Starting from the idea that manuscripts in their material, immaterial, ritual, and recited forms have social lives, biographies, agency, and efficacy, this volume is dedicated to the idea of social codicology. It brings together a new generation of interdisciplinary studies which combine history, philology, codicology, and anthropology, suggesting a more social, local, reflexive, inclusive, yet at the same time material perspective on manuscript cultures in the Muslim world across time and space. Moving beyond the dominant focus on manuscripts as inert carriers of text, its focus is on the social framework in which manuscripts and other forms of writing constantly gain meaning through their interaction with communities, thus humanizing the people who write, use, and venerate manuscripts as part of their living, local, and day-to-day understanding of Islam in the past and present.
1 Casablanca, October 2018
In their many forms and material manifestations, manuscripts tend to appear in places where one least expects them. It was in the late afternoon, a day before the Social Codicology workshop was held in Rabat, that I had the pleasure to visit Darb al-Sulṭān, a popular neighbourhood of Casablanca, with old friends. After strolling over the market and indulging in kaab al-ghzal pastries, we briefly visited my friend’s family home to pay our respects. While being presented with a wide array of sweet delicacies by his mother, a precious object, carefully stored in a wooden chest, was taken from a shelf in the humble majlis-style living room of the apartment. It was the family’s manuscript copy of the holy Qurʾan, a beautiful exemplar, written in a fine multicoloured Maghribī book hand. The manuscript had been in the family for generations and was one of its most prized possessions. It was therefore presented with great pride. I observed, however, that revealing it was also an emotional moment, as a silence fell when the chest was opened. The muṣḥaf, I learned, belonged to the late Ḥajj, the father of the house who, yarḥamuhu Allāh, passed away a year ago. In addition to being a sacred, handwritten religious artefact, as an heirloom, the manuscript was an object of great sentimental value, thus fulfilling multiple roles at once in the family.
The Qadīrī family is certainly not the only household in Morocco where Qurʾanic manuscripts and other handwritten devotional texts are kept, despite the wide availability of affordable, printed versions of the holy book, as the contribution of Anouk Cohen in this volume discusses. The phenomenon of treasuring manuscripts at home in Morocco and elsewhere, as Léon Buskens has described, is still prevalent, despite the growing commercial demand of Arabic manuscript copies from North Africa on the international rare book market.1 It is no coincidence that these family manuscripts, and sometimes entire collections, have survived in the privacy of homes, apartments, and other dwellings. On the contrary, the example of the handwritten family Qurʾan shows that in Morocco, and elsewhere in the Muslim world, manuscripts, documents, and other material forms of writing and inscribed objects, such as talismans, scrapbooks, and sticks, mean something to people. As written artefacts, they continue to play multiple roles in the daily life of their owners and their respective families and communities as everyday objects of common use, precious and collectable objects, instruments of action, or objects of contemplation and meditation.2 Rather than being considered inert or forgotten objects of material culture, frozen in the histories of their creation, such manuscripts remain as significant as they did in the past, be it through acquiring new social lives in the present.3
2 The Return to Codicology
In the last decade, a shift has taken place in the field of “Islamic” manuscripts. Handwritten books and other artefacts are no longer merely part of a turn of some sort—a documentary turn, a digital turn, an archival turn, or part of a “return” to philology—but have become the object of study instead of the means. Manuscripts and other forms of writing are no longer regarded as vehicles of something—knowledge, text, or script—per se. As tangible objects, surrounded by social practices and local meanings, they are the something. As part of this development, anthropologists and social historians have recently “gone textual” by studying the social embeddedness of books, documents, amulets, and other forms of text, and of various practices of writing and reading, collecting, veneration, transmission, and exchange. They have stressed the cultural specificity and multiple local meanings of writing and reading, thus going against common-sense assumptions of the universalist characteristics of these technologies.
The renewed interest in the tangible materiality of texts and manuscripts, and especially in the writing cultures of the Other, is hardly surprising. In the digital, post-print era of mass social media and fake news we find ourselves in, we seem to have not only estranged ourselves from the materiality of books and documents, but even more so from the physical practice of reading and writing in our daily lives. Paper has made way for the screen, libraries in situ no longer have books on their shelves, school children are taught “digital literacy,” and the physical act of writing is taken over by keyboards, digital to-do lists, and encrypted signatures.
Paradoxically, our digitized readerly and writerly practices of today’s world all refer to the oldest practices and manifestations of writing in their etymology, such as the act of “scrolling” (from a rotulus) on “tablets” or “pads” (derived from the cuneiform clay tablet), and software such as “Scrivener” and “PalmLeaf.”4 One could argue that borrowing the vocabulary from primordial writing cultures and their writing surfaces is nothing more than clever marketing. Yet at the same time, references to the history of writing and reading are so powerful and marketable precisely because they still hold meaning in our cultural memory. In other words, despite, or perhaps because of the introduction of these technologies and the collective screen fatigue they cause, our fascination with the question of what people do with handwritten texts and why is re-kindled. The further we become removed from the analogue experience of reading and writing ourselves in the present, the more interest is sparked in writing cultures and bookish societies, and the manuscript as object in particular.
This perspective is, of course, not entirely new. In the 1990s, Stephen Nichols already suggested focusing on the material characteristics of written artefacts, rather than focusing on them as vehicles of text within the framework of “material philology.”5 The renewed interest in book cultures through the lens of material philology could be viewed as a way to reconnect to our written heritage in the digital age, or as what Patricia Crain calls a quest to find a “codicology of the modern self.”6
In recent years, research on the materiality of the book has flourished in all its facets, including the introduction of new fields, technology, and terminology, ranging from “digital codicology”, “provenance-aware material philology”, “bio-codicology”, and “conservation-codicology”, to the study of parchment as “animal archives.”7 Michael Johnston and Michael van Dussen’s The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches, Kathryn Rudy’s Piety in Pieces: How Medieval Readers Customized their Manuscripts, Lambertus Cornelis van Lit’s Among Digitized Manuscripts: Philology, Codicology, Paleography in a Digital World, and Bridget Whearty’s Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor should be mentioned in this regard.8 The mass digitization of manuscript databases available online—at least available to scholars in the Global North—has fundamentally transformed the field and its methodologies.9 “Digital codicology” and the ethics and social justice of working with digital written artefacts (see discussion below), however, is still in its infancy. According to Whearty, at present we have not fully understood what these digital written artefacts actually are, nor have we grasped the material and collective labours of digitization and scholarship.10
With the exception of digital codicology, the predicament attendant to these fascinating developments in codicology is that the dominant focus remains rather on European manuscript cultures and written phenomena. Historically, the field of European codicology has been the main lens through which manuscript cultures of the Other, specifically those of the Global South, have been studied. Even though a lot can be gained from the methodology and new perspectives in this field, applying its perspectives to non-European book cultures is problematic for a number of reasons, as I will discuss towards the end of this introduction. As an alternative to the Eurocentric gaze in Manuscript Studies, progress has been made in the nascent fields of global book history11 and comparative codicology.12 Moving beyond disciplinary and regional boundaries, the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Studies (CSMC) in Hamburg has been exemplary in the comparative study of codicological features, such as paper, bindings, colophons, and paratexts, as well as in introducing new typologies and standards.13
The field of comparative codicology has led to new and exciting avenues of research, especially in regards to the question of the multiple local understandings of the materiality of manuscripts beyond European manuscript cultures. Examples in this regard are the study of agency and efficacy of manuscripts, research on the embodiment of manuscripts and the corporality of scribal traditions, the studies on less-studied written artefacts in their cultural contexts, such as notebooks, lists, albums, and personal manuscripts, as well as the introduction of new terminology, such as “one-volume libraries,” and “composite” and “multiple-text manuscripts (MTM s).”14 Its largest contribution, however, has been in making the traditional subject of “manuscripts” more inclusive by widening its scope to “written artefacts,” including inscriptions, textiles, graffiti, and other inscribed everyday objects into the field.15
Moving to the study of written artefacts in Muslim contexts, also traditionally known as “Islamic” codicology, one cannot help but observe that codicology is all too often still associated with the study of individual anatomical features or typologies of books. These important contributions, which I will discuss below, are unfortunately often still perceived as being on the margins of our field. Whereas the above-discussed fields of European, global, and comparative codicology have evolved in a direction which focusses on the materiality and social embeddedness of manuscripts as written artefacts, the study of “Islamic” codicology still has the aura of a field isolated from its social context. To draw on my own experience, at Islamic Studies conferences I would often get comments such as: “What could possibly be the relevance of codicology? It is just about a few strings and bindings.”
