Tooled lines are also often used to link the central motif to the smaller subordinate designs and to the surrounding border.

Decoration on the flap, which is both rare and less ornamental that that on the cover, often consists of three elements; a simple block-printed central ornament near the outer edge, two-right angled block-printed corner devices at each end and tooled border composed of one or more straight lines.

Spines are usually undecorated, but occasionally carry, a block-printed injunction from the Quran, and declaring, in Arabic, that the volume must not be touched by any ‘impure’ person. Perhaps the most common quotation is:

Which none shall touch, but who are clean,

A Revelation from the lord of the Worlds.

(Surah, 56 78-80)

Harari binding which, which for the moment at least is a dead art, required considerable manual dexterity. The first operation, as reported by Sahleh Mohomed, a disciple of the later Kebir Ali Shek, the last of the great bookbinders of the city, consisted of smearing the manuscripts cover with white of egg to render it supple. As soon as the leather was deemed suitable, work on the decoration process itself began.

This was carried out by placing a block-printing stamp where required on the cover, and beating it with a hammer to produce the desired impression. The procedure was then repeated time after time with the same or other stamp until the entire block-printed decorative design had been completed. Border and other incised lines linking the block-printing in the center of the cover to the border were then cut, or tooled with a wasfe’ for binder’s awl.

The block-printing stamps, used in Harar, according to Sahleh Mohomed who inherited some from his master, were made of hard leather, traditionally taken from old and disused drams, which were reputed to have been particularly solid. One of Sahleh’s stamps, however, is made of bronze, but he does not remember using it.

The block-printing stamps of Harar were made by cutting drum or other hand leather to the required shapes which a knife or scissors, after which the designs would be incised on them with a wasfe’. Accuracy was achieved by first sketching the design in pencil on a piece of paper, which then served as a pattern.

It would be placed on the leather and through to small holes would be pricked to demarcate the design, which would then be etched out with the awl. When it was desired to copy a design from an existing cover a pencil rubbing would be made, and used in the same manner as a patter.

The leather stamp, being initially little over a millimeter thick, was subsequently reinforced with two further layers of leather, and finally, beneath them, with a layer of thick paper or cardboard. The layers were traditionally stuck together with resin made from the succulent eret, or aloe abyssinica, which grew in the hot and dry lowlands around Harar.

The total thickness of the seal would thus be increased to about six millimeters, and thereby rendered sufficiently strong to withstand frequent hammering. Should such blows result in the filling up, or blurring, of the etching it would be redemarcated with the awl.

Kebir Ali Shek, according to his young disciple, possessed several dozen such stamps which, being used as we have seen, separately, enabled him to turn out a large variety of different patterns with which, over the years, he decorated many fine manuscript binds.

All his work, to judge from the example extant, were in the traditional Harari style, which , as is evidence from the recently assembled library collection, has remained virtually unchanged since at the least a century before Richard Burton’s famous visit to the city in 1855.

Book binding, though no longer practiced in Harar, is a traditional skill of which its citizens can feel proud. The question therefore has to be asked: when will they resurrect this art for which they were once greatly renowned?