Activities

Daniel Kinitz gives a lecture on the prerequisites of digital philology in the seminar "Digital Philology" (University of Leipzig) on 18 January 2023.

The city of Baghdad occupies a central role in the history of the Islamic world as the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate and a hub for the production of knowledge since its foundation in the 2nd/8th century. In the 7th/13th century, the city was famously conquered by Mongol troops under the command of Hülegü and the Abbasid caliph was executed. This event is often seen as a catastrophic watershed for the Islamic world in general and has spurred different, at times contradictory, interpretations about the history of Baghdad before and after the Mongol conquest. This is particularly contentious with regard to the role of books and knowledge transmission. Some scholars argue that the Mongols destroyed the city’s fabled libraries and completely disrupted cultural activity in the region. More recently, others have suggested that despite the impact that the conquest certainly had in the region, the city remained one of the prominent cultural centres of the Islamic world.  
The main concern of the workshop is to explore the production, dissemination and consumption of knowledge in Baghdad from the perspective of manuscript studies. We aim to investigate what the production and circulation of manuscripts can tell us about the cultural life of Baghdad and its environs before, during and after the Mongol conquest.

Programme

Inaugural lecture

1 December 2022, 5 pm
Managing Iraq’s Cultural Heritage in the 20th Century: Foreign Occupations, Wars and Dictatorships
Dr. Saad Eskander | Cultural Heritage Advisor, Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Antiquities, Iraq; Former Director, Iraq National Library

Online registration: https://oeaw-ac-at.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_FG9Fl3x0RxmQFfbj5

Workshop

2 December 2022, 9.00 - 17.30
Online registration: https://oeaw-ac-at.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_M2L-Kit-SX2K3PmV62B_RA

3 December 2022, 10.00 - 17.00
Online registration: https://oeaw-ac-at.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_np7gCAUqTj6at12WmeIijw

Verena Klemm is invited as speaker for the Ismaili Studies Conference (London, 21-23 November 2022)

Topic: "Transregional and Regional Ismaili Tradition in Syria: Production, Transmission, Reception"
The eent will take place in the Aga Khan Centre as well as online
Information and Zoom-registration through the webpage of The Institut of Ismaili Studies

Creating a Dynamic Knowledge Graph of the Arabic Manuscript Tradition
Conference presentation by Daniel Kinitz at the Deutscher
Orientalistentag 2022

How can we generate and integrate information on manuscripts in such a way that research can gain new insights? Bibliotheca Arabica’s digital research platform aims to support researchers to shed new light on the production, transmission, and reception of Arabic literatures from the 12th to the 19th century. The heterogeneity of the sources - especially manuscript catalogues, reference works and manuscript notes - creates the need for a flexible approach to generate and process manuscript-related data.That is to say, a research platform has to be more than a static repository, granting access to more or less known facts. Rather, creating a knowledge graph for the Arabic manuscript tradition requires a dynamic, multi-layered modelling of data as well as a flexible workflow of data integration.

This includes the retroactive, increasing tapping of sources, implemented through a flexible data extraction process, a permanent enrichment of existing data, e.g., cross-linking entities, as well as flexible authority control, taking new findings into account. No fixed input mask is used, but rather different layers of data (catalogue layer, processing layer, output layer) are being integrated, thereby allowing for contradicting fact(oid)s and differing categories. While recording and cross-linking entities like works, manuscripts, and related agents, the platform makes the provenance chain of each factual statement transparent and enables researchers to assess the quality of a specific source.
The talk will present approaches and best practices in the making and show relevant features of Bibliotheca Arabica’s new research platform.

“Tracing a forgotten tradition: Commentaries written on al-Baghawī’s post-canonical hadith collection Maṣābīḥ al-sunna”

On March 16, 2022, Stefanie Brinkmann gave a presentation at the webinar series “Pre-modern Islamic Manuscripts”, organised by the NoMansLand Project at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, PI: Dr. Bruno de Nicola.