It is the aim of this volume to change this rather obsolete perspective by bringing together a selection of interdisciplinary contributions on the social role of written artefacts in Muslim contexts which are rooted in social history, philology, musicology, and anthropology, thereby starting a conversation on the return of codicology.
3 “Islamic” Codicology
The materiality of written artefacts in Muslim contexts is traditionally associated with studies on the codicology of Quranic manuscripts, such as François Déroche’s Qurʾans of the Umayyads, Annabel Teh Gallop’s The Art of the Qurʾan in Java, and, more recently, Cornelius Berthold’s Forms and Functions of Pendant Koran Manuscripts and Zulfikar Hijri’s Approaches to the Qurʾan in Sub-Saharan Africa.16 As monumental commodities, a renewed interest in Qurʾanic manuscripts can be observed on the international art market, where “masterpiece” copies from all over the Muslim world, at times of dubious provenance, are auctioned at record prices to private collectors and museums. Examples are the recent sales of two fifteenth-century Qurʾans by the auction house Christie’s: an autographed, royal Mamluk copy written for Sultan Qaitbay (r. 1468–1496), sold for 4.9 million pounds, and a Timurid Qurʾan on Ming gold-painted multi-coloured paper, auctioned at 8.8 million pounds. The auctioning of these masterpiece commodities has resulted in heated academic debates on ethics and provenance, which will be discussed towards the end of this introduction.17
The rich tradition of the “Islamic book,” however, goes far beyond the Qurʾanic muṣḥaf, including many other material manifestations of writing, varying from recording the traditions of the prophet Muḥammad in booklets, to classical codex treatises on Islamic law, theology, mysticism and science, to chronicles, miniature prayer books, diplomatics, letters, and certificates written on scrolls, to single-leaf manuscript receipts, talismanic clothing, paper-wheel head pieces, divination manuals, and amulets.18 The codicological features of these written artefacts, in the shape of a codex or otherwise, have been studied and mapped in great detail, focusing on features such as bindings, paper, layout, colophons, holographs, seals and impressions, inks, and tools and features of transmission.19 A recently emerged codicological topic concerns the objects that store and safeguard written artefacts, such as pouches, chests, bags, cupboards, and boxes.20
The question of how manuscripts and the different material forms they come in have shaped the societies and communities they are produced in has been addressed by studies such as Brinkley Messick’s Sharia Scripts, Konrad Hirschler’s The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands, Léon Buskens’ Tales According to the Book, Houari Touati’s L’Armoire à sagesse, and Beatrice Gründler’s The Rise of the Arabic Book.21 Worth mentioning in this regard are also studies on the mobility of manuscripts and scribal networks across continents, such as the reserach by Ghislaine Lydon, and Shamil Jeppie’s and Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s work in the context of the African continent, as well as scholarship on the movement of written artefacts across the Indian Ocean, such as the work of Elisabeth Lambourn, Christopher Bahl, Mahmood Kooria, and myself.22 The writings of Konrad Hirschler, Said Aljoumani, and Boris Liebrenz have drawn attention to the rich worlds of commentaries and scribal culture, bringing the “rough edges” of book and manuscript cultures, such as paratexts, glosses, and documentary notes, to the centre of study.23 Moreover, the history of the transmission of texts has taken new turns with an interest in booksellers and collectors, publishers, paper makers, stationers, libraries, and archives.24
4 Aim of the Volume
Research on the social embeddedness of texts in Muslim contexts, as we have seen, has gained momentum in Islamic studies, as well as across the disciplines of philology, social history, and anthropology. Social historians, codicologists, “digital philologists,” palaeographers, and textual anthropologists all “work” with manuscripts, either in situ or with manuscripts as digital written artefacts, and are incorporating “the social” into their studies. However, as opposed to other disciplines such as European book culture, global book history, or comparative codicology, a perspective that methodologically unites these disciplines under one umbrella and connects social practices of reading, writing, and consuming, geographically, spatially, and temporally, remains absent.
Through the lens of social codicology, this volume suggests the contours of what such a perspective could look like: a perspective through which we disentangle how the social informs the textual and vice versa, how people make sense of the world, and often of themselves, through their books. It must be acknowledged that this idea is not entirely new, nor unique to the larger fields of manuscript studies and book history, as I discussed above. In the context of Muslim societies, Léon Buskens provocatively suggested already in the 1990s that scholars should “practice codicology as a social science”.25 As part of practicing codicology as a social science, this volume proposes a more critical, social, and reflexive habitus for the study of manuscripts in Muslim societies, one that, in scope, is more inclusive and broader than the classical “archaeology of the book” and engages with critical debates in the humanities and social sciences, such as decolonializing objects and museums, rethinking the institutional and conceptional dominance of Eurocentrism, preservation and climate change, digital humanities, ethics and provenance, gender, positionality, and access, and agency and efficacy.26
The aim of this volume is thus to provide an invitation to, and perhaps even tools for studying the social embeddedness and the local materiality of written artefacts on the one hand, and a critical reassessment of our own disciplinary backgrounds, research practices, and positionality vis-à-vis manuscripts on the other. In other words: social codicology is about analysing the relationship between people and manuscripts, and the tension that is inherent to the encounter between them, both in terms of the manuscript that is the object of study and its social context, as well as our personal relationship with it. As researchers, we must thus be reflexive of the fact that we are part of a larger field of study with its own particular practices and ethical framework.27 The question is therefore not only what “the other” does with their written artefacts and why, but also what it is that we do as researchers and why.
Looking at written artefacts differently, a study in social codicology places the materiality of the written artefact at the centre, starting from the understanding that agency is attributed to texts in various ways, through which narratives of social life are created.28 Arguing along the line of Arjun Appadurai and others, in order to allow these social lives to unfold, we must first consider manuscripts as things, or physical objects, and acknowledge their role as commodities.29 The volume at hand demonstrates that, as “things,” manuscripts have a wide variety of social lives in their capacity as commodities, as the contributions of Carl Dávila, Zahir Bhalloo and Sayyid Sadiq Husayni Ishkawari, and myself show. The individual material features of manuscripts, such as watermarks, bindings, notes, colophons, and autographs have their own social lives as well, as Torsten Wollina’s contribution on Muḥammad Ibn Ṭūlūn’s autographed manuscripts exemplifies. We need to know about these social lives in order to understand handwritten texts holistically, instead of looking at manuscripts as clean texts.30 It is in fact, as the work of John Dagenais has shown, the messier parts of manuscripts, including scriptural incoherencies and their “rough edges,” that make the locality of manuscripts visible.31
Another line of inquiry where codicology has the potential to be practiced as a social science is that of handwritten texts and their various life cycles and biographies.32 As material objects, manuscripts and documents have life cycles from the moment they are brought into being, through their various modes of consumption, and until their demise.33 Throughout these life cycles, the social lives and sometimes even social afterlives of texts are constantly subject to change within different cultural, ritual, geographic, spatial, and temporal contexts.34 Historians may trace these material life cycles and their social contexts through the rough material edges of manuscripts and documents, as demonstrated by Konrad Hirschler’s paper on recycled book bindings, delivered at the conference in Rabat, entitled “Binding Decisions.”35 Anthropologists, on the other hand, may observe these material life cycles through ritual and ceremony during ethnographic fieldwork, in the context of venerating, enshrining, discarding, and ingesting of text.
Another aspect of the social lives and life cycles of manuscripts is the agency that is attached to them and through which believers experience their efficacy. In their volume Agency: How Manuscripts Affect and Create Social Realities, Michael Kohs and Sabine Kienitz make a distinction between individual types of agency attributed to written artefacts that directly influence human behaviour, and manuscripts that affect social relations between actors and shape communities and social groups.36 Several contributions in this volume, including Anwar Haneef’s and my own studies in the present volume, focusing on occult ontologies of Islamic manuscript preservation traditions and sensing secret Bohra manuscripts, respectively, address the ways in which people attribute agency to written artefacts and at the same time rely on their protective and healing powers.
