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The article is devoted to the paper of Dagestan Arabic manuscripts and epistolary documents of the 19th — early 20th centuries, as an important aspect of source study. This work allows you to get an idea of the history of Russia’s cultural and economic ties with Dagestan and the countries of the East. In the course of the study, a comparative historical method was used. The authors analyzed the works of domestic and foreign experts on this issue, highlighted the main identification features of the paper of these written documents. The relevance of the ongoing research is due to the need for a comprehensive study of the writing material of the Arabographic monuments of Dagestan origin. The novelty of the work lies in the fact that the paper of these historical sources for the first time became the object of study in domestic source studies. It has been established that in the Dagestan manuscripts and epistolary documents of the 19th — early 20th centuries, the marked paper of Russian manufactories and factories is mainly represented. The article notes that for a full-fledged study of Dagestan Arabographic sources, it is necessary to use advanced digital technology and modern natural scientific developments. The study of historical sources paper is of great importance in the preservation and restoration of monuments of the written culture of the Dagestan peoples.

Copyright of Tahkik Journal of Critical Editions of Islamic Manuscripts is the property of Hacveyiszade Foundation for Science & Culture and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Cambridge University Library holds an Arabic manuscript of The Thousand and One Nights (Ms Qq.106–109). The library records it as entering the collection in 1819 and codicological evidence shows that the manuscript was copied in Cairo in the early 19th century. This paper discusses the complex narrative of its acquisition, including the roles played by prominent travellers and collectors. The significance of the text of the 'Nights' and its popularity in England and Europe are also examined as are the factors that made the Arabic text of this work much sought-after at the time. The influence of the contemporary political situation, the conditions of travel in the Middle East, and the individuals involved with the text's acquisition are described, focusing on those with a Cambridge connection. A detailed analysis of the activities and twists of fate resulting in the acquisition of this particular manuscript are traced in contemporary sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Arabic language is characterized by a great diversity in its writing styles in terms of the shape, size, and percentage of inclination and methods of drawing. Despite this great diversity, the Arabic styles are also characterized by a huge similarity that makes it difficult for traditional methods of machine learning to overcome with Arabic manuscripts. In this paper we present a Morphological Gradient Convolutional Neural Network to Classify the Arabic styles (MG-CNN). The model is a combination of two methods: a morphological gradient to detect images' contours and a convolutional neural network to extract images features and classify them. Due to the absence of Arabic styles dataset, we created an image database from the book "Teach Yourself Arabic styles: Naskh, Rokaa, Farissi, Tolot, Diwani" (Mehdi, Teach yourself arabic styles: Naskh, Rokaa, Farissi, Tolot, Diwani, 2005) and then we use augmentation methods to increase number of images while preserving the characteristics of each style. Our architecture gives a high accuracy of 100% for the training dataset and 99.50% for the validation dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Espanola de Linguistica is the property of Sociedad Espanola de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Determining the writer or transcriber of historical Arabic manuscripts has always been a major challenge for researchers in the field of humanities. With the development of advanced techniques in pattern recognition and machine learning, these technologies have been applied to automate the extraction of paleographical features in order to solve this issue. This paper presents a baseline system for writer identification, tested on a Historical Arabic dataset of 11610 single and double folio images. These texts were extracted from a unique collection of 567 Historical Arabic Manuscripts available at the Balamand Digital Humanities Center. A survey has been conducted on the available Arabic datasets and previously proposed techniques and algorithms. The Balamand dataset presents an important challenge due to the geo-historical identity of manuscripts and their physical conditions. An advanced Deep Learning system was developed and tested on three different Latin and Arabic datasets: ICDAR19, ICFHR20 and KHATT, before testing it on the Balamand dataset. The system was compared with many other systems and it has yielded a state-of-the-art performance on the new challenging images with 95.2% mean Average Precision (mAP) and 98.1% accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to improve upon the description of MS 2 of the Escuela de Estudios Árabes de Granada, and to propose a new dating based on the material analysis of the document carried out by Sonsoles González in 2014 and my subsequent rereading and translation of its colophon. If one accepts my proposed revised dating, this manuscript would be the last known Qur'an from the Iberian peninsula, copied as late as the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, in the city of Cordova. Moreover, this copy is heir to an Andalusian tradition stretching back to the theoretical treatises of Abū ʿAmr ʿUthmān al-Dānī, transmitted faithfully from generation to generation through the Andalusi, Mudejar, and Morisco periods, down to the period of this manuscript. Lastly, it contains marginal notes with chapter numbers, and Latin translations of sura titles, which are clear evidence of its later use among Christian intellectual circles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Middle Arabic is conventionally defined as existing on a spectrum between colloquial Arabic on the low end and Classical Arabic on the high end. Differences between Middle Arabic and Classical Arabic that are not attested in a modern dialect are typically treated, historically at least, as due to pseudo-correction. This is especially true of non-Classical manifestations of nominal case. In this paper, I tag all instances of alif al-tanwīn – which in Qurʾānic and Classical Arabic marks the accusative on triptotic nouns that do not end in tāʾ marbūṭa – from representative portions of the manuscripts, both vocalized and unvocalized, of 15 Christian translations of the gospels into Arabic dating from the 9th to 15th centuries CE. The data demonstrate, contrary to previous descriptions, that the majority of case inflection is written in line with Classical Arabic norms. Further, the syntactic contexts in which non-Classical case markings occur follow regular patterns, which recur with remarkable consistency across time and manuscript. Instead of originating in pseudo-corrections, I propose the differences from Classical Arabic originated in attempts by Christian scribes to represent a variety of Arabic in which a vowel merger before tanwīn resulting in a single morpheme erased the vocalic distinctions between case vowels. These syntactic contexts include nominative, genitive, and accusative ones. Since Christian Arabic differed from the varieties for which the Arabic script and subsequent vocalizations were developed to write, scribes originally varied in the degree to which they adhered to the writing conventions, with some closely adhering and others taking greater liberties in order to represent the underlying variety with greater nuance. Over time, this led to several scribal traditions for writing tanwīn in Christian manuscripts, each of which is attested among the vocalized manuscripts included in this study and discussed in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes a fresh approach to the study of the Arabic Gospel manuscripts. Although considerable success has been achieved at mapping out macro-families, there are still large lacunae in our knowledge of the Arabic Gospels as well as of the linguistic and scribal cultures that produced them. Arabic Gospel manuscripts notoriously vary at every level, and much of the variation is idiosyncratic. In previous work, this variation has by and large been considered background noise to be filtered out. In this paper, I study variation in the lexical, grammatical, and orthographic domains in the Gospel of Matthew as attested in twenty-two manuscripts belonging to multiple manuscript families. I use a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to detect possible patterns in the variation. At each level, the variation is patterned in ways that contribute to our understanding of the manuscripts and their production. Most significantly, I argue that grammatical variation is not random, as previously assumed, and that several distinct grammatical traditions are detectable. I thus show that far from being an obstacle to the study of the Arabic Gospels, variation is in fact key to fully understanding them.

