Dia al-Azzawi

Provenance

Collection of Muhsin Sayyid Mahdi and Sarah Roche-Mahdi, Cambridge.

Muhsin Sayyid Mahdi purchased this work from Gallery One, Beirut at Dia al-Azzawi's Solo Show in 1969 and it remained in his family's collection until 2022. The work was acquired by Meem Gallery from the heirs of Muhsin Sayyid Mahdi in March 2022.

Muhsin Sayyid Mahdi (1926-2007), the James Richard Jewett Professor Emeritus of Arabic at Harvard University, was a renowned scholar of medieval Arabic and Islamic philosophy. He held visiting professorships at universities throughout the world, offering him and his wife, Sarah Roche-Mahdi, a scholar of medieval and Romantic European literature and thought, the opportunity to build a thoughtful and personally significant collection of art focused on works created in the region of his homeland, Iraq. In later years, the couple spent a great deal of time in Paris, where Mahdi lectured at the Institut du Monde Arabe, participated in seminars, and was a familiar and beloved figure in the cafes and bookshops frequented by intellectuals from all over the Muslim world, many of them former students.

Muhsin Mahdi is best known for the Leiden Text of the One Thousand and One Nights. A major recent edition, which  reverts to the Syrian recension, is a critical edition based on the fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Syrian manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale, originally used by Galland. This edition, known as the Leiden text, was compiled in Arabic by Muhsin Mahdi (1984–1994). Mahdi argued that this version is the earliest extant one (a view that is largely accepted today) and that it reflects most closely a "definitive" coherent text ancestral to all others that he believed to have existed during the Mamluk period (a view that remains contentious). Still, even scholars who deny this version the exclusive status of "the only real Arabian Nights" recognize it as being the best source on the original style and linguistic form of the medieval work.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/09/noted-islamic-scholar-mahdi-dies-at-81/