Articles in Edited Volumes by Dagmar Riedel
Osmanlı kitap koleksiyonerleri ve koleksiyonları: İtibar ve ihtiras, edited by Tülay Artan and Hatice Aynur, 2022
The article examines the Kashf al-ẓunūn’s circulation inside and outside the Ottoman lands, and i... more The article examines the Kashf al-ẓunūn’s circulation inside and outside the Ottoman lands, and investigates how the reference work reflects seventeenth-century book production in a Muslim majority manuscript culture that co-existed with the emergent print cultures of its Jewish and Christian minorities. I argue that Katib Çelebi (1609–1657) compiled the Kashf al-ẓunūn for a book culture, for which the text of a literary work was perceived as being fully independent of its medium, since the entries are designed to correctly identify written texts, and little to no attention was paid to the particularities of the medium through which they were transmitted.
A Companion to the History of the Book, edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, 2nd ed. , 2019
The chapter approaches the book in Arabic script as the indispensable means for the transmission ... more The chapter approaches the book in Arabic script as the indispensable means for the transmission of knowledge across Eurasia and Africa, within cultures and across cultural boundaries, since the seventh century ad. The state of research can be divided into manuscript and print studies, but there is not yet a history of the book in Arabic script that captures its plurilinear development for over fourteen hundred years. The chapter explores the conceptual and practical challenges that impede the integration of the book in Arabic script into book history at large and includes an extensive reference list that reflects its diversity.
The Digital Humanities and Islamic and Middle East Studies, ed. Elias Muhanna, 2016
Project of the Marie Curie Fellowship at the CSIC by Dagmar Riedel
Individual or communal reading of revelation and other sacred literature is a spiritual practice ... more Individual or communal reading of revelation and other sacred literature is a spiritual practice across faith traditions in literate societies. The "Kitāb al-shifāʾ bi-taʿrīf huqūq al-Muṣṭafā (The book of healing concerning the recognition of the true facts about the Chosen One) has been a bestseller of devotional literature with Muslim audiences for centuries, all over the world. Its author ʿIyāḍ. Mūsā (1083–1149) was an important Maliki jurist who spent most of his professional life as a judge (qāḍī) in Ceuta. A loyal partisan of the Almoravid dynasty (1040–1147), Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ died in exile in Marrakesh, and became as one of the city's saints. Drawing on the evidence of manuscripts and printed versions, this lecture will use the "Shifāʾ" to explore different modes of pious reading in Muslim societies since the twelfth century.
Poster for international workshop, 22-23 Feb. 2018, in Madrid, organized in connection with Marie Curie Fellowship
The two-day event is open to the public, with the exception of a show & tell on Thursday afternoo... more The two-day event is open to the public, with the exception of a show & tell on Thursday afternoon. Seating, however, is limited. If you wish to attend the workshop, please send a RSVP to mashqi.workshop [at] gmail.com by Monday, February 19, 2018. Admission will be based on “first come, first served.”
The workshop's participants will explore religious literature that originated under the particular conditions of “convivencia” in the societies of medieval and early modern Iberia. The participants will employ comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to open new perspectives on how the coexistence of Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities on the Iberian Peninsula is reflected in their respective literary traditions. The focus will be on works concerning prophets and saints.
My Islamic Books site on FlickR is inspired by the crowdsourcing photography project of the Libra... more My Islamic Books site on FlickR is inspired by the crowdsourcing photography project of the Library of Congress. The site was created in November 2011 in order to test whether crowdsourcing will also work for a census of extant copies of popular works of Arabic and Persian literatures. I am using this FlickR page to collect and share information about copies of the Kitāb al-Shifāʾ by Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ (1083-1149), whether they are manuscripts, lithographs, or printed books.
This project will examine the manuscripts of a biography of the Prophet Muhammad (d. ca.632), wri... more This project will examine the manuscripts of a biography of the Prophet Muhammad (d. ca.632), written by the Maliki jurist Qadi ‘Iyad (1083-1149), in order to elucidate the historical context of the work’s enduring popularity with Muslim readers. The Kitab al-shifa’ fi ta‘rif huquq al-Mustafa (The book of healing concerning the recognition of the true facts about the chosen one) circulated widely both inside and outside the Islamic West. A large number of manuscripts, written between the 13th and the early 20th century, are known to be extant, but no autograph has been preserved. The project will approach the work’s manuscripts as material evidence for how readers engaged with the text and for how their interpretation evolved over time. Drawing on the methodologies of codicology and critical bibliography, as developed by literary critics and cultural historians for research on Medieval and Renaissance Europe, the manuscript analysis will document changing modes of production, transmission, and reading. In order to advance the integration of Digital Humanities into Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Open Source tools will be employed to map the circulation of al-Shifa’ copies. Since Qadi ‘Iyad is one of the authorities of Maliki Islam in North Africa, the research will be conducted at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) in Madrid under the supervision of Dr. Maribel Fierro, an international authority of the history of the Islamic West. The results will be published as an interpretative study, accompanied by a database of al-Shifa’ copies and a visualization of their circulation; the three parts will be available Open Access on the CSIC website. Analyzing the material evidence preserved by al-Shifa’ copies will provide major new insights into Muslim approaches to the veneration of the Prophet Muhammad since the Middle Ages, thereby refocusing the discussion of whether in Islam religious education stands in the way of progress and modernization.