In an ideal scenario, the social codicologist is in a situation where he or she is able to observe and consider the agency, efficacy, and life cycles of documents and manuscripts from both an ethnographic and a codicological perspective. The contributions of Ismail Warscheid and Paul Love, which document ethnographic fieldwork in the context of private manuscript collections in the Tuwāt Oasis of the Algerian Sahara and among Ibadi libraries in Jerba, Tunesia, are exemplary in this regard.
5 Ethnography and Codicology
Historically, a disciplinary gap exists between the philological practice of reading texts, which traditionally included the study of codicology, and anthropology. Annette Hornbacher and Richard Fox, however, have argued that this methodological opposition is, in fact, based on a textual paradigm centred around hermeneutical Eurocentric notions about text and script.37 Even though these Eurocentric notions do not translate well to textual traditions and manuscript cultures in other non-European contexts, they still inform the way in which we analyse written artefacts in Muslim communities and societies. The local materiality and social context of written artefacts, however, cannot be fully understood without addressing the human element and an emic perspective on manuscript cultures.
Anthropologists are no strangers to the world of people and their books, as the work of Karen Barber and others has shown.38 As libraries, private collections, auction houses, museums, and book markets have proven to be fruitful research sites for the ethnographer, written artefacts have become more commonly the object of study.39 What we may gain from these perspectives is a better understanding of the human element in the world of books.
Bringing in the lens of the human element in codicology may be a first step for the field to come out of its relative obscurity. Rather than isolating individual anatomical features of the book, this requires a perspective in which we acknowledge that manuscripts and documents are handwritten and produced by human beings. As such, no matter how skilled the scribe or bookmaker or how sacred the text is, no manuscript or document is identical to another, regardless of the larger traditions and aesthetic practices it is part of. Moreover, as Dagenais argues, manuscript cultures never operated in isolation.40 Instead, they were part of larger “living” manuscript and documentary cultures, some of which continue to exist today. This holds true for historic manuscript traditions, and it can be observed among the last living manuscript cultures of the Muslim world, such as among family libraries in Timbuktu, the Cham community in Vietnam, and the Bohras in Gujarat, among whom manuscripts are still transmitted manually.41 In such cases, as I have documented elsewhere, a combination of archival, social-codicological fieldwork, including extended periods of participant observation combined with “hands on” archival and codicological scrutiny, is paramount.42
Participant observation, however, may not be an option for those working with historical written artefacts. Historicizing social codicology is a fertile field which this volume explores through various contributions. Even though operating in contexts that are spatially and temporally completely different, the same questions about the social lives of handwritten texts, their rough edges, and life cycles can be applied to the study of pre-modern manuscripts.43 This is where the perspective of historical anthropology is relevant. It is only through the emic perspective of the communities and societies that brought forth these manuscript cultures, whether in pre-modern times or in the case of contemporary living manuscript cultures, that we can understand their social meaning. Even if the societies these manuscripts or documents originally belonged to are long gone, through the lens of historical anthropology documents or manuscripts from the past can still be read with their contemporary custodians, owners, collectors, scholars, and clerics, such as the work of Brinkley Messick among Zaydi qadis in Ibb, Yemen, and Bhalloo and Ishkawari’s contribution to this volume on scribal artisans and collecting practices among clerical bibliophiles in Qum shows.44
Finally, through the lens of social codicology, we not only critically engage with the question of how we may go beyond our academic disciplinary comfort zones in studying manuscripts, but also shift our focus to understanding how codicology, palaeography, and philology are practiced locally by communities through their written artefacts.45
6 Decolonizing Manuscript Studies: Power, Ethics, and Access
In addition to starting an interdisciplinary discussion on written artefacts and their social lives, this volume proposes a critical reflection on the ways we study manuscripts, access them, and interact with them. This would entail moving beyond the Eurocentric bias in the study of non-Western manuscript cultures, or, as Nur Sobers-Khan and Anwar Haneef argue in this volume and beyond, decolonizing the field of Islamic Manuscripts.46
In her article “Reclaiming Manuscripts,” Nur Sobers-Khan argues that the Eurocentric dominance in the humanities and social sciences is especially prevalent in the field of Islamic codicology, which, despite its material turn, remains based on a positivist understanding of the world, and has a strong historic rootedness in colonial discourse and vocabulary.47 In order to move beyond this discourse and vocabulary, Anwar Haneef argues for the appreciation of “diverse cosmologies, epistemologies and forms of knowledge embodied by Islamicate manuscripts,” which, he contends, “would enable a decolonial, non-patriarchal and post-Enlightenment future of the field.”48 Instead of studying manuscripts in Muslim contexts as European handwritten books, this would entail humanizing the people who write, read, use, and venerate manuscripts as part of their day-to-day lives, and focussing on their understanding of manuscripts as written artefacts, rather than on our own academic interpretation.
Moreover, reflecting on our relationship vis-à-vis “Islamic” written artefacts, Sobers-Khan argues that researchers romanticize, or what she calls the “fetishize” and “Orientalize” manuscripts as exotic objects of the Other. The fact that they acquire a “relic”-like aura, as either objects from the past or a faraway land, she argues, should be acknowledged and requires a reflexive turn.49 An example in this regard would be my own contribution in this volume, where I reflect on the experience of learning to “re-see” manuscripts and experience their efficacy through the lens of the community I worked with vis-à-vis my own Western academic training.
In addition to analysing our often personal relationship to the object, this volume encourages critical reflection on the practice of going to the archives. Archives, libraries, and collections, as I have described elsewhere, are rich research sites that, despite the central role they play in our research, are often left out of the scope of our work.50 The ritual and habitus of going to the archives, including the long waits, exchange of formalities, and the building of trust is rarely seen as a social practice despite the fact that, ultimately, our own involvement in them determines the studies we produce. The time we spend in reading rooms, browsing through manuscripts, glossing, scrutinizing, reading, photographing, and editing them, consists of social encounters and rituals which should be reflected on in our writing. It is thus not only the archival practices of the Other, but mostly also our own, which have considerable historical roots. As Buskens writes, these “are taken for granted instead of studied as specific cultural phenomena.”51 While going to the archives is considered a rite of passage to codicologists and philologists, the same can be argued for the tradition of cataloguing manuscripts, whether one is studying catalogology as a social phenomenon or is participating in it.52
Whether private, communal, or state-regulated, archives and libraries are sites of power where access depends on personal relationships and social hierarchies.53 Recognizing these repositories as sites of power, one cannot get around the social, and thus gendered nature that is inherent to archival research. Gender, as I argue in my monograph, shapes the nature of research itself: in the access we negotiate, the obstacles female researchers encounter, and the kind of work we end up publishing.54 Yet there has hardly been a conversation on how gender affects the historical research we do, especially in the context of libraries and archives in the Global South.
In addition to gender, many other factors relating to our positionality such as skin colour, sexual orientation, age, nationality, class, ethnic, and socio-economic background shape our experiences, archive stories, and library journeys, and in many cases, these factors determine the fate of our research through either access or non-access. Following the so-called reflexive turn in cultural anthropology, reflecting on these factors has become standard in ethnographic writing. Yet among philologists, historians, and codicologists, the question of positionality is still considered taboo, taken for granted, deemed irrelevant, rarely discussed, or abandoned to an anecdote in the margins of scholarship.55
As digital manuscript databases are gradually replacing the physical research site of the library or archive, it is also time to critically reflect on a new set of directives regarding ethical research practices of accessing and working with digital artefacts. In her article “Researching Mamluk Syria from a Living Room in Berlin: Reflections on Positionality and Manuscripts in an Age of Digital Reproduction,” Ingrid Austveg Evans argues for “the value of an ‘epistemic politics’ for a philology (and codicology) of the future,” suggesting that “historicizing our own activity as researchers should become much more prominent within archival studies.”56
Just as is the case with on-site libraries and archives, manuscript databases, regardless of whether they are commercially run or crowd- or state-funded by the academic community, should also be regarded as sites of power. Many of these databases restrict access to their online manuscripts by requesting high fees, thus making their collections less accessible to scholars from the Global South.57 Leaving aside the argument of the high costs and labour of maintaining these databases for a moment, one could also debate whether these manuscript databases should even be run for profit, as they contain collections of objects of cultural heritage, often of problematic provenance.
