Özet:

Born in Stuttgart in 1883, Oskar Rescher (a.k.a. Osman Reşer) was a productive Orientalist of the 20th century. He maintained a life between Germany and Istanbul from 1909 to 1925 and then settled in Turkey in 1925. Rescher visited many manuscript libraries in Turkey, saw thousands of manuscripts, sold thousands of manuscripts abroad, and performed bibliographic studies; he constantly updated the copy of Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur (GAL) and placed additional note slips in places where the margins were insufficient. Upon reaching the agreement to co-prepare the updated edition of GAL containing the manuscripts found in Istanbul, Fuat Sezgin brought Rescher from the Süleymaniye Library to the Istanbul University-affiliated Institute of Islamic Studies and took Ramazan Şeşen as the assistant to this project. However, withdrawing from the project upon Sezgin making changes to the plan, Rescher continued to update the copy of GAL on his own. This mentioned copy currently is in the possession of Prof. Dr. Claus-Peter Haase. Rescher wrote in the articles how the new revised edition of GAL should be prepared and added a note to the top of the list. In the last article, he recommends not making an update without considering his additions and corrections. The value of Rescher’s updates will be appreciated if one takes into account that Brockelmann while having benefitted from daftars and catalogues of Istanbul manuscripts, had not seen the libraries of Turkey while preparing his work. This article presents the details of Sezgin’s GAL project and discusses why the project failed and what can be done next while querying the value of Rescher’s copy of GAL.