Why did certain literatures survive while others fell into oblivion? Much has been written about the erratic transmission of literatures, focusing on reasons for the loss of books and/or different parameters and sources to reconstruct their transmission. In line with these questions, this lecture wants to discuss how we systematically can trace the production and transmission of works, and possibly map their circulation and popularity. It will be illustrated by the case study of the rather forgotten commentary tradition that evolved from al-Ḥusayn b. Masʿūd al-Baghawī’s (d. 516/1122) post-canonical “digest” ḥadīth collection Maṣābīḥ al-sunna. This commentary tradition reached a peak in Mongol and post-Mongol Iran, Iraq, and Azerbaijan, with a limited production in Mamluk Syria, before moving on to the Ottoman Empire. The necessary interplay of different sources and parameters to reconstruct this once vivid commentary tradition shows the potential, but also the challenges for ongoing and future research.

Link to the recorded presentation:
https://www.oeaw.ac.at/iran/nomansland/events/

The main concern of the workshop is to explore the production, dissemination and consumption of knowledge in Baghdad from the perspective of manuscript studies. We aim to investigate what the production and circulation of manuscripts can tell us about the cultural life of Baghdad and its environs before, during and after the Mongol conquest. Papers should consider either individual manuscripts or collections of codices that shed light on different aspects of continuity and change in the intellectual life of the region. The workshop is organized jointly by the projects

• Agents: authors, copyists, and patrons.
• Localities: places of production, distribution, and consumption.
• Types of knowledge: religious, secular, or scientific.
• Networks: the interaction of Baghdad with other centres of knowledge.
• Characteristics of specific literary genres and their manuscripts. 

Heterodoxe Literaturgeschichte(n): Fatimidische und ismailitische Überlieferung regional und überregional

Link zum Programm

In an advanced course on Arabic codicology, Boris Liebrenz joins a cast of renowned experts to teach about the history and characteristics of Islamic seals in manuscripts. Teaching language is Arabic.

Link

On December 1, 2021, Boris Liebrenz gave a presentation at the MESA Annual Meeting 2021 in Montreal. 

The political and cultural relations between Byzantium and the nascent Ottoman realm were often marked by hostilities. However, that substantial contact on all levels nonetheless happened is also true. The reception of classical Greek authors such as Aristotle in Arabic literature by means of a number of early translations is well known. However, the converse presence of Arabic literature in the Byzantine capital is much less attested, nor is it widely expected. Could Aristotle have returned to the center of Greek culture in an Arab garb? Who would have been the audience of this translation? Who would have brought it there and for what purpose?

A manuscript now preserved at the Bibliothèque national in Paris shows that, indeed, at least one early Ottoman scholar studied his Aristotle in Constantinople long before it was conquered by the a descendent of his sultan. This talk will showcase the use of minute manuscript notes as means to provide broader context, sometimes a surprising one, for the literature that scholarship tends to study as disembodied texts. The trajectories of manuscripts, but also the lives of their owners and readers, can reveal unexpected connections or complicate modern assumptions of textual histories.

More information on the panel series here: https://teol.ku.dk/afd/the-european-quran/conference-2021/ 

Find the program here: https://teol.ku.dk/afd/the-european-quran/conference-2021/TurkishWars_conferenceprogramme_final.pdf 

 We are happy to announce our upcoming hybrid workshop

which will be held at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin from 27 to 29 October, 2021

The workshop is co-organised by the “Orient-Digital” project at Berlin State Library and “Bibliotheca Arabica” (Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Leipzig).

More information in this blogpost: https://blog.sbb.berlin/authority-control-and-oriental-manuscripts/

This talk gives insights in the story of a 1000 year old Arabic text on astrology transmitted in more than 100 Persian, Turkish, Latin and (Judeo-) Arabic manuscripts.
Nadine Löhr investigates the social and literary history of Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos in the Arabic speaking world. The treatise was translated into Arabic in at least two different versions between the 7th and 9th century and spawned several commentaries, most of which were lost in time. However, a commentary by the Fatimid physician and astrologer ‘Alī Ibn Riḍwān’s (d. ca. 1061), Tafsīr al-Maqālāt al-arba’ fī l-qaḍāʾ bi-l-nujūm alʿā l-ḥawādith was studied, read and copied for many centuries and throughout cultural and linguistic boundaries. Apart from an accessible textual and interpretational guideline which serves likewise as a safeguard for a correct understanding of the ancient Greek text, Ibn Riḍwān gives three concrete examples for the interpretation of planetary constellations. He provides a detailed study of his own horoscope, as well as the horoscopes of an Egyptian boy and a native whom Ibn Riḍwān observed from the beginning of his life until the end.
These three examples for natal interpretations shall be the focus of this study. We examine the marginal annotations and textual variations - we want to know:
– what can reader’s annotations tell us about the reception of these three horoscopes in different cultures?
– was the text updated in time or adapted to other cultures on linguistic or technical levels?
– what do we know about the dissemination and prominence of the text in certain regions throughout the centuries?