Articles in Academic Journals by Dagmar Riedel
I will explore the emergence of Arabic studies in western Europe between the sixteenth-century Re... more I will explore the emergence of Arabic studies in western Europe between the sixteenth-century Reformation and nineteenth-century Imperialism. There is scant research on the history of Arabic studies in early modern Europe aside from Johann Fück’s Arabische Studien (1955), because previous scientific efforts in the field seemed insignificant after the pioneering work of scholars such as Antoine Silvstre de Sacy (1758–1838) and Gustav Flügel (1802–1870). Moreover, research on European Orientalism has focused on the perception of Arabs and Islam within the context of French and British Near East politics, following the lead of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979).
My starting point is the observation that the theoretical discourse of Arabic studies still appears to be largely independent of that in French, English, or Germanic studies. The continued methodological autonomy seems to reflect that neither sixteenth-century Humanists nor nineteenth-century philologists were interested in the Arabic language. While Anthony Grafton has explored how the Humanist approach to editing developed from the goal to recover the Latin and Greek heritage of antiquity, Bernard Cerquiglini has analyzed how nineteenth-century philology became the scientific methodology for editing the first literary documents written in the European vernaculars. Latin, however, was continually taught, even throughout the Dark Ages. In contrast, Thomas Erpenius (1584–1624) published the first Arabic grammar (1617), and only in the seventeenth century did European libraries begin to collect systematically Arabic literature. But the marginal position of Arabic within European university curricula is salient. During the Middle Ages Muslims and Christians competed for territory in Spain, southern Italy, Asia Minor, and the Levant, and since the Reformation, both Protestants and Catholics had relied on Islam as the prime example for spotting false prophets and Antichrists.
I will use the chapter on Islam in the Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peoples du monde by Bernard Picart (1673–1733) to examine the role of Islam in the Enlightenment discourse on idolatry. My analysis will demonstrate that religious intolerance among Christians shaped their perceptions of diverse Muslim societies from the Balkans to the Indian peninsula. I will argue that nineteenth-century Arabic studies remained distant from the modern methodological developments in the field of philology because Europeans did not encounter an Arab nation state with Arabic as its national language. Knowledge of Arabic was relevant for theological research on the Scriptures, but not for the recovery of the literary heritage of the modern national languages.
Encyclopaedia Iranica Entries by Dagmar Riedel
Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, Nov 2016
Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, Jan 2012
Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, Sep 2010
Encyclopaedia Iranica, fasc. XV/4, pp. 386–395, Jun 2010
Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, Jul 2005
Teaching Documents by Dagmar Riedel
Syllabus for an advanced core curriculum course that satisfies the Sacred Texts and Traditions II... more Syllabus for an advanced core curriculum course that satisfies the Sacred Texts and Traditions II requirement for undergraduates at Fordham University's Rose Hill Campus in the Bronx. It offers an introduction to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam during the era, which in the western world is traditionally called the Middle Ages and roughly comprises the millennium between late antiquity and early modernity. In fall 2019 I designed and taught THEO 3332 with a focus on medieval Iberia. My starting point was the establishment of the Christian Visigothic Kingdom in Toledo (Spain) in the early sixth century CE, and as end point served the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth century.
The seminar introduced advanced students to the study of a premodern scientific handbook which is... more The seminar introduced advanced students to the study of a premodern scientific handbook which is one of the relays between the Golden Age of the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258 CE), and the flourishing of Persianate societies in Iran, India, Central Asia, and Turkey between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries.
Uploads
Articles in Edited Volumes by Dagmar Riedel
Project of the Marie Curie Fellowship at the CSIC by Dagmar Riedel
The workshop's participants will explore religious literature that originated under the particular conditions of “convivencia” in the societies of medieval and early modern Iberia. The participants will employ comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to open new perspectives on how the coexistence of Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities on the Iberian Peninsula is reflected in their respective literary traditions. The focus will be on works concerning prophets and saints.
