This edited volume is the material outcome of an international workshop entitled Social Codicology: The Multiple Lives of Texts in Muslim Societies, held in Rabat on 9–11 October, 2018. Organized by the Netherlands Institute in Morocco (NIMAR) and the Institute of Islamic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin in collaboration with the Centre Jacques Berque, the workshop focused on the social and material aspects of manuscripts in Muslim Societies.

The main objective of the workshop was to go beyond the dominant focus on the reading of texts, manuscripts, and script. Instead, we proposed that books and other written materials have many more uses than just reading, purposes which might often be even more important in the social practices of texts. We strongly encouraged interest in these other aspects of the social life of texts, looking at them as objects and commodities.

Starting from the idea that texts in their material, read, and recited forms have social lives and hence biographies, we explored the idea of social codicology, an interdisciplinary approach that combines philological methods, such as codicology and palaeography, with ethnographic approaches, such as participant observation and the conducting of interviews, as well as questions of positionality. This interdisciplinary approach encourages the study of ritual, mechanical, and social practices, such as book copying, consuming, collecting, storing, venerating, discarding, and preserving, both in historical and contemporary societies. Our particular focus was on the various material dimensions of manuscripts, printed books, documents, and other written materials, and on the specific practices and their social embeddedness in geographical, historical, and linguistic spaces in Muslim South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

The main objective of the workshop was to go beyond the dominant focus on the editing and reading of scripture, manuscripts, documents, and texts as books and other written materials. We emphasized that these materials are geared towards many more uses than merely reading, purposes which might often be even more important in practice. The aim of the workshop was to bring together specialists “working” with manuscript cultures in Muslim contexts, from Indonesia to Timbuktu, from Mozambique to Jerba, in Arabic, Urdu, Malay, Persian, Gujarati, and Malayalam, including academics, curators, collectors, librarians, archaeologists, publishers, and heritage specialists.

In Rabat, we addressed the following questions, thinking collectively about the possibilities and limitations of social codicology, crossing the boundaries of our academic comfort zones and professional disciplines as historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, musicologists, philologists, and codicologists:

• How can we study manuscripts through a lens that includes both the social and the codicological, going beyond the notion of the “archaeology of the book” as a framework of inquiry?

• How can we use social codicology as a methodology, and what are its limitations?

• How can we best study the materiality and social embeddedness of collections, libraries, museums, inventories, book catalogues, and archives?

• How do manuscript production, ownership, collecting, and enshrining practices relate to power relations, the creation of religious, political, and intellectual authority, and forms of conspicuous consumption and preservation?

• What occurs beyond the practice of reading? What other kinds of modi operandi do texts have and what are their biographies? What are the meanings of these practices?

• What role do paratexts and marginalia play in this context?

• How can manuscripts be studied as material objects of production, consumption, and veneration? What is the materiality of cultural production and technologies?

• How can we study forms of the transmission of texts as material objects through deeds of endowment, gifts, exchange, selling, theft, and looting?

• How may we understand the presence of living manuscript traditions, or other modes of non-printed book production, in an era of printing or digitalization?

The papers were divided into no less than ten panels, respectively focusing on the social life of manuscripts and the relationship between history, philology, codicology and ethnography, including discussions on ethics, historicizing social codicology, manuscripts and participant observation, positionality, and gender.

1. Social usages of manuscripts: ritual, politics, authority, scholarship, cultural capital and prestige, leisure, veneration and, ostentation.

2. Practices, politics, and technologies of book production: scribal cultures, writing, copying, forging, collating, glossing, illuminating, illustrating, binding, recording, and digitizing.

3. Material manifestations of texts and their practicalities: codices; scrolls; decrees; broadsheets; safīna notebooks; catalogues and lists (fihrist); palimpsests, letters; talismans; coins; inscriptions, etc.

4. Practices of reading, memorizing and reciting, including teaching, transmission, and learning: aspects of orality and embodiment, ijāzāt and samaʿāt.

5. “Collectology,” ownership, endowment and exchange; including booksellers and trade.

6. Archival practices such as collecting, storing, enshrining, endowing, cataloguing, and displaying.

7. Paratexts, rough edges, and the traces of the social lives of texts: including the recycling and upcycling of manuscripts, commentary cultures, stamps and seals, and talismanic marginalia.

8. Transmission histories and scholarly traditions: regional traditions of philology, including the scripting, editing, and translating of individual texts, anthologies, multiple-text manuscripts etc.

9. Books as textual monuments; heritage, preservation, collections, and power.

10. The afterlife of scripture, texts, and collections; genīza-esque practices of discarding (sacred) texts and the enshrinement thereof.

I warmly thank the participants of the workshop:

Christopher Bahl (Durham University)

Zahir Bhalloo (Universität Hamburg)

Léon Buskens (Leiden University/NIMAR)

Anouk Cohen (CNRS, Paris, Centre Jacques Berque, Rabat)

Carl Dávila (College at Brockport, SUNY)

Adrien Delmas (Centre Jacques Berque, Rabat)

Annabel Teh Gallop (British Library)

Konrad Hirschler (Universität Hamburg)

Shamil Jeppie (University of Cape Town)

Said Aljoumani (Centre for Studies of Manuscript Cultures at the University of Hamburg)

Mahmood Kooria (Ashoka University/Leiden University)

Paul M. Love, Jr. (Al-Akhawayn University, Ifrane)

Laurenz Kern (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin)

Brinkley Messick (Columbia University)

Benedikt Reier (Universität Hamburg)

Anne Regourd (CNRS, Paris)

Nir Shafir (University of California San Diego)

Ismail Warscheid (CNRS, Paris)

Torsten Wollina (De Gruyter Publishers)