The article focuses on the William A. Brown Collection of Arabic manuscripts from Mali, which sheds light on West African Islamic history, specifically history of the Islamic theocracy. Topics include Brown's meticulous collection of oral traditions and Arabic manuscripts during research trips to Mali; the correspondence, writings, and unique manuscripts found in this collection, offering insights into various aspects of religious, political, and social life in the region during that period.

The Arabic manuscripts are known for their historical role as dynamic tools for restoring Muslim's historical identity and records. It covers a wide range of areas and fields, including military technology. The military engineer Captain Ibrāhīm ibn Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ghānim ibn Zakariyyā al-Andalusī (d. 1641 AD) produced a remarkable well-illustrated encyclopaedic book in 1632 AD, a veritable practical artillery manual. Titled Kitāb al-'Izz wa al-Manāfi' li al-Mujāhidīn fī Sabīl Allāh bi al-Madāfi' (The Book of Glory and Benefits for those who fight with Cannons on the Path of Allāh). The work was translated into Arabic in 1638 AD by a fellow Morisco Aḥmad ibn Qāsim ibn Shaykh al-'ajarī al-Andalusī (d. 1642 AD). This work has a significant impact in the field of the firearms industry. The book contains superb engravings entirely consecrated to artillery, which includes content on European artilleries. The Andalusian artisans specialised in distinctive Western military techniques and contributed to their diffusion throughout the Islamic world to oppose their enemies. Due to the author's background and experience, he was conscious of Euro-Christian superiority in artillery and the value of well-trained and instructed gunners. This article extracts from his work some significant exposition in this aspect. It represents a short account on the European source of firearm knowledge, a constituent of Islamic technology. The main objective of this research is to identify the European source on which the author relied. The methodology used in doing this research is library-based. The significance of this research is to shed light on the Andalusian efforts in transferring firearms know-how technology from the West to the East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is the first scholarly exploration of slavery's visual representation in medieval Islam. Close examination of thirteenth‐century paintings from Arabic manuscripts, considered alongside textual sources, reveals how images may contribute to the study of slavery in the premodern Middle East. In particular, these paintings confirm the link between domestic service and the trade in black African slaves. They also suggest that if skin colour did not determine enslavement, it might have shaped the perception of slaves and the division of labour among them. This essay further attends to the semantic operations of slavery within the picture. One of its suggestions is that images of slaves functioned as signs of pure labour, as well as liminal figures, framing, highlighting, and creating a contrast with light‐skinned Arab characters, mostly seen engaged in acts of discourse and leisurely activities. A visual dialectic seems to be at work, creating a series of asymmetrical relationships, between light‐skinned and dark‐skinned, freedom and slavery, speech and labour, high culture and servitude. Such a dialectic may ultimately be read as a comment on the mechanisms and limits of archival power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]