In addition to the power dynamics of digital research sites, another phenomenon in need of critical reflexion is what Evans calls “ ‘underground corpora’ of manuscripts” and practices of “digital file-sharing.”58 Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and messenger apps such as Whatsapp and Telegram, have become alternative, if not illicit, ways of exchanging and sharing digital written artefacts among researchers.59 This recent phenomenon raises ethical debates on transparency, digital materiality, ownership, provenance, and terms and conditions of access and copyright, as well as the question of what it means to practice codicology as a social science in the digital age.60
Finally, in addition to critically reflecting on the ways we study manuscripts, preserve them (see below), access them, and interact with them, this volume is also an invitation to rethink the ways in which we teach courses on manuscripts in Muslim contexts and train the future generation of codicologists. This requires not only updating the at times outdated textbooks on codicology and incorporating new digital tools61 and databases, but especially engaging in discussions on decolonializing the humanities and social sciences as well as on transparency, positionality, and access, and the privileges and ethical responsibilities of working with written artefacts as cultural heritage, in the classroom.
7 Manuscripts as Cultural Heritage in the Age of the Anthropocene
As a final line of inquiry, social codicology potentially contributes to discussions on heritage preservation, provenance, endangered archives, object resilience, and safeguarding documentary and manuscript cultures under threat in the age of the Anthropocene. In times of genocide, global warming, pandemics, and the rise of institutionalized anti-Muslim aggression, it is not only the people of communities that are under threat, but also their cultural memory. This is especially the case in the context of communities in the Global South who are at greater risk of being affected by natural disasters and environmental change in the age of the Anthropocene. Through understanding the emic perspective of communities and the importance of their written cultures, as well as documenting and preserving local preservation techniques, social codicology could offer an alternative to taking endangered handwritten heritage out of its social habitat through the translocation of manuscripts or preserving these collections digitally.
Open-access digital preservation of living and historic manuscript cultures as cultural heritage may be of great value to the academic community. Through the lens of social codicology, however, it becomes apparent that these efforts are not without problems. First, as discussed by Nancy Um, these initiatives and the “digital repatriation” of manuscripts “back” to their communities may provide access to scholars and communities of the Global South. Yet at the same time, these initiatives can cause harm in those cases where their symbolic meanings change in contexts of armed conflict and civil war.62 Second, through their digital repatriation, manuscript and documentary cultures may be preserved for the next generations as digital cultural or religious heritage. However, in their transition from material to digital artefacts, their emic meaning, together with their tangible materiality and thus a sense of community, will be lost on the screen. Or, as Nancy Um, puts it, their “meaning and significance” are transformed, rather than sustained.63
For instance, to take the example of the Alawi Bohra community I discuss in this volume, the sacred materiality of Alawi manuscripts and talismans is mostly derived from the fact that the Arabic text is handwritten by their Dāʿī, the head of the community’s sacerdotal family. It is through his calligraphed seal that believers are blessed and the ill are healed as they dissolve and drink his book hand in water. Whereas the digital humanities offer endless possibilities of studying manuscripts and documents and analysing their digital materiality on a meta-level through databases and easy access to digital collections, we run the danger of losing touch with the tangible, physical materiality of texts which is so central in understanding the relationship between people and their books. The talismanic and many other textual practices among the Alawi Bohras, which are central in the day-to day-lives of the community, become meaningless and obsolete when our only tool of preservation is digitalization.
As we have seen, through the lens of social codicology it becomes apparent that people attach various forms of meaning and agency to manuscripts. As objects of heritage, manuscripts become highly politicized artefacts, especially in discussions on ownership and provenance, as the many examples of restitution claims of handwritten objects in museums currently show. Whereas these discussions either tend to focus on the legal aspects of repatriation cases or on the contested objects as the symbol of colonial reparations, they rarely address the impact of the absence of these objects in their respective communities.64 Fortunately, debates on the ethics and provenance of manuscripts as cultural heritage are gradually gaining momentum in the field. The issue of positionality, however, remains largely absent in these discussions.65
Manuscripts become even more politicized artefacts in the context of their illegal displacement or symbolic destruction in conflict zones.66 If we do not make an effort to understand why these traditions matter to the people they belong to and take their physical materiality seriously, we will be unable to protect and preserve the cultural memory of those communities in the Global South, and we run the risk of losing them for good. With their destruction, the social contexts that give manuscripts, documents, and collections life and meaning will disappear.
8 Contents of the Volume
This volume presents a collection of critical reflections on how to practice social codicology as a social science, focusing on humanizing the people who write, use, and venerate manuscripts as part of their living, local, and day-to-day understanding of Islam in the past and present. The contributions span a broad field geographically, from the coasts of Malaysia and Malabar to the clerical headquarters in Qum and the Saharan desert of Algeria, and temporally, from Ayyubid Damascus to contemporary Gujarat. One of the outcomes of the Social Codicology workshop was that, despite the importance of materiality in our work, photographic material which illustrates the materiality of manuscripts and documents is often lacking. It is for this reason that each contribution in this volume is richly illustrated with photographs of written artefacts and, where possible, their social context.
The volume is divided into five thematic parts. The first two contributions, by Said Aljoumani and Torsten Wollina, engage with paratexts in the context of the social usages of manuscripts beyond reading. The next two chapters, written by Carl Dávila and Anouk Cohen, focus on the sensorial experience of texts beyond reading. Nur Sobers-Khan, Annabel Teh Gallop, and Paul M. Love, deconstruct the impact of colonialism on the social meaning and displacement of manuscript collections in chapters six, seven, and eight. In chapters nine, ten, and eleven, Mahmood Kooria, Zahir Bhalloo and Sayyid Sadiq Husayni Ishkawari, and Anwar Haneef engage with the world of scribes, etiquettes of copying, and ontologies of preserving. Finally, Ismail Warscheid and Olly Akkerman reflect on their positionality during ethnographic and archival research as they examine the social role of written artefacts, communities, and cultural heritage in chapters twelve and thirteen.
In the first contribution in this volume (Chapter two), Said Aljoumani focusses on the samāʿāt (audition certificates) notes found in manuscripts and their central role in Arabic reading culture in the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods. His study demonstrates that there were specific criteria and etiquette that controlled the process of transmission, which had an impact on how educational success was achieved in these circles. Aljoumani shows how scholars were able to use audition certificates in their research, and how students had the agency of ensuring that their teachers were authorized to transmit the books that they studied with them.
Chapter three, written by Torsten Wollina, documents how readers and book owners of different social strata living between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries engaged with autograph manuscripts by Muḥammad Ibn Ṭūlūn (d. 1546). In doing so, his paper is an argument in favour of taking the “discrepancies and irritations” one encounters in manuscripts seriously. Wollina contends that they should be part of the discussion on social codicology, as they reveal people’s personal and textual engagements with them, as well as specific social conditions and concerns that informed manuscript production and consumption.
Moving to the section of manuscripts and the sensorium, Carl Dávila discusses the prestigious and less prestigious social lives and afterlives of musical manuscripts in eighteenth-century Morocco. In chapter four, he focusses the various exemplars of a popular North African songbook, entitled Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik, which historically was considered to be of high social value in the prestigious performed tradition it was part of. As such, he argues that Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik manuscripts symbolized and “transmitted” prestige, erudition, and traditionalism to their owner-users as embodied cultural capital, even in the form of “workmanlike” copies.
In chapter five, Anouk Cohen discusses the ways in which the materiality of printed Qurʾans is used to mediate and standardize the sensory experience of the Holy book. She discusses the edition of a national Moroccan Qurʾan printed in 2010 and commissioned by the monarchy, known as the muṣḥaf muḥammadī. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork she analyzes the production of the muṣḥaf muḥammadī through the work of calligraphers, illuminators, and designers. As a national royal Qurʾan, the muṣḥaf muḥammadī, she argues, is considered a tool to standardize ways of seeing and hearing the holy book. Her paper aims to understand the way the believers’ personal relationship to the Qurʾan is being “mediated” by the book and how the materiality of the object is designed to establish an exclusive connection with the divine, through and by the monarch.
