Guy Burak is the Librarian for Middle Eastern, Islamic, Jewish and African Studies at NYU’s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library. He is the author of The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and of several articles dealing with the intellectual, legal and artistic histories of the Islamic world in the post-Mongol period. He is also the co-editor of The Library of Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar: Book Culture in Late Ottoman Palestine (Brill, 2025). He is currently completing a monograph on the history of kanun in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Middle East.

“I have read the catalog of Hafız Ahmed Ağa’s library several years ago, long before I was asked to contribute to this volume. At the time, my interest in Ottoman libraries was the practical interest of a librarian looking for manuscripts for users. More recently, I got interested in the work of Ottoman-era librarians and book collectors as colleagues or fellow practitioners. Elsewhere, I described this interest as an act of “comparing notes” across geographies and centuries. I have come to appreciate the sense of humility this act of comparison generates.”

Guy Burak