Articles in Academic Journals by Dagmar Riedel
My starting point is the observation that the theoretical discourse of Arabic studies still appears to be largely independent of that in French, English, or Germanic studies. The continued methodological autonomy seems to reflect that neither sixteenth-century Humanists nor nineteenth-century philologists were interested in the Arabic language. While Anthony Grafton has explored how the Humanist approach to editing developed from the goal to recover the Latin and Greek heritage of antiquity, Bernard Cerquiglini has analyzed how nineteenth-century philology became the scientific methodology for editing the first literary documents written in the European vernaculars. Latin, however, was continually taught, even throughout the Dark Ages. In contrast, Thomas Erpenius (1584–1624) published the first Arabic grammar (1617), and only in the seventeenth century did European libraries begin to collect systematically Arabic literature. But the marginal position of Arabic within European university curricula is salient. During the Middle Ages Muslims and Christians competed for territory in Spain, southern Italy, Asia Minor, and the Levant, and since the Reformation, both Protestants and Catholics had relied on Islam as the prime example for spotting false prophets and Antichrists.
I will use the chapter on Islam in the Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peoples du monde by Bernard Picart (1673–1733) to examine the role of Islam in the Enlightenment discourse on idolatry. My analysis will demonstrate that religious intolerance among Christians shaped their perceptions of diverse Muslim societies from the Balkans to the Indian peninsula. I will argue that nineteenth-century Arabic studies remained distant from the modern methodological developments in the field of philology because Europeans did not encounter an Arab nation state with Arabic as its national language. Knowledge of Arabic was relevant for theological research on the Scriptures, but not for the recovery of the literary heritage of the modern national languages.
Encyclopaedia Iranica Entries by Dagmar Riedel
Teaching Documents by Dagmar Riedel
The workshop's participants will explore religious literature that originated under the particular conditions of “convivencia” in the societies of medieval and early modern Iberia. The participants will employ comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to open new perspectives on how the coexistence of Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities on the Iberian Peninsula is reflected in their respective literary traditions. The focus will be on works concerning prophets and saints.
My starting point is the observation that the theoretical discourse of Arabic studies still appears to be largely independent of that in French, English, or Germanic studies. The continued methodological autonomy seems to reflect that neither sixteenth-century Humanists nor nineteenth-century philologists were interested in the Arabic language. While Anthony Grafton has explored how the Humanist approach to editing developed from the goal to recover the Latin and Greek heritage of antiquity, Bernard Cerquiglini has analyzed how nineteenth-century philology became the scientific methodology for editing the first literary documents written in the European vernaculars. Latin, however, was continually taught, even throughout the Dark Ages. In contrast, Thomas Erpenius (1584–1624) published the first Arabic grammar (1617), and only in the seventeenth century did European libraries begin to collect systematically Arabic literature. But the marginal position of Arabic within European university curricula is salient. During the Middle Ages Muslims and Christians competed for territory in Spain, southern Italy, Asia Minor, and the Levant, and since the Reformation, both Protestants and Catholics had relied on Islam as the prime example for spotting false prophets and Antichrists.
I will use the chapter on Islam in the Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peoples du monde by Bernard Picart (1673–1733) to examine the role of Islam in the Enlightenment discourse on idolatry. My analysis will demonstrate that religious intolerance among Christians shaped their perceptions of diverse Muslim societies from the Balkans to the Indian peninsula. I will argue that nineteenth-century Arabic studies remained distant from the modern methodological developments in the field of philology because Europeans did not encounter an Arab nation state with Arabic as its national language. Knowledge of Arabic was relevant for theological research on the Scriptures, but not for the recovery of the literary heritage of the modern national languages.
Dieses Proseminar dient zur Einfuehrung in die Quellen und Uebereste der islamischen Wirtschaftsgeschichte vor 1800. Der Ausgangspunkt ist die Frage, wie die Beruecksichtigung wirtschaftlicher Faktoren Konzeption und Verstaendnis vormoderner islamischer Gesellschaften veraendern kann. Denn wir sind daran gewoehnt, dass in unserer Gegenwart Staatseinnahmen, Kunjunktur resp. Rezession, oder das Bruttosozialprodukt die politische Debatte bestimmen: von Theatersubventionen und Krankenversicherung zu Kindergartenplaetzen und Etat der Bundeswehr. Eine starke Binnenwirtschaft bedeutet auch immer aussenpolitischen Einfluss, aber die wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen einer Gesellschaft koennen ohne Rekurs auf die politischen, sozialen, und geographischen Faktoren nicht verstanden werden. Nichtsdestowenigertrotz ist die Wirtschaftsgeschichte vormoderner islamischer Gesellschaften, mit der Ausnahme des Osmanischen Reiches und seiner Provinzen, bisher nicht gut erforscht. Die Forschungsliteratur ueber die Entwicklung des islamischen Rechts enthaelt, z.B., detaillierte Information ueber die Ausbildung von Juristen, aber das Curriculum eines Juristen gibt nicht unbedingt darueber Auskunft, wie eine solche Ausbildung in Cairo, Shiraz, oder Cordoba zu verschiedenen Zeiten finanziert wurde. Die Herausforderungen einer methodologisch abgesichertem Auswertung dieser Quellen und Ueberreste (d.h., Quellenkritik) fuehren dann zu einer abschliessenden Diskussion der wichtigsten theoretischen Ansaetze, von der Pirenne-These und der These von der Bluete der islamischen Zivilisation unter den Abbasiden bis zur "world-systems theory".
