THE FIRST BOOK IN THE ARABIC SCRIPT PRINTED IN THE WORLD OF ISLAM FROM THE COLLECTIONS OF THE INSTITUTE OF ORIENTAL MANUSCRIPTS OF THE RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
In this article its author describes and examines a copy of the bilingual (Arabic-Greek) Missal published in the monastery of Snagov, not far from Bucharest in AD 1701 by the famous printer and Church hierarch Anthim the Iberian (Georgian) and kept now in the library of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The special value of this old-printed edition consists in the fact that it became the ﬁrst book in Arabic script appeared in the territories put under control of Muslim authorities. Such an event happened on the initiative of Athanasius III al-Dabbâs, Patriarch of Antioch in AD 1686-1694 and 1720-1724, who in the interim took the seat of the Metropolitan of Aleppo, and with ﬁnancial and organizational support of the Prince of Hungaro-Wallachia Constantin Brâncoveanu. Due to a good degree of preservation of the Petersburg copy of the Missal its structure is described in detail and the precise number of pages in it (377) is counted for the ﬁrst time (despite the lack of a continuous pagination in it). Thanks to a stamp and two short notes in Greek and Arabic on its title page and the ex-libris on its back ﬂyleaf two owners of the Missal were successfully indentiﬁed. They proved to be Macarius Sammân, Uniate Bishop of Amida (modern Diarbakır), who in AD 1846 converted to the Orthodox faith and was ordained Metropolitan, and Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich to whom Macarius probably presented the rare Missal during his sojourn in St. Petersburg in AD 1866-1867. From the Marble Palace this book was delivered to the Asiatic Museum in AD 1924.