The World in a Book is a well written analysis of one of the largest compendia of Classical Arabic literature, the early fourteenth-century Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab (The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition) by the Egyptian scholar and scribe Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī (d. 733/1333). The author, Elias Muhanna, states in his first sentence that his is “a small book about a very large book”. Al-Nuwayrī’s compendium is published in 31 volumes containing “all the knowledge of the world”. Muhanna's analysis of this huge compendium is despite its conciseness very thorough and compelling.

Even the length of al-Nuwayrī’s text makes you wonder why in the world anyone would compose such a comprehensive book. In his introduction the author formulates his quest for knowledge and his path to writing this book as follows:

He thus seems to suggest that the text was written for himself, as a tool of reference. Yet who else in the world would want to read such a comprehensive work and for what purpose? What models informed the composition of the text? What broader audiences did al-Nuwayrī have in mind while composing his text? How would these other readers be able to consult the text? These are the questions Muhanna deals with in his book. He elegantly reads the work against the background of a broader tradition of encyclopaedism in Arabic literature that had its heyday during the Mamluk period in Egypt and Syria (thirteenth–fifteenth centuries). By answering the questions above, The World in a Book forces us to re-evaluate not only this specific classical Arabic text, but also a broader range of compilatory texts of the era and the “writerly” milieu in which they were composed.

The first chapter of Muhanna's study deals with the ambitions and motivations behind the tradition of encyclopaedism in the Mamluk era. Here Muhanna argues against traditional views that the rise of encyclopaedism under the Mamluks was motivated by fear of loss of knowledge brought on by Mongol destructions. He sees the appeal of encyclopaedic texts in line with Thomas Bauer's more recent analysis of the blending of the scribal and Islamic religious culture. The panoramic study of al-Nuwayrī’s text, as provided in chapter 2, demonstrates the ways in which the author was motivated to collect the ubiquitous knowledge of his age and combine, cross-reference and organize it in systematic new ways, thus transforming the traditional genres – anthologies, chronicles, biographical dictionaries, administrative manuals – into a new hybrid compendium.

In the third and fourth chapters Muhanna describes the two “writerly” milieus in which al-Nuwayrī operated: the scholarly world (of the madrasa) and the world of the state servants (kuttāb) employed in the chancery and financial administration. He shows how these worlds were interconnected in al-Nuwayrī himself, but also how the two milieus focused on and valued distinctive types of knowledge. Analysing the overabundance of books upon which the Ultimate Ambition draws, Muhanna sketches the buoyant scholarly milieu of Cairo and Damascus in the Mamluk period and the transforming knowledge practices taking place at the time. A small gem is the last paragraph of chapter 3 “Copia and contradiction” in which he analyses the generally ecumenical, but sometimes outspoken, way in which al-Nuwayrī deals with contradictory truth claims. Muhanna's depiction of the connections between encyclopaedism and bureaucracy in chapter 4 is likewise strong and very convincing, analysing the scribe as a professional archiver, a gatherer of information for the state, and how this collecting mentality influenced the literature these scribes produced. Al-Nuwayrī’s emphasis on the virtues of the financial scribes in comparison to their chancery colleagues who were traditionally deemed more prestigious, is refreshing and perhaps can be attributed to the author's own experience at the bureau of the Privy Purse.

The fifth chapter studies the manuscript culture of the era, the strategies and challenges of collation, edition and source management, especially with multi-volume manuscripts such as the Ultimate Ambition. By analysing al-Nuwayrī’s own working methods as testified by his biographers, the codicological and palaeographical evidence from the autographs of the Ultimate Ambition and his copies of al-Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ, and his exposition on copyists’ practices, Muhanna is able to answer some very relevant questions on working methods, including the author's composition schedule and the number of pages he produced each day, his techniques of collating sources, and the prices of the copies he made. The sixth and final chapter of the book discusses the reception of the text by contemporaries and later scholars, especially Dutch Orientalists.

Muhanna's analysis of al-Nuwayrī’s Ultimate Ambition reaches far beyond this specific text and its author. It opens a window on the scribal and scholarly world of the Mamluk era. Collecting all the knowledge in the world and writing it down as a consultation tool for yourself must have been fun! This enjoyment is noticeable throughout al-Nuwayri's work. It is also apparent in Muhanna's book which is not only a very erudite analysis of one of the most impressive compendia of the Mamluk era, but also provides the reader with the same joy and excitement al-Nuwayrī must have felt while composing his book.