Vorkenntnisse sind nicht notwendig, auch wenn Arabischkenntnisse vorteilhaft waeren. Anwesenheit, aktive Teilnahme, und eine schriftliche Hausarbeit gemaess der "Formrichtlinie fur Hausarbeiten" (die pdf-Datei kann von der AAI Webseite heruntergeladen werden), sind Voraussetzungen fur einen Proseminar-Leistungsnachweis.
In den gegenwärtigen Debatten über das Verhältnis zwischen der islamischen und der westlichen Welt werden Westeuropa und Nordamerika normalerweise als eine weltanschauliche Einheit betrachtet, da es sich auf beiden Seiten des Atlantiks um demokratische, kapitalistische Gesellschaften handelt. Die Betonung der gemeinsamen politischen und wirtschaftlichen Rahmenbedingungen verdeckt jedoch, daβ die Geschichte der verschiedenen muslimischen Bevölkerungsgruppen in der EU und Nordamerika nur begrenzt vergleichbar ist. Das Verständnis dieser Unterschiede ist von fundamentaler Bedeutung für jede europäische Interpretation der US Auβenpolitik gegenüber der islamischen Welt.
Im ersten Teil des Seminars werden muslimische Gruppen in der Geschichte der USA verortet: westafrikanische Sklaven seit dem 16. Jh.; Einwanderer aus der Levante und dem Nahen Osten seit dem 19. Jh.; Nation of Islam; Ahmadiyya; und Einwanderer aus Südostasien seit 1945. Im zweiten Teil wird das gegenwärtige Selbstverständnis dieser Gruppen als amerikanische Muslime im Vordergrund stehen. Die Herausbildung einer muslimischen Identität als US Staatsbürger verläuft in der Auseinandersetzung mit den protestantischen Traditionen der founding fathers (e.g., George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton), den soziopolitischen und wirtschaftlichen Konsequenzen der Sklaverei, ‘Orientalismus’ in den Massenmedien, und den Terroranschlägen des 11. September 2001.
Sehr gute Englischkenntnisse sind notwendig, sowie Bereitschaft mit dem Internet und digitalen Medien zu arbeiten. Um die Vorbereitung der Seminarsitzungen zu erleichtern, wird über das Rechenzentrum eine e-learning Webseite eingerichtet werden; die detaillierte Leseliste wird dort Anfang April bereitgestellt. Voraussetzung für den Scheinerwerb sind die Übernahme von zwei Kurzreferaten (d.h., ein Kurzreferat per Block), die im voraus vergeben werden, und eine schriftliche Hausarbeit (1500-2000 Wörter), die bis zum 31. Juli 2006 einzureichen ist. Die Teilnehmerzahl ist begrenzt, and Anmeldung (mit Angabe der Matrikelnummer, Fächerkombination und Semesterzahl) wird erbeten bis zum 31. März 2006 unter [email protected].
Zur Einführung empfohlene Literatur:
Bulliet, Richard W. The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Goody, Jack. Islam in Europe. Oxford: Polity, 2004.
Hasan, Asma Gull. American Muslims: The New Generation. 2d ed. New York: Continuum, 2002.
Turner, Richard Brent. Islam in the African-American Experience. 2d ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003."
The course was designed to double as a topics-course in intercultural issues and as an introduction to Islam, as it approached American cultural narratives at the beginning of the G. W. Bush presidency through their representations of Muslims. The primary sources ranged from Arabic and Persian literature, which are bestsellers in their English translations, to Hollywood films, comics, and science fiction. They were accompanied with a selection of theoretical readings about semiotics. Field trips to a mosque in Bloomington and the Islamic art exhibit in the IU Art Museum provided opportunities for a reality check on the fictional representations of Muslims and Islamic culture.
