In Islamic book culture, the copyright record is where the authors sign their signatures at the end of the text. In contrast, the istinsah record is where the signature of the copyist (müstensih), who creates a new copy by reproducing the text, is affixed. On the other hand, the ferag or ketaba record is used to express a common term for both. In addition to providing information about the place and time of the composition of the finished text or the copy of the completed manuscript, ketaba records also bear individual traces of the author and the scribe, which opens the door to analysing ketaba records from a different perspective. For example, it is possible to make inferences and interpretations about the personal/social life of the author, the scribe, or the communication networks they were a part of from the prayer sentences they made for themselves or others. For instance, we can trace the scribe’s genealogical information such as father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, their relations, their nicknames, and sometimes even their occupations through the ketaba records; or we can trace the places and times of copy production through the ketaba records.

The fact that some scribes or copyists describe the place or location they were in at the time as if they were sketching it and mentioning geographical and local characteristics is a virgin area for urban history researchers to extract new sources and meanings. A noteworthy element in the ketaba records is the phonetic harmony between the names of the cities and the prayer sentences. This indicates that the prayers were written as a religious ritual with aesthetic concerns. The content of the prayers included in the ketaba records is also an essential subject of analysis. These prayers generally pray to protect cities from disasters, epidemics and turmoil. For example, prayers such as “Protect the city of Istanbul from earthquakes and floods” or “Protect the city of Bursa from fire and famine” appear frequently. As can be seen, the prayer phrases can be closely related to the specific situation of that city.

This is where the prayer mentioned above gives historiography a special meaning. Instead of making a general prayer for the city in which the author and the annotator have finished composing or copying a work of history, another meaning should be sought underneath the prayer for the city to be protected from fire, earthquake, or fitnahs. As witnesses of the period in which they lived, the scribes and the copyists bear the social memory of the city in the prayers they make for the cities in their ketaba records.

Based on this fact, this article traces the prayers made by the scribes and the annotators for the cities they lived in in their ketaba records. It has been observed that prayers were made to protect the cities from seditions and social events. Prayers for protecting these cities or their inhabitants from disasters and calamities such as earthquakes and epidemics are noteworthy in the ketaba records recorded in Damascus, Istanbul, Edirne, Erzincan, and Amasya. Looking back at the relevant dates, it can be seen that the cities faced disasters that needed to be protected in the period close to the period in which the ketebe records were written. A similar situation applies to social events. In the ketebe records, the most crucial factor to be avoided from cities and their inhabitants was fitna. In the prayers for cities such as Edirne, Adana, Maraş, Zile, Bursa, Amasya and Erzincan, the fear of sedition is rampant. As in the section on disasters, we have returned to the relevant dates when the prayers were made and checked from different sources whether the events that were thought to be the basis for the prayers took place on the relevant dates. Thus, in a way, the concerns in the ketaba records have been verified. In this comparison, it has been observed that the events in historical sources can be traced through extra-textual elements and even through prayer sentences, which are some of them. For example, the projections of the Jalali rebellions and the Suhte uprisings can also be read in prayer sentences. During the Jalali uprisings, many authors and manuscript writers must have suffered from the uprisings in their cities or neighbouring cities as they prayed to keep the fitnah away from their cities.  

To summarise, the article proposes that the prayer sentences in the ketebe records not only wish well for the cities but also reflect the individual or social reflexes of the scribe and the annotators, carry traces of historical events and that the prayer, as mentioned above sentences can be used as a source in historiography in this respect. The aforementioned proposal of the article gains a precious meaning in the absence of historical documents to confirm these concerns for cities in prayer sentences. In this way, the events that nurture these anxieties and fears hidden in the prayers in the ketaba records, even if they are not included in historical sources, will indicate that similar experiences have taken place in those cities in the recent past. In doing so, the sources used in the article were identified after a severe screening, carefully read and classified according to the city and prayer topics, and the data were processed to reveal a new and original subject. Although the methodology and perspective used in the study will contribute to new and original results, there will likely be some shortcomings and unforeseen differences in interpretation because it is one of the first of its kind. In conclusion, Ketebe records provide important data for historians researching various fields such as urban, social, and cultural history. These records can be used to learn about the state of cities in the past, to analyse the political and social atmosphere at that time, and to investigate the cultural values of cities. While manuscripts are the carrier of knowledge as they are texts, the non-textual elements of the manuscript also mediate this transfer of knowledge; it has been observed that the non-textual aspects of the prayer sentences in the ketebe records can also become a direct or indirect source in historiography.