December 15, 2025 Journal article Open Access

Building a Christian Arabic Library at Mount Sinai: The Scribe Thomas of Fusṭāṭ and the Manuscripts of His Workshop

Tarras, Peter

This contribution focuses on the monk-scribe Thomas of Fusṭāṭ (Tūmā l-Fusṭāṭī) who was active at St Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai at the turn from the ninth to the tenth century CE. He belonged to a workshop of scribes that produced a great number of Christian Arabic manuscripts for readers within the monastery (and possibly other monasteries in Palestine). These manuscripts were part of the historical core of what remains one of the most outstanding collections of early Christian Arabic books. This study gives an overview of this manuscript corpus and assesses some of its material, palaeographical, textual, and paratextual features. It seeks to throw light onto the beginnings of the Sinai monastery’s Arabic manuscripts collection and the scribal context from which it emerged. It will be shown that the corpus of Sinai’s early Christian Arabic scribal workshop reveals important details about the monastery’s history, early Christian Arabic manuscript production, its material preconditions, and the needs of arabophone monastic readers of the first millennium.