The Escorial's holdings of Arabic MSS

As some of us are talking Portugal, let's talk Madrid. Specifically: the Escorial collection of Arabic MSS.

Apparently many of these MSS had taken a roundabout turn. Famously Cordova / Qurtuba was a haven of scholarship, not only by West European standards but also by Islamic standards. Eventually, however, the time of Islam had to end in Spain so many of those MSS were taken to Morocco. The Moroccans were very interested in Andalusian material by then; there's talk that Andalus itself had lost interest in Qurtubi's tafsir (pdf) but the Moorish library stored many copies thereof.

Sadly Morocco by then had a bit of a Dark Age problem too. One of the amirs got into a scrape, packaged up the library and then... lost them to French pirates. In 1614 the Catholic monarch of Spain (and Portugal) got his hands on the library and moved them to Philip II's palace at Madrid, the Escorial. Can't really say "back" to Madrid; note I didn't say Cordova. At least they didn't burn it all.

Er. Well, not on purpose. Sigh.

In the early twentieth-century Anno Domini, some Frenchmen made up a catalogue, in French so that nonSpaniards in Europe could see it. Arthur Jeffrey trooped down there to check out Marandi's commentary on Ubay and other "off" readings in the Quran, the Qurrat Ayn al-Qurra in MS 1337. Read about it in Tomo 3. Jeffrey noted peevishly he was unable to return to Spain in the mid 1930s; Madrid was Republican (subdivision: Stalinist) and under seige from 1937 on. Franco himself was pro-Moroccan, so had that motive to stymie any further publications of Materials For The History Of The Text.

Meanwhile, the Moroccans kept bugging the Spaniards for what was left of their ex-sultan's manuscripts back, reasoning - sensibly - that the Spaniards had enjoyed all the mathematical and classically-translated lore they were going to get, and all that was left was the Islamic lore, which the Spaniards clearly cared nothing about. VERY recently the Moroccans were allowed to do microfilm of the MSS.

Although I question the quality of the microfilm. We still do not own an edition of (say) MS 1337; just an entirely illegible PDF someone did a decade ago.