Notes on Contributors
Kaoukab Chebaro currently serves as Associate University Librarian for Archives and Special Collections at the Jafet Library, AUB, and is involved in several archiving and preservation projects. Chebaro holds a Masters in Library and Information Science (MLIS) from the University of Pittsburgh, and a Doctorate in Philosophy from Columbia University. Before joining AUB, Chebaro worked at the University Libraries of Columbia University, first as a Cataloging and Bibliographic Assistant, and then as the Middle East and Islamic Studies Librarian, before joining the AUB Libraries in 2011. She is a member of several societies, including the Middle East Librarian Association (MELA); the Islamic Manuscript Association (TIMA), UK; the Lebanese Library Association; the Modern Heritage Observatory (MOHO); and the Society of Lebanese Custodians of Manuscripts. She has contributed to service on numerous Library and archival cultural heritage committees, at AUB and beyond.
François Déroche is currently Professor at the Collège de France in Paris, teaching History of the Qurʾan. He is a specialist of Arabic manuscripts, with a special interest for the history of the written transmission of the Qurʾan. He has been a member of the Bibliothèque nationale staff, then of the French Institute in Istanbul before joining the Ecole pratique des hautes études. He has published on codicology (with other contributors, Islamic codicology. An introduction to the study of manuscripts in Arabic script, 2006) and early Qurʾanic manuscripts (La transmission écrite du Coran dans les débuts de l’ islam. Le codex Parisino-petropolitanus, 2009; Qurʾans of the Umayyads, 2014).
Faustina Doufikar-Aerts studied Arabic, Persian and Turkish Languages and Cultures at the Universities of Leiden and Utrecht. She is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Faculty of Religion and Theology, department of Texts and Traditions at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is involved in the study of Arabic manuscripts – in particular aspects of philology, semantics, orthography, lexicography and Middle Arabic linguistics – as the key to unlocking sources. She is a specialist in the oriental Alexander tradition. Currently, she supervises the five-year research program Beyond the European Myth. In Search of the Afro-Asiatic Alexander Cycle and the Transnational Migration of Ideas and Concepts of Culture and Identity. The program aims at charting, classifying, investigating, interpreting and describing (hand)written material about Alexander the Great in Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Chagatay, Mongolian, Ethiopic, and Malay.
Alba Fedeli is a research associate at the Asien-Afrika-Institut, Universität Hamburg, working on the transmission of early Quranic manuscripts using digital philology and phylogenetic methods. She received her PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK, after studies in Italy with Sergio Noja Noseda. Fedeli was a research fellow at FSCIRE in Bologna, Italy, at the Centre for Religious Studies, CEU, in Budapest and at the John Rylands Research Institute in Manchester. She cooperates with the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the University of Birmingham. She stirred up media frenzy after the BBC announcement that the “Birmingham Quran” manuscript dates to Muhammad’s lifetime. Her publications reflect her research interests in early Quranic manuscripts. Her work on the Mingana-Lewis palimpsest has been uploaded on the Cambridge Digital Library.
Ludmila Hanisch (1947–2015), PhD 1988 on the Algerian resistance movement at Freie Universität Berlin, researched extensively on the history of Oriental studies in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Among her main publications are „Machen Sie doch unseren Islam nicht gar zu schlecht“: Der Briefwechsel der Islamwissenschaftler Ignaz Goldziher und Martin Hartmann 1894–1914, Wiesbaden 2000; Die Nachfolger der Exegeten: Deutschsprachige Erforschung des Vorderen Orients in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, Wiesbaden 2013. Her last work on the semitist Mark Lidzbarski has been published posthumously in 2017: Aufzeichnungen von Mark Lidzbarski (1868–1928): Aus den Nachlässen der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, Halle, 2015.
