SIGNED TAQI AL-DIN MUHAMMAD BIN MA’RUF AL-ASADI, OTTOMAN PALESTINE, DATED AH 963/1555-56 AD

The title-page of this manuscript tells us that Tuhfat dhawi al-‘urfan li-ma’rifat al-‘amal bi al-mizan wa al-qubban, a treatise on weights and scales, is by Muhmmad bin Abi al-Fath al-Sufi al-Shafi’i al-Misri. This information appears in a rectangular panel. In the shamsa is the name of the scribe, place and date: Taqi al-Din Muhammad Ma’ruf al-Asadi al-Rasid in Nablus on 10 Rajab AH 963/5 May 1556 AD. The title of the second work, a risala on weights, is given as 'al-Ustuwana' ('the Cylinder') on folio 21. Neither of the two titles appears to be recorded in the usual reference books.

However, the scribe of our manuscript is very probably the author quoted in Rosenfeld & Ihsanoglu as “Taqiy al-Din Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Qadi Ma’ruf ibn Ahmad al-Shami al-Asadi al-Rasid (1526-1585), an Ottoman astronomer from Damascus who worked in Nablus, Palestine and Constantinople. He founded the first observatory in Istanbul during the reign of the Ottoman Sultan Murad III (1574-1595) which housed a library mainly comprising books on astronomy and mathematics. He invented new instruments that were added to the array already in use for observation purposes in the Islamic world”. The text is interspersed with several tables (jadawil).

See Rosenfeld & Ihsanoglu, 2003, pp. 333 -35, no. 1004 and Brockelmann, GAL, G, II, 484.