Bibliotheca Arabica News & Activities

Im Rahmen des Dreiländerkolloquiums am 19. Januar 2024, welches an der Universität Jena stattfindet, hält Dr. Boris Liebrenz einen Vortrag zu der Bibliothek Abū Bakr al-Širwānīs. 

Der Vortrag findet von 15.30 Uhr bis 16.00 Uhr im Senatssaal (Fürstengraben 1) statt. 

Hier finden Sie das Programm des Dreiländerkolloquiums. 

Im Rahmen des Dreiländerkolloquiums am 19. Januar 2024, welches an der Universität Jena stattfindet, hält Dr. Daniel Kinitz einen Vortrag zu der Forschungsplattform Khizana.

Der Vortrag findet von 15.00 Uhr bis 15.30 Uhr im Senatssaal (Fürstengraben 1) statt. 

Hier finden Sie das Programm des Dreiländerkolloquiums. 

Das Akademievorhaben Bibliotheca Arabica hat für den 22. Januar Frau Jun.-Prof. Dr. Katharina Meinecke zu einem Gastvortrag in die Akademie eingeladen. Interessierte Besucherinnen und Besucher sind herzlich willkommen.

Der Vortrag findet am 22. Januar 2024 von 18.15 Uhr bis 20.00 Uhr an der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Karl-Tauchnitz-Straße 1, 04107 Leipzig, statt.

Frau Katharina Meinecke ist Juniorprofessorin für Archäologie des Mittelmeerraums an der Universität Leipzig und im Wintersemester 2023/24 Fellow am Center for Advanced Study "RomanIslam – Center for Comparative Empire and Transcultural Studies" der Universität Hamburg. Als Klassische Archäologin liegen ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte im Bereich der hellenistischen Skulptur, der römischen Bestattungskultur, der digitalen Bildwissenschaften sowie der visuellen und materiellen Kulturen der „langen Spätantike“. Insbesondere beschäftigte sie sich mit der Bauornamentik des frühislamischen Wüstenschlosses Mschatta und der Herrscherrepräsentation der Umayyaden. Dabei untersucht sie die Potenziale von Globalisierungstheorie als Konzept für die Erforschung antiker visueller Kulturen. Bevor sie an die Universität Leipzig kam, war sie am Deutschen Archäologischen Institut in Rom, an der Technischen Universität Berlin, an der Universität Wien sowie als Gastprofessorin an der Masaryk-Universität in Brünn tätig.

Vorislamische Bildmotive in der visuellen Kultur der Umayyaden: Globale Perspektiven und Ebenen der Aneignung

Die visuelle und materielle Kultur der Umayyaden, der ersten Dynastie des Islamischen Reiches (661-750 n.Chr.), ist durch die Aneignung ikonographischer Motive und Formen aus unterschiedlichen Regionen des Kalifats gekennzeichnet, die vor allem griechisch-römisch-byzantinischen und sassanidisch-persischen Ursprungs sind. Insbesondere in ihrer Herrscherrepräsentation griffen die Umayyadenkalifen immer wieder auf Motive zurück, die in der spätantiken Welt eine geradezu globale Verbreitung genossen. In diesem Vortrag sollen anhand von Beispielen die unterschiedlichen Ebenen der Aneignung vorislamischer Bildmotive ebenso wie das Zusammenspiel globaler und lokaler Elemente in der Herrscherrepräsentation der Umayyaden nachvollzogen werden.

Bibliotheca Arabica and Researchers of the Majlis project (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) will engage in insightful discussions covering a wide array of topics, including digital tools, data modeling, research methodologies, and more. On Wednesday, Konrad Hirschler will introduce the recently launched audition certificate platform.

For more information on the Majlis project see: https://www.jewisharabiccultures.fak12.uni-muenchen.de/majlis/

Abstract

The collectanea of an eminent Ismaili scholar from Gujarat (19th century)
This essay takes as its focus the personal notebook of the eminent Ismaili scholar Sayyidī
Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Hamdānī(1833-1898) from Surāt. He filled it over time with a wide variety
of content, using several languages (Arabic, Gujarati)and scripts (Arabic, Gujarati, Gujarati in
Arabic and Persian Script, Secret Script ….) and different text and table formats (excerpts of
classical religious, philosophical and scientific texts, marginal and interlinear comments,
magical formula, lists, sketches, interreligious and correlation and comparative tables for
astronomical terms and constellations, time measure and other systems, chronologies,
currencies. The book bears witness to the versatile intellectual interests of its owner, his mental
focus, and his memory, as well as the working methods of his owner.
The manuscript (ms. 1662) is part of the famous Hamdani Collection, an old family library
whose oldest manuscripts come from Yemen, at the Institute of Ismaili Studies inLondon. In
our contribution, the manuscript will be shortly presented in its historical contexts and then
described in terms of its materiality, organization and content. On this basis, I would like to
contribute to ongoing debates about a differentiated typology and terminology of notebooks.

Stefanie Brinkmann gives a lecture on “Kommentare in Krisenzeiten? Die
Kommentartradition der islamischen Traditionssammlung Maṣābīḥ as-Sunna von al-Baġawī
(d. 516/1122)“ on the symposium on commentary literature Kommentieren als Kulturtechnik.
Relationalität – Medialität – Resonanz. The symposium takes place 12 – 14 July 2023, at the
Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel.