In chapter six, Nur Sobers-Khan explores knowledge production and the interplay between illustrated lithographs and manuscript culture in nineteenth-century South Asia. Her contribution focusses on the genealogy of Tilismat-i ʿAjāʾib (“Talismans of Wonder”) texts, and the link to the Persian ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt (“Wonders of Creation”) manuscript tradition. Establishing a basis for the empirical study of this genre of Urdu lithographs, Sobers-Khan’s article examines the social use of these texts beyond reading, such as practices of bibliomancy and divination, to create new audiences and spheres of meaning made possible when mass-produced cosmological images were able to circulate more widely. She argues that, in bringing about colonial modernity, lithograph production gave new life to forms of premodern knowledge that we would describe as “enchanted.”
Chapter seven, by Annabel Teh Gallop, addresses the question of provenance, displacement, and war booty manuscripts and libraries from the Malay world. Her paper focusses on the private library of Tengku Sayid Jafar, scholar, bibliophile, and military commander of Selangor, Malaysia. This library, consisting of Arabic, Malay, and Bugis manuscripts, was looted by in 1784 by the Dutch colonial government. Based on the analysis of colophons, owners’ marks, seals, and decorative details, she argues that Jafar’s manuscripts constitute the only pre-modern library known to have survived from the Malay peninsula, offering a glimpse of the books that were copied, read, shared, and valued in Selangor in the eighteenth century.
In chapter eight, Paul M. Love, Jr. continues the discussion on private manuscript libraries, focusing on rumours and collections on the island of Jerba through the lens of historical anthropology. In his photo essay, he engages with the stories of a private manuscript library belonging to the al-Baʿṭūrī family. Drawing inspiration from Luise White’s work on vampire narratives in colonial East Africa, he uses the library’s history to reflect on the relationship between manuscript collections, accounts of their histories, and social dynamics in Jerba.
In chapter nine, Mahmood Kooria discusses juridical discourses in Arabic and Arabic-Malayalam on the etiquette of producing, preserving, and circulating manuscripts among Shafiʿi Muslims of the Indian Ocean littoral. Based on Ajwibat al ʿajība by Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī (fl. 1580s), he examines how jurist-scribes on the Malabar coast exchanged ideas with the Middle East on the ideal book culture and the scribal and bibliophilic praxis of their time, including etiquette on writing, disseminating, preserving, circulating, discarding, and objectifying books.
In chapter ten, Zahir Bhalloo and Sayyid Sadiq Husayni Ishkawari focus on the codicology and social life of three Bukharan fatwa documents as they changed hands between scribes, litigants, muftis, and the local authorities. These changes, they argue, involved intricate practices of writing, sealing, and preservation through which new meanings were ascribed to the document as it changed its codicological form and moved spatially from a loose-leaf sheet of paper to a glued-in treasure object, cut out for display in a private collection in Qum.
Chapter eleven, written by Anwar Haneef, moves the discussion on the potential of social codicology into the direction of botany, climate resilience, and decolonializing the field of Islamicate manuscript studies. Haneef focusses on the phenomenon of the kabīkaj invocation as a preservation practice and deconstructs its association with magic and occult practices and Islamicate genealogy. He argues that kabīkaj invocations should be seen as a technology in the context of object resilience rather than a talismanic or “magical” practice. As such, Haneef argues for recognizing a multitude of worldviews on kabīkaj, and introduces “sociotechnical codicology” as a methodology to understand the diverse sociotechnical lives of Islamicate manuscripts beyond current paradigms of colonial modernity.
In chapter twelve, Ismail Warscheid reflects on the ethnographic and documentary fieldwork he conducted in the oases of Tuwāt in southern Algeria, in search of unedited manuscripts preserved in private ʿulamāʾ collections. He makes the interesting observation that the rise of neo-traditionalism and the new visibility of scriptural religious knowledge (ʿilm) in contemporary North and West African societies facilitate dialogue with locals on their cultural heritage. Yet at the same time, these factors impact the study of historical change and social cleavages that the discourse of continuity with the past tends to overshadow.
My own chapter, entitled “Social Codicology in the Digital Age: Sensing Secret Bohra Manuscripts in Situ and on the Screen,” engages with the question of manuscript efficacy in the context of the Alawi Bohras and their secret manuscript culture. Based on archival and ethnographic fieldwork, I document how the community experiences secret manuscripts and other forms of writing in their daily lives through their sacred materiality. Instead of reading, I argue, believers interact with Bohra manuscripts and their esoteric content in ritually performed ceremonies through the senses. I end with a discussion on digital manuscript efficacy, including how the recent COVID-19 pandemic has turned secret Bohra manuscripts into digital and immaterial sacred artefacts.
Léon Buskens, “Paper Worlds: A Nesrani Ethnographer Entering the Manuscript Trade in Morocco,” in Pratiquer les sciences sociales au Maghreb. Textes pour Driss Mansouri, eds. Mohamed Almoubaker and François Pouillon (Casablanca: Fondation du Roi Abdul-Aziz Al Saoud pour les Etudes Islamiques et les Sciences Humaines, 2017), 239–265.
Categories used by François Déroche and Carine Juvin, “Introduction,” Special issue: From Visual Power to Private Stories: Inscribed Objects from the Medieval Arab World, Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World, vol. 4 (2023), 1–2.
For changing social roles of written artefacts throughout their material life span, see Karl Schaefer, “Malleable Magic: Medieval Arabic Block Printed Amulets and Their Audiences,” in Agency: How Manuscripts Affect and Create Social Realities, eds. Michael Kohs and Sabine Kienitz (Hamburg: Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, 2023), 149–167.
For the link to the cuneiform tablet and tablet computers, see Katja Weirauch and Michele Cammarosano, “WoW! Writing on Wax in Ancient Mesopotamia and Today: Questions and Results from an Interdisciplinary Project,” in Traces of Ink. Experiences of Philology and Replication, ed. Lucia Raggetti (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 9.
Stephen Nichols, “Introduction. Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” The New Philology. Special Issue of Speculum 65, no. 1 (1990): 1–10 and “Why Material Philology? Some Thoughts,” in Philologie als Textwissenschaft: Alte und Neue Horizonte, eds. Helmut Tervooren and Horst Wenzel, Special Issue of Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie 116 (1997): 10–30. See also Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the 14th and 18th Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) and Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).
Patricia Crain, “Reading Childishly? A Codicology of the Modern Self,” in Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era, eds. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman (Minneapolis: MN, 2013; online edition, Minnesota Scholarship Online, 24 Aug. 2015).
See, on “digital codicology,” Bridget Whearty, Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2022); on “bio-codicology,” Sarah Fiddyment, Matthew D. Teasdale, Jiří Vnouček, Élodie Lévêque, et al. “So you want to do biocodicology? A field guide to the biological analysis of parchment,” Herit Heritage Science 7, 35 (2019) online; on “conservation-codicology”: Patricia Engel, “Reversibility—Minimal Intervention—Conservation-Codicology: Terminology as a Tool for Awareness Raising,” Journal of Paper Conservation 1 (2023), online. On “animal archives,” see Bruce Holsinger, On Parchment. Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023); and on “Provenance-aware Material Philology”, see Liv Ingeborg Lied, Invisible Manuscripts: Textual Scholarship and the Survival of 2 Baruch (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021).
Michael Crain Johnston and Michael van Dussen, The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Kathryn Rudy, Piety in Pieces: How Medieval Readers Customized their Manuscripts (Open Book Publishers, 2016); Whearty, Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor; Lambertus Cornelis van Lit, Among Digitized Manuscripts: Philology, Codicology, Paleography in a Digital World (Leiden: Brill, 2020).
See Timothy Stinson, “Codicological Descriptions in the Digital Age” in Kodikologie und Paläographie im digitalen Zeitalter—Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age, eds. Malte Rehbein, Patrick Sahle, and Torsten Schaßan, 35–51 (Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2009).
Whearty, Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor, 1–40.
For contributions on global book history, see Elleke Boehmer et al., eds., The Global Histories of Books. Methods and Practices (London: Palmgrave Macmillan, 2017); Michael F. Suarez and H.R. Woudhuysen, eds., The Book: A Global History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Two edited volumes were published recently on the phenomenon of colophons in a global perspective. See Stefan Hanß and Christopher D. Bahl, eds. Scribal Practice and the Global Cultures of Colophons, 1400–1800 (London: Palmgrave Macmillan, 2022); George Anton Kiraz and Sabine Schmidtke, eds., Literary Snippets. Colophons Across Space and Time (New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 2023).
