Arab Studies expert Aurora Cano Ledesma has passed away

The retired professor with the Department of Arab and Islamic Studies at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid passed away on November 6. We would like to share her biographic sketch by Professor Bernabé López, which was published on the university’s website.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH  OF    PROFESSOR  AND  ARABIST AURORA CANO LEDESMA

Retired professor Aurora Cano Ledesma, of the Department of Arab and Islamic Studies at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, passed away on November 6, 2020. My memories of this colleague go back to the time when I joined the Department in October 1977, at the proposal of its director Pedro Martínez Montávez. Back then, Aurora had already been working in the department for several years as a non-numerary professor, teaching the Arabic language. I shared a large and sunny office with her and Professors José Manuel Continente Ferrer and Ana Ramos Calvo for years, in harmonious coexistence (the Palestinian professor Mohamed El Geady also spent some time at that office). Aurora was from my neighborhood, and for a long time she gave me a ride to the University in her orange “four-can” Renault, as we called it, during an era when RENFE’s train service did not have the constant service it provides now. Spending so much time together led to a friendship which felt like family, enduring long after her retirement in 2010.

When I met her, Professor Cano was preparing a doctoral thesis on Iraqi writer Nazik al-Mal’ika (1923-2007), following a line of research in which the Department had specialized, with its orientation towards the contemporary Arab world, thus extending the traditional dedication of Spanish Arabists to studies on Al-Andalus. Besides writing her thesis on this poet, Aurora Cano published several works about her in specialized journals (Awraq), collective books such as the homage to Professor Fórneas and Congressional Proceedings such as the first Conference on Modern and Contemporary Arab Literature held at the UAM in 1991. This was not her only foray into such contemporary literature topics, because in 1986 the Alicante magazine Sharq al-Andalus published her translation of a short story by Yamal al-Gitani, “Papers of a young man who lived a thousand years ago”.

However, her true calling, which had developed since she became a full professor in 1988, was to study medieval Arab manuscripts, with a special devotion to science in Al-Andalus, about which she created monographic courses not only in our Department, but other open to Science History scholars at other UAM university schools. She paid special attention to the contribution made by Abu l-Qasim Zahrawi, a tenth-century Andalusian author known as Abulcasis, to surgery, by studying several of the author’s manuscripts kept at the Monastery of El Escorial.

She made further contributions regarding Arab-Islamic medicine in 1993, including one on pediatrics and gynecology for the journal Arbor published by the CSIC, and another on ophthalmology at a symposium about “Science at the Monastery of El Escorial.” For years, she attended a weekly meeting on Tuesdays at the El Escorial Monastery’s library to complete thorough research on the Arab manuscripts stored there. Her objective, in addition to finding documentation for her various works, was to carry out the “indicizing” (Aurora preferred this term to “indexing” in order to avoid using computer-related language) of the monastery’s Arabic manuscripts.

She herself talked about what her work consisted of in an interview held with Jean Lauland (http://www.hottopos.com/collat2/escorial.htm):

“There is a catalogue in Latin from the eighteenth century, showing all the works perfectly, but using a cataloguing system from its own era. Because items were lost, there were fires and things “disappeared,” in the late nineteenth century a Frenchman named Derenbourg catalogued the collections existing at the time. His work is made up of three volumes, and we have catalogued nearly all of the works of Arab origin (except legal works). It turns out that this was a descriptive catalogue, but not an index (of authors, subjects or titles). To provide one example: imagine you want to know whether there are any works by Ibn Sina in the El Escorial Arabic collections...In the past, you had to read the three volumes by Derenbourg to find Ibn Sina’s titles in the Arab collections; the work I am doing is to develop a “working tool” to help researchers, to create indices which make research on these Arab collections possible.”

This work, titled “Indexing the Arab Manuscripts of El Escorial,” was published in three volumes in 1996, 1997 and 2004 in the Ediciones Escurialenses put out by the Royal Monastery of El Escorial.

In the foreword of the work’s first volume, Teodoro Alonso Turienzo, a librarian at the monastery, explains that “the Arab collections of El Escorial were catalogued in their entirety by M. Casiri (Old Catalogue), Derenbourg, Renaud and Levi-Provencal (Modern Catalogue), with appendices by various authors intended to cover the gaps in Casiri’s and the Frenchmen’s works. All inconveniences arise from a lack of good indices.”

And this was the task taken on by Aurora Cano, who, as stated in the above-mentioned foreword, “does away with all these inconveniences. It is the result of a long-standing, costly effort, because she was required to examine all the codices one by one meticulously, a great number of them being miscellaneous. While it is true that the experience of the illustrious professor, a user of the existing catalogues for her research work, did greatly aid her in her undertaking.”

We will always have the work she left behind, along with our memories of her. Rest in peace.


Further information: Remembering Aurora Cano (UAM)