Bibliotheca Arabica News & Activities

 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/

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).

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?

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

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

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 

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.

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

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

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

Link zum Programm

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. 

“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 long-term research project "Bibliotheca Arabica – Towards a New History of Arabic Literature" based at the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig (Germany) invites applications for a part-time position (50%) as research associate in the field of computer science.

The application deadline is July 31, 2022.
The contract period is 2 years, with an option of extension until 2035.

The offiicial call (en/de) can be found here PDF (en),  PDF (de) .

Applications are welcome in English or German.

For more information on the project see www.saw-leipzig.de/bibliotheca-arabica.

For those interested in the manuscript sources of Arabic literature, the rich book collections of Baghdad, Berlin, Cairo, Damascus, Leiden, London, or Princeton can pride themselves with immense treasures. But there is no place to rival the libraries of modern Istanbul in scope and splendor. This talk will look at the roots of this current state, when the Ottoman capital was the main nexus for the trans-regional circulation of Arabic books for nearly half a millennium between the 15th and 19th centuries.

More than a simple point of provenance, Constantinople and the ways books took to and from its markets and book-shelves represents the lives, often rich, sometimes tumultuous, of books and those who interacted with them. As a gravitational center of great attraction for books from all over the vast Ottoman empire and beyond, it was also the source for many who wanted to collect on their own. This paper will highlight some of the central actors in this process, particularly of the 17th and 18th centuries, and show how they helped shape the Arabic literary tradition as we still have it today. Central among these will be Abū Bakr b. Rustam al-Širwānī (d. 1135/1723), one of the era’s most ferocious bibliophiles, whose many books are now scattered all over the world and thus allow us to follow the currents of the book market in every direction.

I will also discuss the basic methodological question of how to write the history of such a book culture. How can we reconstruct the routes a given codex took, the content of libraries, the social settings in which particular texts were circulating?

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.

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

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