Die Forschungsbibliothek Gotha der Universität Erfurt lädt alle Interessierten herzlich zur nächsten Online-Veranstaltung in der Gesprächsreihe „Gotha Manuscript Talks“ am Mittwoch, 3. November, um 18.15 Uhr ein.

Soziale und politische Faktoren, wie Mission, Auswanderung, Verfolgung und Diaspora, trugen wesentlich zur weiträumigen Verbreitung und zur Diversifizierung von Lehre und Literatur der heterodoxen Gemeinschaft der Ismailiten bei. Anhand einer Gruppe von Sammelhandschriften (maǧmū'āt) befasst sich der Vortrag mit der Literaturgeschichte der Ismailiten in Syrien, deren Überlieferung weitgehend verborgen, nicht erfasst oder zerstört worden ist. Multiple text und composite manuscripts erweisen sich hierbei als wahre Fundgruben, die Einblick in die Zirkulation und Rezeption von Texten sowie in die Bedingungen und Formen ihrer Tradierung und Bewahrung bieten können.

Link zur Veranstalung

Talking about commentaries often implies that we approach the texts with our contemporary 21st century notions, concepts, and terminology. We would like to draw the attention to those text passages where the author expresses their intention to write the commentary. In many cases, the preface offers such insights, besides other potential instances.

29 November 2021 6:30 pm Stefanie Brinkmann and Nadine Löhr discuss the importance of prefaces for the study of commentaries with colleagues from the Commentarial Forms in Literature project (funded by the DAAD) and show some results of their research on prefaces and introductions to commentaries on Arabic hadith literature (Brinkmann) and astral sciences (Löhr).

Boris Liebrenz | Abraham Yahuda and the Globalisation of the Middle Eastern Manuscript Market 

“The manuscript business of Abraham Yahuda could be framed as part of a long tradition through which thousands of volumes from the Middle East ended up in western European and North American libraries. Since the seventeenth century, travelers, consuls, merchants, soldiers, and scholars were able to assemble significant collections of such artefacts. The question of where, through whose agency, or by what means they acquired their libraries is the subject of much recent scrutiny and not always easy to answer.

And yet, when looking at his predecessors, one thing immediately stands out: there was hardly anyone even remotely as successful as Abraham Yahuda. Which begs the fundamental question of how he was able to amass such unparalleled treasures.
An analysis of manuscript notes is unlikely to bring any concrete results in this regard, but reveals general trends in the local and trans-regional book markets. Expectedly, the Yahuda section of Princeton’s Garrett collection reveals many overlaps with the books collected by earlier dealers. At the same time, it will be argued that his activities mark a new stage in how manuscripts were collected in both the Middle East as well as Western Europe and North America.

This talk will build on the cataloguing of provenance data for some of the major European collectors of Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman manuscripts up to the nineteenth century. Based on this source material, it will explore what sets Yahuda’s collecting apart from that of earlier periods and where he reflects trends in the manuscript market of the broader region.

Link

On 26 July Nadine Löhr will speak on the  International Congress of History of Sciences and Technologies (Prague) about marginal and interlinear glosses in the Arabic Tetrabiblos manuscripts

Symposium organizer: Benno van Dalen (Germany), Nathan Sidoli (Japan)

Chair: Benno van Dalen (Germany), David Juste (Germany)

An Almost Forgotten Contribution to the Tetrabiblos

Authors

Abstract text

Lecture at the virtual  Dreiländer-Kolloquium, 16 July 2021.

15. July2021 Stefanie Brinkmann: “Analysis of Marginal Commentaries in Bukhari Manuscripts of the Timurid Period”
International Online Conference Ancient and Rare Manuscripts of the “Sahih al-Bukhari” in World Libraries, Imam Bukhari International Scientific Research Center, Samarkand


The international online conference, organised by the Imam Bukhari International Scientific Research Center, Samarqand, was dedicated to the manuscript heritage of al-Bukhārī’s al-Jāmiʿ al-Ṣaḥīḥ. It addressed issues of important and less known holdings, conservation and preservation, and above all cultural contexts of the manuscript production and transmission, as well as al-Bukhārī’s place in ḥadīth scholarship.