Alessandro Bausi et al., eds. Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies. An Introduction (Hamburg: Tredition, 2015); Malachi Beit-Arié, “The Advantages of Comparative Codicology: Further Examples,” in Exploring Written Artefacts: Objects, Methods, and Concepts, ed. Jörg B. Quenzer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 395–404.
Michael Kohs and Sabine Kienitz, eds., Agency: How Manuscripts Affect and Create Social Realities (Hamburg: Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, 2023); Antonella Brita et al., eds., Manuscripts and Performances in Religions, Arts, and Sciences (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024); Michael Clarke and Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, eds., Medieval Multilingual Manuscripts: Case Studies from Ireland to Japan (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022); Dmitry Bondarev, Alessandro Gori, and Lameen Souag, eds., Creating Standards: Interactions with Arabic Script in 12 Manuscript Cultures (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019); Alessandro Bausi, Michael Friedrich, and Marilena Maniaci, eds., The Emergence of Multiple-Text Manuscripts (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019); Michael Friedrich and Cosima Schwarke, eds. One-Volume Libraries: Composite and Multiple-Text Manuscripts (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016).
Jörg B. Quenzer, ed., Exploring Written Artefacts. Objects, Methods, and Concepts (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016). On “manuscript textiles,” see “Manuscript Textiles: Weaving the Thread of Faith,”
Cornelius Berthold, Forms and Functions of Pendant Koran Manuscripts (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2021); François Déroche, Qurʾans of the Umayyads. A First Overview (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Annabel Teh Gallop, “The Art of the Qurʾan in Java” Jurnal SUHUF 8, no. 01 (2015): 215–229; Zulfikar Hirji, “The Siyu Qurʾans: Three Illuminated Qurʾan Manuscripts from Coastal East Africa,” in Approaches to the Qurʾan in Sub-Saharan Africa, ed. Zulfikar Hirji (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 431–472, Special issue “Manuscripts of the Qurʾān,” Journal of Islamic Manuscripts Volume 11, no. 3 (2020).
For instance, the sale of a fifteenth-century Timurid or Aqquyunlu Qurʾan on Chinese Paper. See Anna Brady, “Quran quietly sells for record £ 7 m despite questions over its provenance,” The Art Newspaper,
The standard works on Arabic manuscripts and Islamic codicology in English are François Déroche, Islamic Codicology: An Introduction to the Study of Manuscripts in Arabic Scripts (London: Al-Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation, 2005); Adam Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts: A Vademecum for Readers (Leiden: Brill, 2012). In Arabic and Persian, the standards are Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Munajjid Qawāʾid fahrasat al-makhṭūṭāt al-ʿarabiyya (Beirut: Dār al-kitāb al-jadīd, 1973); ʿAlī Āq Qalʿah Ṣafarī, Nuskhah shinākhat: Pazhūhish-nāmah-i nuskhah shināsi-yi nusakh-i khaṭṭī-yi fārisī (Tehran: Markaz-i pazhūhishī-yi mīrāth-i maktūb, 1390 Sh/2011). For recent publications on talismans and amulets, including on scrolls and in block print, see Petra Sijpesteijn and Marcela Probert (eds.), Amulets and Talismans of the Middle East and North Africa in Context. Transmission, Efficacy and Collections (Leiden: Brill, 2022); Michael Kohs and Sabine Kienitz (eds.), Agency: How Manuscripts Affect and Create Social Realities (Hamburg: Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, 2023). On paper wheels, see Farouk Yahya, “Paper Wheels with Strings Used for Divination from Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula,” in Agency: How Manuscripts Affect and Create Social Realities, 31–44.
On bookbinding, see Karen Scheper, The Technique of Islamic Bookbinding Methods, Materials and Regional Varieties (Leiden: Brill, 2015); on paper: Jonathan Bloom, Paper before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); on layout: Frederike-Wiebke Daub, Formen und Funktionen des Layouts in Arabischen Manuskripten anhand von Abschriften religiöser Texte: Al-Būṣīrīs Burda, al-Ǧazūlīs Dalāʾil und Die Šifāʾ von Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2016); on colophons: Rosemarie Quiring-Zoche, “The Colophon in Arabic Manuscripts. A Phenomenon without a Name,” Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 4 (2013): 49–81; on holographs: Frédéric Bauden and Elise Franssen, eds., In the Author’s Hand: Holograph and Authorial Manuscripts in the Islamic Handwritten Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2019); on seals and impressions: Annabel Teh Gallop, Lasting Impressions. Seals from the Islamic World (London: British Library, 2010); on inks: Lucia Raggetti, ed., Traces of Ink. Experiences of Philology and Replication; and on transmission: Jan Just Witkam, “The Human Element between Text and Reader. The Ijaza in Arabic Manuscripts,” in The History of the Book in the Middle East, ed. Geoffrey Roper (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 89–112; Jan Just Witkam, “Establishing the Stemma: Fact or Fiction?” in Manuscripts of the Middle-East 3 (1988): 88–101. See also Stefanie Brinkmann and Beate Wiesmüller, eds. From Codicology to Technology Islamic Manuscripts and Their Place in Scholarship (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2012). Social media has also become a resource for the study of codicology in Muslim contexts, such as the website of Jan Just Witkam and the blog posts of Dagmar Riedel and Evyn Kropf. See
This was one of the recent foci at the Archiving Artefacts cluster of the CMCS in Hamburg. See also Karin Scheper, who is an authority in this field. Karin Scheper, “Bindings, Bags and Boxes: Sewn and Unsewn Manuscript Formats in the Islamic World,” in Tied and Bound: A Comparative View on Manuscript Binding. Studies in Manuscript Cultures, eds. Allesandro Bausi and Michael Friedrich (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023), 121–154.
Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Brinkley Messick, Sharia Scripts. A Historical Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Konrad Hirschler, The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Léon Buskens, “Tales according to the Book. Professional Witnesses (`Udul) as Cultural Brokers in Morocco,” in Narratives of Truth in Islamic Law, eds. Dupret Baudouin, Drieskens Barbara, and Moors Annelies (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008), 143–160; Houari Touati, L’armoire à sagesse: Bibliothèques et collections en Islam (Paris: Aubier, 2003); Beatrice Gruendler, The Rise of the Arabic Book (New Haven: Harvard University Press, 2020).
On manuscript lives and mobility across the African continent, see Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne, eds., The Meanings of Timbuktu (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008); Ghislaine Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails. Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Charles C. Stewart and Ahmed Chaouki Binebine, eds., Manuscripts and Arabic-Script Writing in Africa (London: Hali Publications Ltd, 2023); Andrea Brigaglia and Mauro Nobili, eds. The Arts and Crafts of Literacy: Islamic Manuscript Cultures in Sub-Saharan Africa (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017). In the context of the Indian Ocean, see Elisabeth Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Mahmood Kooria, “Texts as Objects of Value and Veneration. Islamic Law Books in the Indian Ocean Littoral,” Sociology of Islam 6 (2018): 60–83; Olly Akkerman, “The Bohras as Neo-Fāṭimids: Documentary Remains of a Fatimid Past in Gujarat,” Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World 1 (2020): 286–308.
Andreas Görke and Konrad Hirschler, eds. Manuscript Notes as Documentary Sources (Beirut: Orient-Institut, 2012); Said Aljoumani’s contribution in the present volume; Boris Liebrenz, Die Rifāʿīya aus Damaskus. Eine Privatbibliothek in osmanischer Zeit und ihr kulturelles Umfeld (The Rifāʿiyya from Damascus: A Private Ottoman-Era Library and Its Cultural Context) (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
Said Aljoumani,
Buskens, “Paper Worlds,” 137–145.
Léon Buskens, “Maliki Formularies and Legal Documents. Changes in the Manuscript Culture of the ʿUdul (Professional Witnesses) in Morocco,” in The Codicology of Islamic Manuscripts. Proceedings of the Second Conference of Al- Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, ed. Yasin Dutton (London: Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 1995), 137–145. This is in contrast to other disciplines, such as Medieval Spanish and Portuguese studies, where the study of manuscripts has been subject to critical (self-)reflection. See John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de Buen Amor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
The term “social codicology” was first coined in my PhD thesis, which is based on my archival and ethnographic research conducted in Baroda, India, between September and December 2012. Central to my research were encounters with, and active participation within, the community and its scribal, archival, and other social-philological practices. Olly Akkerman, “The Bohra Dark Archive and the Language of Secrecy: A Codicological Ethnography of the Royal ʿAlawī Bohra Library in Baroda” (PhD diss., Freie Universität Berlin, 2016), 12.
