Iṣṭalāḥāt-i Sūfiyah by Khwaja ʻAbduṣṣamad, A Glossary of Sufi Technical Terms in Urdu

PREFACE: Librarians continue to play an important role in creating consistent bibliographic records and in dealing with cataloguing issues, on an on-going basis. To be consistent the cataloguers and indexers need re-education of the trends, problems and alternative ways to resolve the problems. One great help comes from the big libraries, such as, Library of Congress, British Library, etc. in setting up working standards and best practice guidelines. Ask me for more on this. 

Istalahaat-E-Sufia  By Hazrat Khawaja Shah Muhammad Abdul Samad. Lahore, Sang-e-Meel Publications, 2011.

My review of this 2011 print: This glossary is a useful reference book in Urdu on Sufism. It helps a beginner as well an advanced student to know the esoteric and exoteric meaning of Sufi terminology. The value of the book is it makes use of Hadith / Quran or other sources to explain some of the important terms. However, it lacks an index (that helps find synonyms, or contextually related words). In addition wherever it mentions Quran, Hadith, etc., a full citation is missing. A future revision may restore the attribution of ownership, as well as improve its user-friendliness.  One may also see A Glossary of Sufi Technical Terms  by Abd al-Razzaq al-Qashani ("This is the first accessible English translation from the Arabic of a book that has been required reading in Sufi circles for more than six centuries").

The consistency of transliteration as an example, here, is in ISTALAHAAT as found in the verso of the book. According to the Practical Standard Twentieth Century Dictionary: Urdu  into English, istilah (N.F), istilahat (plural) p. 58, 1980; Library of Congress is same; but Toronto Public Library uses Iṣṭalāḥāt. So much about the inconsistency in data entry. The resulting data search success or failure is dependent on a semantic search enginge (such as Google) or a literal search box (as most libraries have).

This post is also about the importance of attributing the ownership, systematizing bibliographic work and tackling cataloguing Issues, based on the case of an Urdu book on Sufi Terminology: 

(a) issues in transliteration (or Romanization) of Urdu Books,
(b) dealing with a Market that is more open / competitive / irresponsive and
(c) how to troubleshoot/avoid all related problems (esp., in dealing with rare/reprinted books, conducting proper search in library catalogs, retaining consistency in title, author name, searchability, findability and access).

The Urdu title that brings forth the above concerns, here is, ISTALAHAAT-E-SUFIA (اصطلا حاتِ صو فیا). While the book did not track down the original source, the catalogers too did not indicate that this a reprint of either a 1983 work (printed in Lahore, Pakistan) or 1929 (printed in Delhi, India). Compare the three prints of the same title, here:

2011 print  (note the changes in transliteration of the title, in each print):

• ISTALAHAAT-E-SUFIA  Lahore, Sang-e-Meel Publications, 2011. ISBN: 9693524195
  By Hazrat Khawaja Shah Muhammad Abdul Samad -- (also note the rendering of the title/author in  the Toronto Public Library Catalog: Iṣṭalāḥāt-i Sūfiyah ʻAbduṣṣamad, Shāh Muḥammad)  

1983 print:

• ʻAbduṣṣamad, Shāh Muḥammad. Iṣt̤ilāḥāt-i Ṣūfiyah / Shāh Muḥammad ʻAbduṣṣamad. Lāhaur : Makkah Buks, [1983?] 172 p. ; 22 cm. Note: First published in Delhi, India.  Library of Congress record

1929 print  (probably* the original work):

• Iṣṭalāḥāt-i Sūfiyah, Shāh Muḥammad ʻAbduṣṣamad, Dihlī : Dillī Printṭing Varks, 1929, 176 p. World Cat Record -- (*reviewer's note: According to the J Royal Asiatic Society dated 1847 ... paid Hafiz Ahmad Kabir for printing 500 copies of Istalahat Sufia. Based on this information, a future researcher has to ascertain the name of the actual  author who was definitely an adult in 1847, and thence track the date of its first publication???)

PS. The reading list, below, helps in understanding the crux of the problems as listed above (a, b & c).

Transliteration issues: 

>> Some Issues with the Orientalists' Urdu- English Dictionaries by Dr. Zafar Iqbal and Mahmood Ahmad

>> Roman to Urdu Transliteration using word list, by Tafseer Ahmed 

>> Why isn't transliteration from Urdu to Latin working properly in icu4c? 

>> English to Urdu transliteration: An application of Soundex algorithm by MA Zahid 

>> CILLA rules: Transliteration rules and cataloguing guide for material in public libraries in Indic languages : Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Panjabi and Urdu CILLA 

>> Masterpieces of Patriotic Urdu Poetry - Text, Translation & Transliteration in English & Urdu K C Kanda 

>> Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India (Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History) Indra Sengupta 

>> 2.10 Non Anglo-American cataloguing codes 

>> اردو اصطلاحات سازى / Urdū iṣt̤ilāḥāt sāzī by ʻAt̤ish Durrānī -- see also another link 

>>Guide for the compilation of terminological dictionaries (Malay language--Terminology) 

Urdu Book Market, Media reports:

• Plagiarize And Prosper | C.M. Naim - Outlook 

• A short, myopic and utterly biased guide to bookstores in Lahore
• The Five Forms of Plagiarism in the Urdu Literature
• Rare books: A forgotten history being preserved at Sangemeel
• Urdu book publishing - a field survey
• The lost world of Urdu books
• Ibn-i-Safi makes a resounding return 
• Disappearing Treasures: Public Libraries and Urdu Printed Books

• Jadīd ṣaḥāfatī Angrezī-Urdu lug̲h̲at = Jadeed sahafati Angrezi- Urdu lughat

  Author:	Sayyid Rāshid Ashraf; Muqtadirah-yi Qaumī Zabān (Pakistan), Islāmābād : Muqtadirah-yi Qaumī Zabān, 2006.

   

Copying an Entire Article Without Permission - OK in Some Cases?

The blog post is continuously updated, last updated Mar 19th, 2012

Court Declares Newspaper Excerpt on Online Forum is Fair Use, Righthaven in Ruins

WebProNews, Chris Crum | March 22, 2011
Extract:

Judge Finds Full Article Copy to Be Fair Use

Last month, we asked whether full article-copying could be ruled as fair use. We now know the answer. Yes, it can.

Do you think duplicating an article in its entirety without permission is OK in some cases?...

Righthaven, a company whose business model relies on copyright lawsuits for newspapers, has essentially lost its second fair use case. The first one was over a partial article sampling, but this most recent one involved the copying of a full 33-paragraph article from the the Las Vegas Review Journal (with credit) by the Center for Intercultural Organizing, a ten-person Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit organization set up to preserve immigrant and refugee rights. The case has not been dismissed yet, but he judge presiding over it says he plans to. continue reading

New Hazards For Book Reviewers, by Steve Denning

From a Book Review to a Criminal Trial in France
By ADAM LIPTAK, The New York Times,
"In a little more than a week, a court in Paris will decide whether a law professor in New York committed criminal libel by publishing a book review."

Steve Denning, RETHINK - Forbes, Feb. 21 2011
EXTRACT:
In a bizarre story in The New York Times...

... Moreoever “France is an odd place to adjudicate a claim concerning a review written in English by a German professor of a book written in English by an author living in Israel. The book was, moreover, published by a Dutch firm. The review was published on a Web site in New York. True, Ms. Calvo-Goller is a French citizen. But still.”

What’s next? Students suing their teachers for poor grades? Commenters in Amazon being sued for their less-than-five-star reviews?
Continue reading