Sometime before his death in 1392, the Moroccan jurist Muḥammad b. Sa'īd al-Zammūrī al-Ṣanhājī composed Kanz al-asrār wa-lawāqiḥ al-afkār (Le trésor des secrets et des idées fécondes), a sprawling work of prose whose ambition was nothing less than to gather in one text the best of accumulated knowledge about the nature and origin of the cosmos, the place of humans within it, and the eventual day of resurrection. Though the work would continue to be copied in the centuries following Ṣanhājī's death, today its author is not well known among either religious scholars or university-based academics. By crafting a complete critical edition of Ṣanhājī's monumental work, Belkacem Daouadi has sought to rescue Ṣanhājī from scholarly oblivion and argue on behalf of his relevance to the history of the medieval Islamic world, the Maghreb in particular. The resulting Arabic edition of Le trésor, part of the French-led VECMAS project (Valorisation et Edition Critique des Manuscrits Arabes Sub-sahariens), is an impressive achievement that complements the abridged French translation already in print.

In a brief introduction, Daouadi presents a picture of Ṣanhājī as he appears in various biographical dictionaries. Among the authors of such dictionaries, readers of this journal will be most familiar with Ahmed Baba, the celebrated scholar of Timbuktu who was familiar with Ṣanhājī's writings and called Le trésor a ‘delectable work’. But other than confirming his role as a practicing qadi who probably studied in Cairo and Alexandria, Ṣanhājī's biography is rather sparse. And so Daouadi uses the rest of the introduction to discuss his approach to editing Ṣanhājī's text. In short, after comparing manuscript copies in Rabat, Algiers, Cairo, and Paris, he tracked down each of the text's references to the Qur'an and the hadith corpus as well as to other scholarly works. Such editing on its own represents an enormous effort since, as Daouadi notes, Qur'anic verses and hadith reports rarely appeared in full in manuscript copies. Instead, they were usually limited to a few opening words, with the assumption that the reader would be familiar with the cited passages and able to complete them by memory. The rest of the book is given over to Ṣanhājī's text. Divided into four parts, it treats in turn the upper realm, including the preserved tablet, the throne of God, the heavens, the sun, and the moon; the lower realm of the earth and its creatures, humans, and the story of Adam and Eve; life expectancy, death, and the soul; and resurrection and the afterlife. Dense with citation, it resembles a commonplace book containing excerpts from other texts arranged by topic, with a particular emphasis on Islamic eschatology.

Elsewhere Daouadi has maintained that, though never overtly political, Le trésor obliquely references the turbulent political climate that characterized life under the Marinids.Footnote ² Ṣanhājī's lifespan did indeed witness a great deal of political instability, but given how little is known about his relation to the elite of the Marinid hierarchy, the implications of such shifts for Ṣanhājī remain unclear. In any case, readers looking for a detailed account of the political vicissitudes of the late Marinid dynasty had better look elsewhere. What they have in Le trésor is instead a window onto the epistemological landscape of religious scholars in the medieval Maghreb.

With that consideration in mind, it remains to be determined just how we are to understand a work like Le trésor in relation to both the broader compilatory literature of the Islamic world and the spread of Islamic scholarly practice in northwest Africa. A critical edition would seem to be the appropriate venue in which to offer a few thoughts on genre, audience, and canon formation. Daouadi's introduction, however, does not take up such issues. One wishes that he had drawn more fully from his 2006 dissertation, which analyzed Le trésor at length and argued forcefully for its treatment as an example of medieval Arabic encyclopedism. Ṣanhājī was clearly working within a tradition. Just a few years before his birth, a Mamluk clerk began a 31-volume encyclopedia that treats many of the same topics as Le trésor.Footnote ³ And then there is Ṣanhājī's more famous contemporary, Ibn Khaldun, whose Muqqadima and Kitāb al- ͑Ibar have also been likened to encyclopedias.Footnote ⁴ To what extent is Ṣanhājī's work part of a larger growth in Arabic encyclopedism that has been associated with the intellectual ethos of expanding state power? Or, conversely, to what extent does his eschatological focus point to something different? Daouadi would be well positioned to take on such comparative questions and one hopes he will share his reflections in the future. In the meantime, Arabic readers can venture on their own into the depths of Ṣanhājī's treasure. That they are able to at all is Daouadi's patient and meticulous achievement.