Posterity quarried the catalogue where the shelf was thinnest

Claim (verbatim)

The Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadim (the Baghdad warraq, d. c. 385/995) catalogued the whole bookworld in ten maqalat, but its afterlife should be lopsided: for law, hadith, grammar and adab, later scholarship had dense in-genre biobibliographies of its own (tabaqat and rijal works), while for the philosophers, physicians and the ancient sciences the Fihrist stood nearly alone on the shelf until the seventh/thirteenth-century historians of the hukama built on it - Ibn al-Qifti (d. 646/1248) and Ibn Abi Usaybi'a (d. 668/1270) worked its entries into their dictionaries. A reference work is quarried where it holds a monopoly, and the Fihrist's monopoly was its foreign-sciences wing. Prediction: in the KITAB one_to_all reuse file for the OpenITI primary version of 0385IbnNadim.Fihrist, the single largest later-authored partner book by alignment-instance count - partners whose OpenITI author URI prefix exceeds 0385 - will be one of the named historian-of-the-hukama biobibliographies, a 0646IbnQifti book (Ikhbar al-'ulama' / Ta'rikh al-hukama') or 0668IbnAbiUsaybica.CuyunAnba, ahead of every hadith, law, adab and geography partner (primary clause: top-partner membership in that named two-author set; the verdict follows it); if the Fihrist's file shows fewer than 20 later-authored alignment instances in total, the test is void as a coverage failure rather than a kill. Kill: the KITAB one_to_all msdata file for the Fihrist's OpenITI primary version plus the OpenITI 2025.1.9 metadata for partner identities - group alignment instances by partner book, restrict to partners with author URI prefix later than 0385, rank by instance count, and read the top book's identity.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in the KITAB one_to_all reuse file for the OpenITI primary version of 0385IbnNadim.Fihrist, the single largest later-authored partner book by alignment-instance count - partners whose OpenITI author URI prefix exceeds 0385 - will be one of the named historian-of-the-hukama biobibliographies, a 0646IbnQifti book (Ikhbar al-'ulama' / Ta'rikh al-hukama') or 0668IbnAbiUsaybica.CuyunAnba, ahead of every hadith, law, adab and geography partner (primary clause: top-partner membership in that named two-author set; the verdict follows it); if the Fihrist's file shows fewer than 20 later-authored alignment instances in total, the test is void as a coverage failure rather than a kill.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the KITAB one_to_all msdata file for the Fihrist's OpenITI primary version plus the OpenITI 2025.1.9 metadata for partner identities - group alignment instances by partner book, restrict to partners with author URI prefix later than 0385, rank by instance count, and read the top book's identity.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

That Ibn al-Qifti and Ibn Abi Usaybi'a built their hukama' dictionaries partly on the Fihrist's foreign-sciences entries is established source criticism; but posterity's quarrying has never been measured as reuse geometry, and whether those two authors actually top the Fihrist's later-authored KITAB partner ranking against hadith, law, adab and geography partners has not been tested.

• B. Dodge (trans.), The Fihrist of al-Nadim: A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture (New York, 1970), introduction
• E. Savage-Smith, S. Swain & G.J. van Gelder (eds.), A Literary History of Medicine: The 'Uyun al-anba' fi tabaqat al-atibba' of Ibn Abi Usaybi'ah (Leiden, 2020), on its sources

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.