Akkerman, “The Bohra Manuscript Treasury as a Sacred Site of Philology: A Study in Social Codicology,” 17.
Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1986).
Buskens, “Maliki Formularies,” 137.
John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de Buen Amor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), xvi.
Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1986), 64–92.
Akkerman, “Bohra Manuscript Treasury as a Sacred Site of Philology,” 10.
Akkerman, “Bohra Manuscript Treasury as a Sacred Site of Philology,” 10.
This presentation formed the basis of Hirschler‘s Chapter 3, “Binding Matters—From Stand-Alone Booklet to Monumental Composite Manuscript”, Medieval Damascus.
Michael Kohs and Sabine Kienitz, Agency: How Manuscripts Affect and Create Social Realities, 3.
Hornbacher and Fox, Efficacy of Balinese Letters, 1.
Karin Barber, Anthropology of Texts, Persons, and Publics: Oral and Written Culture in Africa and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
For the discussion on collecting practices in archives and museums in the modern Arab world, see Sonja Mejcher-Atassi and John Pedro Schwartz’s edited volume Archive, Museums and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World (London: Routledge, 2012).
Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, xvi.
Jeppie and Diagne, Meanings of Timbuktu; Hao N. Phan, “Cham Manuscripts, the Endangered Cultural Heritage from a Lost Kingdom,” Restaurator. International Journal for the Preservation of Library and Archival Material 36, no. 2 (2015): 101–120; Akkerman, Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books.
Akkerman, “Bohra Treasury of Manuscripts,” 18.
Dagenais, Ethics of Reading, xvi.
Messick, Sharia Scripts; Messick, Calligraphic State.
Richard Fox, More than Words. Transforming Script, Agency, and Collective Life in Bali (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018); Hornbacher and Fox, Materiality and Efficacy of Balinese Letters; Esther-Miriam Wagner, Ben Outhwaite, and Bettina Beinhoff, eds., Scribes as Agents of Language Change (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013); Akkerman, Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, Ch. 6. “Script and Scribal Politics.”
Nur Sobers Khan, “Reclaiming Manuscripts. Divination, Social Justice, and Islamic Codicology,” Special Issue on Relics, Critical Muslim 2, vol. 2 (2020): 86–90. See also Farid El-Ghawaby, “Localizing Johann Gottfried Wetzstein and other ‘Western’ Actors of Translocation Processes in the 19th and early 20th Century,” (forthcoming).
For a discussion of the colonial hangover in cataloguing, see Jake Benson’s presentation “Persian Manuscripts in the John Rylands Research Institute and Library: Aims and Approaches,” Taking the Past into the Future: Studying, Preserving, and Understanding Islamicate Manuscripts, University of Edinburgh, Thursday and Friday, May, 11th–12th, 2023 (available online in the future).
This volume: add page number after editing.
Nur Sobers Khan, “Reclaiming Manuscripts. Divination, Social Justice, and Islamic Codicology”, 76, 77.
Akkerman, “Bohra Treasury of Manuscripts,” 18. A rare exception in this regard is Ingrid Austveg Evans’s account of digital archives, entitled “Researching Mamluk Syria from a Living Room in Berlin: Reflections on Positionality and Manuscripts in an Age of Digital Reproduction,” (forthcoming). See also Antoinette Burton, ed., Archive Stories. Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), and Jan Just Witkam for a slightly dated yet vivid account on working with manuscripts in the Dār al-Kutub library in the 1980s: Jan Just Witkam, “Manuscripts & Manuscripts. Research Facilities for Manuscripts in the Egyptian National Library,” in Manuscripts of the Middle East 2 (1987): 111–115.
Buskens, “From Trash to Treasure,” 182.
An interesting workshop in this context was: All You Can Do with Catalogs: Accessing, Organizing, Disseminating Local and Global Knowledge (15th–19th Centuries), 6–7 October 2016. Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin.
Akkerman, Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 28.
Akkerman, Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books, 16, 17.
Even though it has by now become a historic account itself, an exception is Ignaty Kratchkovsky’s Among Arabic Manuscripts, which can be read as a philological “thick” description of his time spent among manuscript collections in Damascus and Saint Petersburg. The detailed way in which he reflects on his positionality while working with these collections, his personal agency vis-à-vis the librarians, and his intimate relationship with the manuscripts, makes the work a study in social codicology avant la lettre. Ignaty Y. Kratchkovsky, Among Arabic Manuscripts: Memories of Libraries and Men (Leiden: Brill, 1953).
Evans, “Researching Mamluk Syria from a Living Room in Berlin,” forthcoming.
See Evans, “Researching Mamluk Syria from a Living Room in Berlin,” forthcoming; and Hemmungs Wirtén 2020: 366–367, and Eva Hemmungs Wirtén: “Globalization,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book, ed. James Raven, 348–368 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Evans, “Researching Mamluk Syria from a Living Room in Berlin,” forthcoming.
Annabel Teh Gallop refers to this practice as “Facebook philology” in an article that discusses ethical debates on digital materiality, ownership, and access. Annabel Teh Gallop, “Facebook Philology: The Contribution of Social Media to the Study of Manuscripts from Indonesia and the Malay world,” Simposium Internasional Pernaskahan Nusantara XVI MANASSA, Perpustakaan Nasional RI, Jakarta 26–29 September 2016, 1–12.
Another problematic phenomenon in this regard is the random selection of manuscript pictures on social media platforms and websites without referring to the manuscripts they came from, their context, or copyright. For an example brought up by Annabel Teh Gallop, see Annabel Gallop, @BLMalay, Twitter/X,
See, for instance, the interactive online classes entitled Mouse & Manuscript by Dorrit van Dalen:
Nancy Um, “Yemeni Manuscripts Online: Digitization in an Age of War and Loss,” Manuscript Studies, 5, no. 1 (2020), 8; Sabine Schmidtke, “The Zaydi Manuscript Tradition: Virtual Repatriation of Cultural Heritage,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 50, (2018), 128.
Um, “Yemeni Manuscripts Online: Digitization in an Age of War and Loss”, 8.
I thank Wendy Shah and Anwar Haneef for insightful discussions on this topic.
The Ethics Working Group of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures has recently produced a set of guidelines, entitled, “Ethical and Responsible Research at CSMC.”
Palmobo, and Kristiansen, “ ‘It belongs in a museum” … or does it’?
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Brita, Antonella, Janina Karolewski, Matthieu Husson, Laure Miolo, and Hanna Wimmer, eds. Manuscripts and Performances in Religions, Arts, and Sciences. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024.
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Buskens, Léon. “Maliki Formularies and Legal Documents. Changes in the Manuscript Culture of the ʿUdul (Professional Witnesses) in Morocco.” In The Codicology of Islamic Manuscripts: Proceedings of the Second Conference of Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, edited by Yasin Dutton, 137–145. London: Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 1995.
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Chartier, Roger. Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.
Chartier, Roger. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the 14th and 18th Centuries. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.
Clarke, Michael, and Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, eds. Medieval Multilingual Manuscripts: Case Studies from Ireland to Japan. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022.
Crain, Patricia. “Reading Childishly? A Codicology of the Modern Self.” In Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era, edited byN. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, online (Minneapolis: MN, 2013).
Daub, Frederike-Wiebke. Formen und Funktionen des Layouts in Arabischen Manuskripten anhand von Abschriften religiöser Texte: Al-Būṣīrīs Burda, al-Ǧazūlīs Dalāʾil und Die Šifāʾ von Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2016.
Déroche, François. Islamic Codicology: An Introduction to the Study of Manuscripts in Arabic Scripts. London: Al-Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation, 2005.
Déroche, François. Qurʾans of the Umayyads. A First Overview. Leiden: Brill, 2013.
Déroche, François, and Carine Juvin. Special Issue: From Visual Power to Private Stories: Inscribed Objects from the Medieval Arab World. Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World, vol. 4. (2023).