Michaela Hoffmann-Ruf is currently research associate at the University of Tübingen in the interdisciplinary project “Settlement and Society in Premodern Oman”. From 2010 to 2014 she has been carrying out a DFG-sponsored project editing and analyzing the correspondence of the 19th-century German Orientalist Johann Gildemeister (1812–1890). For several years she has been working in the interdisciplinary project “Transformation Processes in Oasis Settlements in Oman” at the University of Tübingen where she also obtained her doctoral degree. She has frequently published on the history of Oman (Scheich Muḥsin b. Zahrān al-ʿAbrī: Tribale Macht im Oman des 19. Jahrhunderts, 2008; Oman and overseas, ed. 2013); on the development of Oriental studies in Germany (Johann G. Gildemeister: Briefe 1831–1888, ed. 2016; Einer der gescheidsten Männer, die ich je habe kennen lernen: Johann Gustav Gildemeister und die orientalischen Studien im 19. Jahrhundert, 2016; „Es war einfach nothwendig, so und nicht anders zu schreiben“, ed. 2014) as well as on aspects of material culture.
Ingeborg Huhn (Berlin), independent Orientalist, Freiburg/i.Brsg (MA), Freie Universität Berlin (PhD-thesis on Johann Gottfried Wetzstein), two years in Cairo and Damascus. She wrote numerous publications on Johann Gottfried Wetzstein, e.g. “Der Nachlass des Orientalisten Johann Gottfried Wetzstein in der Handschriftenabteilung der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin” (2006), “Johann Gottfried Wetzstein: Orientalist und preußischer Konsul im osmanischen Syrien (1849–1861)” (2016) and Huhn/Kurio (ed.): “Die ersten elf Suren des Koran: Übersetzt von Johann Gottfried Wetzstein, erster preußischer Konsul in Damaskus 1849–1861” (2015).
Robert Irwin is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His works of non-fiction include The Arabian Nights: A Companion (1994), Islamic Art (1997), Night and Horses and the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (1999), The Alhambra (2004) and For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2006). Also Camel, Mamluks and Crusaders, Visions of the Jinn: Illustrators of the Arabian Nights and the editing of and introducing The New Cambridge History of Islam volume 4, Islamic Cultures and Societies to the End of the Eighteenth Century, all in 2010, and Memoirs of a Dervish in 2011. His Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography was published in 2018. He was formerly a lecturer in the Department of Mediaeval History in the University of St Andrews. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, of the London Institute of Pataphysics, of the Royal Asiatic Society and of the Society of Antiquaries. He is a consulting editor at the Times Literary Supplement and is a Senior Research Associate of the Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University.
Boris Liebrenz is a Post-Doc researcher at the Saxon Academy of Sciences and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Islamic Manuscripts. Liebrenz has published widely on the history of Oriental studies, manuscript collecting, and Arabic type printing, particularly in Leipzig in the 16th through 19th century. His main interest is the history of manuscripts, libraries, and readers in the Middle East, also the topic of his Ph.D. (2013) which was published as Die Rifāʿīya aus Damaskus (Leiden 2016). He currently explores 18th century Arabic merchant networks in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea through letters.
Astrid Meier is Professor of Islamic Studies at the Martin Luther University of Halle Wittenberg. She served as Deputy Director of the Orient-Institut Beirut from 2013 to 2018. A historian by training, she holds a Ph.D. of the University of Zurich in Switzerland (1994). Her research interests include the social and cultural history of the Middle East in the early-modern period; theory and practice of Islamic law; environmental history. The focus of her current research project is on the early-modern history of rural societies in the Middle East. Recent publications: “The Materiality of Ottoman Water Administration in 18th-Century Rural Damascus. A Historian’s Perspective,” in: McPhillips, Stephen/Wordsworth, Paul (eds.): Landscapes of the Islamic World: Archaeology, History, and Ethnography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016, 19–33: with Tariq Tell: “The World the Bedouin Lived in. Climate, Migration and Politics in the Early Modern Arab East,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 58, 2015, 21–55.
Samar El Mikati El Kaissi Archives & Special Collections Librarian at the American University of Beirut (AUB). BA in Business Computer, Lebanese American University, Beirut, Lebanon, 1980. MS in Library and Information Science, Simmons College, Boston, USA, 2015. Recipient of AUB President’s Service Excellence Award, 2014. Member of various international and national societies: Beta Phi Mu Honorary Society, USA: The Islamic Manuscript Association (TIMA), UK; Lebanese Library Association; Modern Heritage Observatory (MOHO); and the Society of Lebanese Custodians of Manuscripts. Co-authored with Dr. Nadia El-Cheikh a chapter entitled “Women at AUB: The Beginnings, 1905–1947” published in “One Hundred and Fifty”, Beirut: AUB press, 2016.