In December 2010, this version was submitted for peer review to be included into the Selected Conference Proceedings. The guidelines for submissions were limited to matters of style (author-year format, neither endnotes nor footnotes) and a clear instruction regarding length (2000-6000 words including bibliography). In August 2011, this version was rejected, without the option of "revise and resubmit." While my request for the reviewer's marked-up copy was ignored, the editors shared with me the evaluation of the single anonymous reviewer:
My recommendation is that the article is not publishable in its current state. While I believe the subject could be interesting, the author's approach is awkward and often confusing. Paragraph topic sentences go astray, never leading to any kind of solid synthesis. There is an ongoing mismatch of information regarding print encyclopedias and digital research sources (including but certainly not defined by the concept of an encyclopedia) - this is made more (and unnecessarily) complex by the author's presumptions about how such digital resources are (or are not) appreciated by the academy. I could never quite understand whether the author was defending the resources and the people who make them, or the academic structure which (the author seems to believe) undermines them. Curiously, and without preamble, the author uses Wikipedia as the bar by which an academic encyclopedia should be judged. Soon thereafter, the author implies that universities are dismantling their IT infrastructures and outsourcing software development to Google and Wikipedia - a statement that as articulated seems unsupportable.For an essay that purports to be a case study, in my opinion, there needs to be a better balance between the state of the field and specifics of the project at hand (EIr). There should also be a balance between the frustrations inherent in such a task and the benefits in undertaking and sustaining it. Rather than general inferences to challenges faced in the early days of digitizing the project, I would like to read more about what makes the digital realm helpful for a specialized project such as this. Have the contributors discovered a beneficial digital solution to the multilingual nature of their research? Have they been able to maximize the potential of metadata in a way that strengthens the project? Does the nature of a de-centralized digital project (physically housed at Columbia but available to contributing scholars all over the world) enhance the perspectives inherent in the encyclopedia entries - or perhaps allow for dynamic interaction and meaningful amendment among scholars collaborating on entries? Several times the author refers to the marginalized nature of scholars of Iranian studies within multidisciplinary medieval studies. Does the author find that the digital platform assists in overcoming that marginalization (the author may be attempting to discuss this, but veers off whenever coming close to a conclusion).It should also be pointed out that there are several significant grammatical and stylistic errors and oversights in the essay. For example, Ehsan Yarshater is first referred to as "her" (p. 5) and later as "he/him". I assume the "her" was a typographical error, but is confusing. There are also missing URL's (marked only by a "?") and other confusing errors."
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://researchblogs.cul.columbia.edu/islamicbooks/religionwriting/usem751history/
The seminar is dedicated to the comparative study of the roles of literacy vis-à-vis the uses of writing as a form of communication technology in religious traditions. Approaching the relationship between religion and writing through the lenses of literacy and communication technology, the seminar strives to address all media – from inscriptions on stone and clay tablets to internet websites – and all literary genres – from myths and commentaries to divine revelations and hymns – as well as the theoretical and practical implications of the absence, or rejection, of writing.
The seminar title includes the word “religion,” as its starting point is the thesis that religions have an impact on whether and how societies approach writing and literacy. At the moment the possibly most popular application of this thesis is the wrong, and yet persistent claim that Islamic theology is responsible for the fact that the diffusion of letterpress printing technology – coming during the medieval era from China and Korea and from northern Europe during the early modern era – halted at the borders of the Islamic civilization. Since it is impossible to examine a negative, it is one of the aims of the seminar to provide an interdisciplinary context for the thesis’ further investigation.
The conference began with opening remarks, followed by a panel of the history of Oriental Studies at Columbia between 1886 and 1969. Four presenters discussed the Columbia professors Edith Porada (1912-1994), Arthur Jeffrey (1892-1959), and Joseph Schacht (1908-1969), as well as Gottheil and Jackson. In the afternoon, a second panel explored how after 1945 the emphasis on Social Studies transformed Near Eastern Studies. A survey of the development of Area Studies was followed by papers about the study of Islam in the African-American community and in Persianate societies, respectively. The panel concluded with a presentation juxtaposing the self-understanding of Jewish and Islamic Studies. The conference ended with a round table on Islamic and Global Studies in the twenty-first century, offering presenters and audience the chance to explore future approaches to the study of Islam in North America.
I am adding new images whenever I manage to take more photographs for this set.
Daniel Varisco published a few of these photographs on his blog Tabsir under
Quranic License, 17 July 2008 (http://tabsir.net/?p=612) and
Streetwise Halal, 31 May 2009 (http://tabsir.net/?p=875).
Nor did the editors give the author any chance to proof read the galley proofs.
