The Guide to Goodness: An Islamic Medieval Bestseller, Copies at Penn, and Their Contexts

This talk explores the famous 15th-century Islamic devotional manual Dalail al-Khayrat (The Guide to Goodness), composed by the North African Sufi mystic al-Jazuli (d. 1465). I will begin with a general introduction to the text and its significance before turning to an examination of the copies housed at the University of Pennsylvania and their particularities. Through my analysis of the copies, I will theorize the meaning of reading in the context of invocation of blessings upon the Prophet––a practice that constitutes the substance of the Dalail. I will argue that the book is representative of a 15th-century shift in practices of reading, away from individually tailored pious reading to mass-produced texts like the Dalail. To conclude, I will draw attention to the striking parallels between the rise of devotional manuals like the Dalail and the contemporaneous popularity of the book of hours in Europe. These developments, I suggest, raise exciting questions about reading and devotion across cultures in the early modern period.