Introduction

MS British Library Or. 1406 (hereafter Or. 1406) is a multi-text manuscript put together by ʿAlī b. al-Qāsim al-Mūsawī al-Najafī, an expert on the genealogy of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib's kinfolk who flourished in the latter half of the fifteenth century CE. Al-Mūsawī al-Najafī, who operated in such regions as Iraq and Iran and was in all probability a Twelver Shiʿi, copied texts in which he was interested into this “notebook.” This study discusses one of the texts copied into the manuscript, entitled the Genealogy of the Prophet Muḥammad and the Ancestry of the Zaynabids and the Ḥusaynids ( al-Shajara al-nabawiyya al-Muḥammadiyya wa-l-nisba al-Zaynabiyya wa-l-Ḥusayniyya; hereafter the Genealogy of the Thaʿlabids in light of its intents and contents [explained below]). Although the Genealogy of the Thaʿlabids as copied into Or. 1406 is mentioned briefly in Charles Rieu's catalog description of Or. 1406 as well as in my own discussion of the manuscript published previously, no detailed study of the treatise has been conducted to date to the best of my knowledge.

The author's name appearing on the first and the last pages of the Genealogy of the Thaʿlabids includes the nisba “al-Najafī.” Repeated manifestations of special regard for the Twelve Imams, in addition, constitute a conspicuous feature of the treatise. The treatise, therefore, may at first glance look a Twelver Shiʿi work written in Iraq. A closer examination of the text and investigation of sources external to it, however, reveal that the “Najafī” author is identifiable with one of the promotors of the practice of tomb visitation in Cairo (I use this toponym in the sense of metropolitan Cairo, not to refer narrowly to Fāṭimid Qāhira) previously known to scholarship who flourished in and around the middle of the thirteenth century.