The two main sources originated in western Iran before the Mongol conquest of the thirteenth century. The Muḥāḍarāt al-udabāʾ wa-muḥāwarāt al-shuʿarāʾ wa’l-bulaghāʾ (Conversations among Men of Letters and Debates between Men of Poetry and Rhetoric) is an anthology of literary Arabic, ascribed to Abū’l-Qāsim al-Rāghib al-Isfahānī (d. before 1050?; cf. GAL 1: 289 and S1: 506–6). The Rāḥat al-ṣudūr wa-āyat al-surūr (Comfort of Hearts and Wonder of Delights) a Persian miscellany of practical literature, which Muhammad Rāwandī (d. after 1209?; cf. Storey-Bregel 2: 749) compiled in Hamadan to petition the Rum Saljuq sultan Kay Khusraw (ruled 1192–1197 and 1205–1211) in Konya, Anatolia. While the Rāḥat became obsolete in the sixteenth century, the Muḥāḍarāt never dropped out of circulation, and has been continuously in print in the Middle East since 1870, when Ibrāhīm al-Muwayliḥī (d. 1906) published a complete version in Egypt. Nowadays both works are widely cited primary sources in research.
The Muḥāḍarāt and the Rāḥat complement each other, because they represent different segments of pre-Mongol Iranian society. Drawing on interdisciplinary research on the written transmission of knowledge, I consider both works encyclopedias, as they are educational compilations which aim at completeness with regard to their stated subjects. I will make extensive use of the codiciological and bibliographical data gleaned from manuscripts and printed books in order to demonstrate how their material evidence can significantly advance our understanding of the roles of writing and literacy in Muslim societies.
The monograph will comprise three chapters, framed by an introduction and conclusion, and followed by an appendix for the manuscripts, a bibliography, and an index. The introduction provides a survey of the state of research, followed by an explanation of methodology and terminology. The first chapter is dedicated to the diachronic perspective on the diffusion of written knowledge between the eleventh and the early twentieth century. I use the works’ manuscripts and printed books, together with entries in biographical dictionaries and book catalogues as well as scattered references in other works, to document circulation and uses of the Muḥāḍarāt and the Rāḥat. In the second chapter I examine the biographical data of al-Rāghib and Rāvandī to develop the complementary synchronic perspective on the geography of knowledge in pre-Mongol Iran. The third chapter presents a comparative analysis of the literary conventions which al-Rāghib and Rāvandī employed for the compilation of their encyclopedias. The conclusion explores how these encyclopedias are witnesses to a literary culture in which writing was employed to maintain the ideal of an oral tradition.
In the Fall 2009 I have received grants-in-aid of publication from the Aaron Warner Fund of Columbia University Seminars and from the Iran Heritage Foundation.
Hiram B. Otis in Oscar Wilde, "The Canterville Ghost” (1887)
There are considerable collections of manuscripts in Arabic script at institutions in the US and Canada: Princeton and UCLA, each university owns about 10,000 codices; Yale has more 6,000, and the Library of Congress more than 3,000; and smaller collections between 800 and 2,000 codices can be found at the NYPL, Columbia, Harvard, the University of Michigan, and the University of Toronto. Since these collections are accessible to scholars, it is salient that, in general, they receive little attention in teaching and research. On the one hand, few manuscripts in American collections are listed in in the bio-bibliographical reference works by Carl Brockelmann (1868–1956), Georg Graf (1875–1955), and C. A. Storey (1888–1967), which are still indispensable for textual research in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Their poor showing reflects the catch-22 that unpublished collections are invisible to scholarship. Even though American private collectors, as well as universities, museums, and public libraries, had been actively acquiring manuscripts in Arabic script at least since the second half of the nineteenth century, it took some time until private and institutional collectors first managed to catalog their new possessions and then to arrange for the publication of printed finding aids, be they handlists in periodicals or stand-alone catalogs. For example, Jacob H. Schiff (1847–1920) provided Richard Gottheil (1862–1936), the first Chief of the Oriental Division of the New York Public Library, between 1897 and 1920, with a cash account for the acquisition of books in Semitic Languages. Gottheil used these funds, among other things, for the purchase of manuscripts in Arabic script, but it took until 1992 that Barbara Schmitz’s printed catalog of the NYPL’s Islamic manuscripts was published. On the other hand, research in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies is driven by textual scholarship, which focuses on seminal works by renowned authors, so that the scholarly value of a manuscript collection is usually perceived to be the number of particularly old or otherwise rare manuscript witnesses for canonical authors and their works. Even though American collections include a fair number of exceptional manuscripts—such as the only known copy of an Arabic translation of the universal Christian history of Orosius (fl. 400) at Columbia (RBML X893.712 H) or the illuminated Islamic manuscripts of Alexander Smith Cochran (1874–1929) in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art—they appear as rather undistinguished, if their holdings are compared to the fabulous riches of Islamic manuscript collections in Turkey, Iran, and India. Consequently, American and European scholars maintain research networks in Turkey, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, as it seems counterintuitive to search for Islamic manuscripts in the US or Canada.