Dietrich, Nikolaus, Ludger Lieb, and Nele Schneidereit, eds. Theory and Classification of Material Text Cultures: Concluding Volume of the CRC 933. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024.
van Dussen, Michael, and Michael Johnston, eds. The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Engel, Patricia. “Reversibility—Minimal Intervention—Conservation-Codicology: Terminology as a Tool for Awareness Raising.” Journal of Paper Conservation 1 (2023), online.
Evans, Ingrid Austveg. “Researching Mamluk Syria from a Living Room in Berlin: Reflections on Positionality and Manuscripts in an Age of Digital Reproduction.” (forthcoming).
Fiddyment, Sarah, Matthew D. Teasdale, Jiří Vnouček, Élodie Lévêque, Annelise Binois, and Matthew J. Collins, “So you want to do biocodicology? A field guide to the biological analysis of parchment.” Heritage Science 7, 35 (2019) online.
Friedrich, Michael, and Cosima Schwarke, eds. One-Volume Libraries: Composite and Multiple-Text Friedrich Manuscripts. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.
Gacek, Adam. Arabic Manuscripts: A Vademecum for Readers. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
Gallop, Annabel Teh. Lasting Impressions. Seals from the Islamic World. London: British Library, 2010.
Gallop, Annabel Teh. “The Art of the Qurʾan in Java.” Jurnal SUHUF 8, no. 01 (2015): 215–229.
El-Ghawaby, Farid. “Localizing Johann Gottfried Wetzstein and other ‘Western’ Actors of Translocation Processes in the 19th and early 20th Century.” (forthcoming).
Görke, Andreas, and Konrad Hirschler, eds. Manuscript Notes as Documentary Sources, Beirut: Orient-Institut, 2012.
Gruendler, Beatrice. The Rise of the Arabic Book. New Haven: Harvard University Press, 2020.
Hemmungs Wirtén, Eva. “Globalization”. In The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book, ed. James Raven, 348–368. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Hirji, Zulfikar. “The Siyu Qurʾans: Three Illuminated Qurʾan Manuscripts from Coastal East Africa.” In Approaches to the Qurʾan in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Zulfikar Hirji, 431–472. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Hirschler, Konrad. Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library: The Ashrafiya Library Catalogue. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
Hirschler, Konrad, “Saleroom Fiction Versus Provenance. Historicizing Manuscripts via Their Marginal and Material Logic (Schøyen Fragments 1776).” Journal of Islamic Manuscripts (2022) 13: 1–54.
Holsinger, Bruce. On Parchment. Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023.
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Juvin, Carine and François Déroche. Special Issue: From Visual Power to Private Stories: Inscribed Objects from the Medieval Arab World. Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World, vol. 4 (2023).
Kiraz, George Anton and Sabine Schmidtke, eds. Literary Snippets. Colophons Across Space and Time. New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 2023.
Kooria, Mahmood. “Texts as Objects of Value and Veneration. Islamic Law Books in the Indian Ocean Littoral.” Sociology of Islam 6 (2018): 60–83.
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Liebrenz, Boris. Die Rifāʿīya aus Damaskus. Eine Privatbibliothek in osmanischer Zeit und ihr kulturelles Umfeld. Leiden: Brill, 2016.
Lied, Liv Ingeborg. Invisible Manuscripts: Textual Scholarship and the Survival of 2Baruch. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021.
Van Lit, Lambertus Cornelis. Among Digitized Manuscripts: Philology, Codicology, Paleography in a Digital World. Leiden: Brill, 2020.
Lydon, Ghislaine. On Trans-Saharan Trails. Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Messick, Brinkley. The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Messick, Brinkley. Sharia Scripts. A Historical Anthropology. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
Al-Munajjid, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn. Qawāʾid fahrasat al-makhṭūṭāt al-ʿarabiyya. 1st ed. Beirut: Dār al-kitāb al-jadīd, 1973.
Nichols, Stephen. “Introduction. Philology in a Manuscript Culture.” The New Philology. Special Issue of Speculum (1990)1.65: 1–10.
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Phan, Hao N. “Cham Manuscripts, the Endangered Cultural Heritage from a Lost Kingdom.” Restaurator. International Journal for the Preservation of Library and Archival Material 36, no. 2 (2015): 101–120.
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Probert, Marcela A. Garcia, and Petra Sijpesteijn, eds. Amulets and Talismans of the Middle East and North Africa in Context. Transmission, Efficacy and Collections. Leiden: Brill, 2022.
Quenzer, Jörg B., ed. Exploring Written Artefacts.Objects, Methods, and Concepts. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.
Quiring-Zoche, Rosemarie. “The Colophon in Arabic Manuscripts. A Phenomenon without a Name.” Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 4 (2013): 49–81.
Regourd, Anne, ed. The Trade in Papers Marked with Non-Latin Characters/Le commerce des papiers à marques à caractères non-latins. Documents and History/Documents et histoire. Leiden: Brill, 2018.
Rudy, Kathryn M. Piety in Pieces: How Medieval Readers Customized their Manuscripts. Open Book Publishers, 2016.
Rustow, Marina. The Lost Archive. Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.
Ṣafarī Āq Qalʿah, ʿAlī. Nuskhah shinākhat: Pazhūhish-nāmah-i nuskhah shināsi-yi nusakh-i khaṭṭī-yi fārisī. Tehran: Markaz-i pazhūhishī-yi mīrāth-i maktūb, 1390 Sh/2011.
Schaefer, Karl. “Malleable Magic: Medieval Arabic Block Printed Amulets and Their Audiences.” In Agency: How Manuscripts Affect and Create Social Realities, 149–167, edited by Michael Kohs and Sabine Kienitz. Hamburg: Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, 2023.
Scheper, Karin. “Bindings, Bags and Boxes: Sewn and Unsewn Manuscript Formats in the Islamic World.” In Tied and Bound: A Comparative View on Manuscript Binding. Studies in Manuscript Cultures, edited by Alessandro Bausi and Michael Friedrich, 121–154. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023.
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Scheper, Karin. The Technique of Islamic Bookbinding Methods, Materials and Regional Varieties. Leiden: Brill, 2015.
El Shamsy, Ahmed. Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.
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Witkam, Jan Just. “The Human Element between Text and Reader. The Ijaza in Arabic Manuscripts.” The History of the Book in the Middle East, edited by Geoffrey Roper, 89–112. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.
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Yahya, Farouk. “Paper Wheels with Strings Used for Divination from Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula.” In Agency: How Manuscripts Affect and Create Social Realities, edited by Michael Kohs and Sabine Kienitz, 31–44. Hamburg: Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, 2023.
“Manuscripts of the Qurʾān”, Special Issue: Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 11, no. 3 (2020).
Conference Papers
Benson, Jake. “Persian Manuscripts in the John Rylands Research Institute and Library: Aims and Approaches.” Taking the Past into the Future: Studying, Preserving, and Understanding Islamicate Manuscripts, University of Edinburgh, 11–12 May, 2023.
Gallop, Annabel Teh. “Facebook Philology: The Contribution of Social Media to the Study of Manuscripts from Indonesia and the Malay World.” Simposium Internasional Pernaskahan Nusantara XVI MANASSA, Perpustakaan Nasional RI, Jakarta 26–29 September 2016.
Blogs and Blog Entries
Palmobo, Cecilia and Birte Kristiansen. “‘It belongs in a museum” … or does it’? https://emco.hcommons.org/2021/03/19/it-belongs-in-a-museum-or-does-it/
Singhanan, Methaporn. “Manuscript Textiles: Weaving the Thread of Faith.”
https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2023/07/manuscript-textiles-weaving-the-thread-of-faith.html
https://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/islamicbooks/resources/
https://guides.lib.umich.edu/islamicmsstudies/bibres/
Websites
Brady, Anna. “Quran quietly sells for record £7m despite questions over its provenance,” The Art Newspaper, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/quran-sells-for-record-price. Accessed December 18, 2023.
“Islamic Manuscripts” http://www.islamicmanuscripts.info
“Materiale Textkulturen” https://www.materiale-textkulturen.org
“CSMCS Hamburg” https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de
“Ethical and Responsible Research at CSMC” https://www.csmc.uni–hamburg.de/about/ethics.html
“Mouse and Manuscript” https://mouse.digitalscholarship.nl