Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī (1279–1333) studied with various teachers in Egypt, left for Damascus in his twenties, and returned to Cairo in 1304 with an important position in the government. He showed a comprehensive knowledge of and an accurate ability to manage the interests of the highly educated society of the Mamluks. In 1310, he was dispatched to Tripoli (Lebanon), as superintendent of army finances, for two years; then, at the end of 1312, he was back in Egypt to oversee the financial revenues in the Nile Delta. This training in Damascus or Cairo, as well as his professional profile linked to the government, is not atypical for a compiler in the Mamluk realms. Actually, other of al-Nuwayrī’s contemporaries followed similar trajectories. However, toward 1316, al-Nuwayrī decided to withdraw from his public duties and to devote his life to copying manuscripts and to writing the Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab (Ultimate ambition in the arts of erudition), a thirty-volume encyclopedia probably composed in the Nāṣiriyya madrasa (Cairo). The work brings together all kind of subjects, arranged into five principal divisions: cosmos, human being, animal world, plant world, and universal history.

Elias Muhanna, professor of comparative literature at Brown University, translated into English, in 2016, an abridged version of the Ultimate Ambition. Two years later, in The World in a Book, Muhanna offers a careful study of this important text, neglected until now. Muhanna's book is composed of six short chapters, dealing with the milieu, the contents, the production, and the reception of the book. It is a brief study full of new information and easy to read—succinct and clear at the same time. The book is completed by two appendixes, notes to the six chapters, a final bibliography (with a detailed account of the manuscript and printed Arabic primary sources), and an index of names and topics. Some illustrations provide an idea of the manuscript and printed transmission of this encyclopedia.

Muhanna's book opens the door to the cultural and intellectual interests of Mamluk society. From the first chapters, the author shows how the fourteenth century witnessed an explosion of compilations in Egypt and Syria—al-Nuwayrī’s work and that of other compilers such as al-’Umarī (d. 1349) or al-Qalqashandī (d. 1418). However, as Muhanna argues briefly, one should not understand this as a symptom of the decline of Arab-Islamic civilization or as an instinctive act of cultural preservation, as argued in traditional historiography, but as a solution to manage the overflow of authoritative sources available mainly in the school cities of Cairo and Damascus. In spite of the obvious links between encyclopedism and state, the author underscores the importance of distinguishing between scholarly and administrative knowledge.

In the second part, the author masterfully narrates the practical circumstances of the composition, circulation, and reception of these kinds of books. Especially important for our knowledge about Arabic manuscript sources is chapter 5, “Working Methods.” Although the number of studies on Arabic material culture has increased in recent years, and has analyzed more carefully the strategies of collation, editing, and source management involved in producing Arabic compilations, the production of the book in Islamic lands remains insufficiently studied. Muhanna shows that al-Nuwayrī provides us with answers to important questions about the working methods used to compile multivolume manuscripts, the needed training that allows someone to become a successful copyist, and the distinction between one's own copies of authoritative texts and those of other copyists. Thanks to the study of the contents of the Ultimate Ambition, the careful reading of al-Nuwayrī’s biographies, and the analysis of the autograph manuscripts of this multivolume encyclopedia preserved in European libraries, Muhanna sheds light on the production process of this kind of work during the fourteenth century.

The last chapter brings us from the fourteenth to the twentieth century, and from Egypt and the Levant to Europe. It is devoted to the reception of the Ultimate Ambition by contemporaries and later European Orientalists, mainly Dutch. Muhanna raises questions such as: which volumes were most read; who was interested in this book (only Muslim or also non-Muslim readers?); and was the work edited, printed, or translated? Muhanna's original and essential book provides the reader with an in-depth understanding of the cultural and intellectual history of Mamluk times.