Against this backdrop I argue that the American collections of manuscripts in Arabic script are an untapped resource for research on book production and the book trade in Muslim societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I will use American copies of the "Kitāb al-Shifāʾ" by Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ (1083–1149) to examine how manuscript workshops in Muslim societies restored, recycled and refurbished manuscripts for the export. Unlike the Islamic manuscript collections in Europe, the oldest layers of which date to the sixteenth century, the American collections were largely formed during the last phase of the Islamic manuscript tradition. Individuals and institutions started libraries from scratch, when the professional production of manuscripts slowly ceased to be commercially viable in Muslim societies; luckily some Americans had the means to buy by the box, and not just piecemeal by the codex. This bulk acquisition strategy ensured that Islamic manuscript collections such as the Yahuda collection at Princeton or the Minassian collection of the Library of Congress provide snapshots of the manuscript trade in Muslim societies about a century after the adaptation of printing technology to large-scale commercial book production in the early nineteenth century. The bulk acquisition strategy first emerged in the Gilded Age and was eventually abandoned in the late 1970s, after the 1976 World of Islam Festival in London had showcased manuscripts in Arabic script not as mere books, but as a cultural achievement of the Islamic civilization.
Each collection comprises about 600 codices, and their oldest layers were shaped by the Semitist Richard Gottheil (1862–1936). He joined the Columbia faculty in 1886, and in 1896 he was appointed Chief of the NYPL’s newly established Oriental Division.
Gottheil held both appointments until 1936. At Columbia he developed the Semitic Studies collection from scratch, while at the NYPL his purchases were aimed at improving the distinguished Near Eastern Studies holdings that had originally belonged to the Astor Library.
Provenance research shows that Gottheil focused on finding texts in good versions, and at neither institution did he aim at developing a self-contained collection of Islamic manuscripts. My analysis will focus on the manuscripts’ contents and date, while systematically distinguishing between formal copies from professional workshops and informal copies for personal use. I argue that in both institutions the manuscript acquisitions were dominated by works which did not belong to the new canon of Medieval Arabic literature.
Islamic manuscripts dominated the international trade with books in Arabic script until the beginning of the twentieth century, since book production in Muslims societies adapted western printing technology only after 1800. Yet little is known about the circulation of Islamic manuscripts outside Muslim societies. Since Islamic manuscripts are nowadays perceived as cultural heritage central to Islamic civilization, and not as an internationally circulating commodity like silk or oil, collections built by non-Muslims and held outside Muslim societies can seem less authentic―especially to non-Muslims who are sensitive about their outsider status―and their acquisition appears as suspicious. A comprehensive history of Islamic manuscript collections in Europe and North America remains to be written, and manuscript based research in Middle Eastern Studies tends to focus on specific texts and their authors, with no interest whatsoever in the economics of book production and the book trade. Neither the European collections, which originated in the early modern period, nor the North American collections, which have been formed since the late nineteenth century, have been analyzed as evidence for how book dealers in Muslim societies have satisfied foreigners’ demand for books in Arabic script.
I argue that western collections of manuscripts in Arabic script were shaped not only by the scholars and bibliophiles who bought Islamic books for pleasure and research, but also by the indigenous book dealers in Muslim societies. Westerners have traveled and lived in Muslim societies since the Middle Ages, and in the early modern period there was a continuous demand for books in Arabic script among European readers. A better understanding of how book dealers in the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, India, or Iran approached their foreign customers will provide new insights into how western collections of manuscripts in Arabic script represent the whole range of book production in Muslim societies.
Austria shared borders with Russia and Turkey, and viewed Iran as a possible ally against its eastern neighbors. The Viennese Academy for the study of Oriental languages was founded in 1754, and in 1811, the Mechitarist Order moved its press from Trieste to Vienna, bringing with it the Italian expertise in printing books in Arabic script. The Viennese printing of Islamic books culminated in the 1850s when the Kaiserlich-Königliche Hof- und Staatsdruckerei published three luxury editions of medieval Arabic and Persian literary texts. Ibn al-Farid’s Das arabische Hohe Lied der Liebe (1854) and die Geschichte Wassafs (1856) were accompanied by a German translation, and part of their publication cost was covered by Austrian Oriental Society. The critical edition of Sa‘di’s Boustan (1858) had a French commentary, and was dedicated to the ruler of Saxony. These three quartos are remarkable for their use of new printing techniques, such as chromolithography, to adapt Islamic book design to the framework of the French beau livre. The Arabic and Persian texts are preceded by chromolithographed frontispieces and vignettes whose style is adapted from carpet-pages and rosettes in Persian manuscripts. Chapter divisions are marked by vignettes and cul-de-lampes, which are unusual in nineteenth-century German-language books. The three volumes are typeset in a newly designed Arabic font. These books do not present Islamic design as an exotic curiosity, thus opening the door for the inclusion of Islamic art into the new field of art history.