Conference Programe

The webinar, featuring Verena Klemm, Boris Liebrenz, and Thomas Efer, is hosted by the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies (Near Eastern Studies).

Please register in advance  here

Arabic literatures are usually studied as purely creative products, a body of texts disembodied from their material life. Bibliotheca Arabica, in contrast, focusses on the context, the production, transmission, and reception of the manuscripts that for centuries carried the works we study today. Knowing what was copied, read, endowed, or owned when, where, and by whom, offers new perspectives on this immensely rich tradition. However, such a research agenda requires the collection, cross-reference, normalization, and visualization of widely diverse data created over more than one and a half millennia.
The long-term perspective of the Academy Program offers a unique environment to tackle such an ambitious task for an extended period. Over 18 years, the collection of data culled from biographical dictionaries, catalogues, and original manuscript research will enable sharply focused studies (the fate of single books or libraries) as well as broader overviews (literary trends and centers). The project’s database as a combination of bio-bibliography and manuscript reference, including a systematic collection and edition of manuscript notes, will provide a versatile tool not only for our own research agenda, but for the field as a whole.
This presentation will offer an overview of the scope, progress, and challenges of Bibliotheca Arabica, illuminated through exemplary case studies of libraries and marginal commentaries. It will showcase the database tools that are being developed as the backbone of our analytical endeavor.

Lecture: 26 March 2021, 14.00-15.30
Title: What’s in Genre? Defining Hadith Commentary

Starting with the definition of commentary by Eric van Lit, and hadith commentary by Joel Blecher, the presentation sheds a light on the restrictions of these definitions and illustrates problematic issues and border cases for the field of hadith commentary. The presentation is part of the lecture series of the working group “Practices of Commentary” (https://globalcommentary.utoronto.ca).

On Friday 19 March 2021 Boris Liebrenz gives a lecture at Columbia University within the series

Libraries in the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Bilad al-Sham:
The Jerusalem Khalidiyya Library in Context

The lecture "Of Waqfs and Worms: The Khalidiyya Through Its Manuscript Notes" is followed by a commentary by Marina Rustow and a Q&A session.
A recording of the talk is available through the facebook page of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University

Permalink

Research Paper Discussion "Off the Record - Networks of Lost Arabic Books"

based on an analysis of the works mentioned in Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa's History of Physicians.

Virtual Forum  Communities of Knowledge Interreligious Networks of Scholars in Ibn Abi Usaybiʿa’s History of the Physicians

Publications for the collective volume: Jews, Christans, and Muslims as Colleagues and Collaborators in the Abbasid Near East

Evening Lecture (5-7 pm) by Prof. Dr. Verena Klemm at the Opening Workshop of the 2nd project period of the DFG Priority Programme Transottomanica (2020-23), Leipzig.

The Transottomanica research programme can be found here

On Monday 5th October 2020, Boris Librenz gives insights into seals.

Maktabāt al-Shām wa Miṣr is hosting the conference "Libraries in Syria and Egypt in the Mamluk and Ottoman Periods based on Manuscript Notes", in cooperation with the Freie Universität Berlin and The Institute of Arabic Manuscripts.

The conference recordng can be accessed via here:

Part 1

Part 2

Programme

On occasion of the opening ceremony of the DFG-Longterm-Project: Digitale Edition des Werks von Ibn Nubāṭah al-Miṣrī, University of Münster: Keynote Lecture “Eine neue Blütezeit der Arabistik”

https://www.uni-muenster.de/ALEA/Aktuelles/index.html

Prof. Dr. Bauer, Thomas: Ibn Nubātah al-Miṣrī (686-768/1287-1366): Life and Works. Part I: The Life of Ibn Nubātah. In: Mamlūk Studies Review 12,1 (2008), 1-35

Daniel Kinitz and Boris Liebrenz presented Bibliotheca Arabica at the Egyptian-German workshop "Digitization of Books and Manuscripts" (رقمنة الكتب والمخطوطات) at the National Libarary of Egypt in Cairo.

Programme Dar al-Kutub Workshop (English)

Programme Dar al-Kutub Workshop (Arabic)

International workshop “Marginal commentaries in Arabic manuscripts”, Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig, organized by Stefanie Brinkmann

Programme