Claudia Ott studied Arabic, Oriental Languages and Islamic Studies at the Universities of Jerusalem, Tübingen (MA) and Berlin (PhD) and Arabic Music (nay) at Cairo. In her doctoral dissertation, she researched manuscripts of Arabian Epics, many of them from Wetzstein’s collections (Metamorphosen des Epos, 2003). She is well-known as the German translator of the Muhsin Mahdi edition of the Arabian Nights (Tausendundeine Nacht, 2004), the Kayseri manuscript of the same work (Tausendundeine Nacht – Das glückliche Ende, 2016) and of Arabic love poetry (Gold auf Lapislazuli, 2008). In 2012, she published the first translation ever of the Aga Khan Manuscript of the Hundred and One Nights (101 Nacht, 2012). Claudia Ott is Associate Member of the Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Göttingen.
Holger Preißler (1943–2006) studied Arabic and Semitic Studies in Leipzig where he graduated with a dissertation on “Dependency in South Arabia in the middle Sabaic period” (Abhängigkeitsverhältnisse in Südarabien in mittelsabäischer Zeit). He served as professor for the History of Religion in Leipzig, for Islamic Studies in Saarbrücken, and again for Islamic Studies and Near Eastern History of Religions in Leipzig. His numerous publications treat aspects of Ancient South Arabian language and society, Arabic literature, and developments in contemporary religions, and include a translation of the Crusader-era memoirs of the knight Usāma b. Munqiḏ (Die Erlebnisse des syrischen Ritters Usāma ibn Munqid. Unterhaltsames und Belehrendes aus der Zeit der Kreuzzüge. Leipzig / Weimar 1981). Fundamental contributions to the history of Orientalist scholarship in the Early Modern period, particularly in Leipzig.
Christoph Rauch studied Arabic philology, Islamic studies and religion at the University of Leipzig. In 2002 he received a fellowship from the Volkswagen-Stiftung at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum and made several research trips to Sanaa/Yemen. Since 2004 he has worked at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, where he was appointed head of the Oriental Department in 2010. His research interests cover Islamic manuscripts and the history of Oriental collections in the Western world. He co-organized several conferences and exhibitions on manuscript collections and the history of Oriental studies. He is co-editor of Heroic Times: A Thousand years of the Persian Book of Kings (Berlin 2011, with Julia Gonnella), The Yemeni Manuscript Tradition (Leiden 2015, with D. Hollenberg and S. Schmidtke), The Diez Albums (Leiden 2016, with J. Gonnella and F. Weis) and Oriental Bible Manuscripts from the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-PK (Wiesbaden 2016, with M. Pehlivanian and R. Vollandt).
Helga Rebhan read Islamic and Arabic studies at the universities of Erlangen and Damascus and sojourned for PhD studies two years in Cairo. Currently she is the head of the Oriental and Asian Department at the Bavarian State Library in Munich and the area specialist for Arabic and Islamic studies. She has curated several exhibitions on Islamic and other Oriental and Asian manuscripts, e.g. “Prachtkorane aus tausend Jahren” in 1998 and “The Wonders of creation” in 2010. She has frequently lectured on Oriental and Asian manuscripts to university students and, in 2012 and 2018, was lecturer in a course on Islamic manuscripts at the University of Leipzig. From 2009–2016, she was president of MELCom International.
Anke Scharrahs Ph.D., is a freelance conservator specializing in polychrome wooden interiors from Ottoman Syria. For 20 years she has been engaged in research and conservation of Syrian-Ottoman interiors, both in museum collections in Berlin, Dresden, New York, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Doha as well as in historic houses in Damascus and Hama. She is the author of the book Damascene ʿAjami Interiors: Forgotten Jewels of Interior Design (London, 2013).
Jan Just Witkam is professor emeritus of the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, with the chair ‘Manuscript culture of the Islamic World’. He has published on many aspects of Islamic book culture (