Christopher Whitmore in “AHR Conversation: Historians and the Study of Material Culture,” American Historical Review 114.5, 2009, p. 1383""
Suyūṭī (1445–1505) praised Rāghib and Bayḍāwī as Shafite scholars with Mutazilite leanings, but within the Shiite tradition they are viewed as Persian Shiites who may have practiced taqīya. Taşköprüzade (1495–1560) and Katip Ҫelebi (1609–1657) incorporated the works of Rāghib and Bayḍāwī as authoritative classics into their Sunnite review of the Arabic and Persian literary heritage. Suyūṭī, Taşköprüzade, and Katip Ҫelebi were major sources for Carl Brockelmann’s Geschiche der Arabischen Litteratur (Grundwerk 1898–1902, Supplement 1937–1942), though Arabic and Islamic studies scholars continue to disregard its Ottoman Sunnite bias.
I will argue that time-tested teaching tools enjoy a remarkable staying power, transcending the Sunnite-Shiite divide. Iranian and Ottoman studies scholars study the fifteenth-century emergence of Persian and Ottoman curricula as a first fledgling expression of their respective national identity, yet the Shiite reception of Arabic literature in Iran has received little attention. The study of the parallel uses of the same Arabic reference works by Sunnites and Shiites allows for a more nuanced perception of Sunnite–Shiite differences vis-à-vis national identities in the modern Middle East.
The antebellum imprints of English Quran translations, Washington Irving’s Alhambra, and missionary pamphlets were usually not illustrated. Readers could, however, catch glimpses of the Islamic world in books such as George Bush’s Life of Mohammed (1831), whose frontispiece shows the Kacba; the Universal Traveller (ed. Ch. Goodrich, 1845), which includes two images of Persian noblemen; or An Affecting History of the Captivity… of Mrs. Mary Velnet ([1804?]), whose frontispiece shows the tied-up, semi-nude heroine. Since Goodrich included three, and Burder two, figures into the Islam chapter of their respective editions, their abridgments are comparatively generously illustrated, although they are mere octavos if compared with the luxurious French folio.
These five illustrations are noteworthy because the updated text is accompanied with outdated images. I argue that the reproduced eighteenth-century illustrations in these handbooks informed how Americans imagined Islam until the twentieth century. This persistence is demonstrated by the figure of Muhammad in the 1930s North Wall frieze in the Supreme Court courtroom. Adolph Weinman portrayed the prophet in the same manner as he is shown in the frontispiece of Goodrich’s abridgment: he holds a sword in one hand and the Quran in the other.
Both works are single-subject encyclopedias, designed as comprehensive textbooks. The circulation of manuscripts and imprints provides a diachronic perspective on the diffusion of knowledge. These textbooks circulated largely between Isfahan and Istanbul. Rāghib’s anthology is a propaedeutic work for a general audience, and is still in print in contemporary Middle Eastern societies. In contrast, Rāwandī’s miscellany is a personalized curriculum of Great Seljuq politics and courtly etiquette, and thus became obsolete in the sixteenth century. The biographical data on their authors offer the complementary synchronic perspective on the geography of knowledge in pre-Mongol Iran.
The contents of the Muḥāḍarāt and the Rāḥat illustrate how their authors utilized well-established conventions of transmitting knowledge to compile an anthology of literary Arabic and a miscellany about the Great Seljuq sultanate. The arrangement of their contents is the most original aspect of these textbooks. On the macro-level, the sequence of parts, chapters, and sections follows a principle of associative order of topics and disciplines. The textbooks are witnesses to societal dependence on literacy. The oral transmission of knowledge had lost its monopoly, yet writing was less a replacement than a supplement to the oral tradition. The contents and structure of the Muḥāḍarāt and the Rāḥat document the continued prestige and use of oral practices within a literate society.
The study of the Middle East and the broader Islamic world has been no less impacted by this new paradigm. Scholars are making daily use of digital tools and repositories including private and state-sponsored archives of textual sources, digitized manuscript collections, densitometrical imaging, visualization and modeling software, and various forms of data mining and analysis. This collection of essays explores the state of the art in digital scholarship pertaining to Islamic & Middle Eastern studies, addressing areas such as digitization, visualization, text mining, databases, mapping, and e-publication. It is of relevance to any researcher interested in the opportunities and challenges engendered by this changing scholarly ecosystem.
Participaremos presentando el proyecto HILAME.