See the programm: (PDF)

Daniel Kinitz and Thomas Efer (Leipzig University) give a talk at the DH 2023 in Graz on how to tackle the challenges of building a knowledge graph of a premodern Islamicate manuscript tradition.

Introduction
How can we generate and integrate data on a pre-modern, Arabic book tradition in such a way that research can gain new insights? Within the long-term project “Bibliotheca Arabica” [Brinkmann/Löhr 2021], we are creating an agile knowledge graph integrating a wide range of data on (handwritten) Arabic manuscripts and their historical context. Our aim is to create a digital research environment to investigate the production, transmission and reception of Arabic manuscripts and their social environment as clusters of linked entities: scholars linked to works with students as readers, reproduced by scribes in manuscripts, linked by ownership notes and combined to historical libraries, etc.

See the full programme: https://www.conftool.pro/dh2023/sessions.php

The paper will be published in the conference proceedings: Digital Humanities 2023: Book of Abstracts.

Tariq Yousef (Hamburg University) and Daniel Kinitz give a talk at the DH 2023 in Graz on "Similarity-Based Clustering of Premodern Arabic Names".

1 Introduction
Data repositories must manage the identity of their entities. In the case of intellectual history, the challenge lies in premodern, and therefore non-standardised entity names. Our use case deals with Arabic persons related manuscripts (scholars, scribes, etc.). Thus, multiple occurrences of the same person with different spellings and name compositions must be identified and disambiguated. This paper presents a graph clustering approach that combines literal and numerical properties (name and year of event) with promising results. The particular challenge lies in the vast variability of name variants and sometimes unspecific dates.

See the full programme: https://www.conftool.pro/dh2023/sessions.php

The paper will be published in the conference proceedings.

On 7 July 2023, Daniel Kinitz gives an online talk at the summerschool "Thinking with Islamicate Manuscripts: Critical Approaches to Historical Methodology, History of Collections, and Digital Tools in Islamic Studies" (Vienna, July 3–7, 2023).
https://summeruniversity.ceu.edu/courses/thinking-islamicate-manuscripts-critical-approaches-historical-methodology-history

Manuscript Catalogues in the Digital Age?

What digital tools and methods do we need to gain new insights into Islamicate manuscripts? What data already exists and in what form? Would a central (digital) union catalog be an adequate solution to answer research questions? The talk will explore these questions through a thought experiment: What if we design our own digital research platform (wishes) and confront it with the technical, academic, financial and legal realities (facts)? Among other things, we will have a brief look at (1) AI-based text recognition and how it works in principle with Arabic script, as well as possible sources of error, (2) authority control (as identity management) and what it means in practice, and (3) the possibilities offered by database queries.

On July 2-3, 2023, Boris Liebrenz will teach at the summerschool "Thinking with Islamicate Manuscripts: Critical Approaches to Historical Methodology, History of Collections, and Digital Tools in Islamic Studies" (Vienna, July 3–7, 2023).
https://summeruniversity.ceu.edu/courses/thinking-islamicate-manuscripts-critical-approaches-historical-methodology-history

Besides hands-on demonstrations and readings with the students throughout the week-long course, he will give a lecture entitled:

Manuscript Notes as a Historical Source

Abstract  Arabic translations of Claudius Ptolemy’s Almagest spawned numerous commentaries, summaries, and introductions. Throughout history none of the derivative works became as prominent as Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī's 13^th century recension (Taḥrīr al-Majisṭī). The yet unedited text is witnessed in at least 170 manuscripts as well as translations into Persian and Sanskrit, and had major impact on the study of astronomy in the Arabic speaking world.

The text relies primarily on the Arabic translation credited to Isḥāq b. Ḥunayn (d. c. 911) with corrections by Thābit b. Qurra (d. 901), but includes material from other Almagest versions and earlier commentaries, some of which are considered lost today. With these sources at hand al-Ṭūsī rephrased, corrected, and updated the Almagest. The diligent recension was originally written while al-Ṭūsī still resided at the Ismāʿīlī citadel of Alamut, but extensively studied and copied under Mongol patronage. Over the centuries, a rich literary tradition developed around the Taḥrīr, with renowned astronomers such as Niẓām al-Dīn al-Nīsābūrī (d. 1328/29) and ʿAbd al-ʿAlī al-Birjandī (d. c. 1527) writing super-commentaries that further facilitated the dissemination of the work.

This talk addresses the temporal and geographical distribution of extant manuscripts and takes a closer look at the surviving witnesses from the Mongol period. We attempt to trace the influence al-Ṭūsī’s colleagues and students had on the dissemination and study of the text, focusing in particular on marginal annotations and manuscript notes.

Please register with https://oeaw-ac-at.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_6G1txBG3TpyUyIjs8TaPwA

This is the 6th lecture in this year's Webinar series organised by the NoMansLand research project (FWF Y 1232) dedicated to the study of Islamic manuscripts in pre-modern Iran and Central Asia.

Convenor: Project team "Nomads' Manuscripts Landscape"

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