Ioana Feodorov, Recent Findings Regarding the Early Arabic Printing in the Eastern Ottoman Provinces
The article encloses a preliminary description of a rare copy of an early Arabic printed book authored by the Metropolitan of Aleppo (and two times Patriarch of Antioch) Athanasios Dabbās, Risāla wağīza tūau kayfiyyat at-tawba wa-l-ʼiʻtirāf wa-fī-mā yalzamu l-muʻtarif wa-l-muʻarrif, i.e., Brief epistle that explains how repentance and confession are done and what the one who confesses and the confessor have to do, preserved at Bibliothèque Orientale in Beirut. This is the last book printed in the Aleppo press by Dabbās, in 1711. After a preliminary presentation of the information provided about this book by bibliographers since the beginning of the 19th century, the contents and the visual aspects of the book are discussed. The author’s comments address the possible sources of the Arabic text, influences on Dabbās’s opinions on repentance and confession, and connections to other similar texts that circulated in the Christian communities of the Near East in Ottoman times. This is a glimpse of one of the topics that is comprised in the European Research Council Advanced Grant (ERC AdG 2019) project TYPARABIC. Early Arabic Printing for the Arab Christians. Cultural Transfers between Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Near-East in the 18th Century, which was awarded to the Institute for South-East European Studies of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest (as Host Institution) and will be conducted by the author of the present article, Ioana Feodorov (as Principal Investigator)