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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]

Until recently, only two Arabic translations of Ptolemy's Almagest were thought to have survived, one by al-Ḥajjāj made under the caliph al-Maḥmūn and one by Isḥāq b. Ḥunayn, later revised by Thābit b. Qurra, prepared in the second half of the third/ninth century. In the 2010s, a third Arabic version of the Almagest, authored by Thābit b. Qurra alone, was first shown by Dirk Grupe to be extant in a partial Latin translation in a Dresden manuscript, and then in an Arabic manuscript in Jaipur that breaks off after chapter VI.2. We introduce here a second manuscript of this Thābit version, extant in the Khuda Bakhsh Library in Patna, which is around four centuries older than the Jaipur manuscript, was copied from a manuscript by the hand of al-Bīrūnī, and extends the text till the middle of Book VIII. After a general introduction, we provide a detailed description of this manuscript. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the close examination of 32 manuscripts produced in Kairouan between the 9th and the 11th centuries, this article reassesses the content and function of their paratext and interrogates some diagnostic features of their scripts and page layout. In the first part, we demonstrate that some dated notes can refer to auditions and readings that occurred decades before the production of the manuscripts on which they appear, and therefore cannot be used as termini ante quem for dating them. In the second part, we discuss some key palaeographic parameters for a better understanding of Ifrīqī scripts, their origin, and their development, with a view to establishing a set of reliable criteria for a more accurate dating and contextualisation of this little-known material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.)

The extraction of paleographical features is an important task to study the identity of the text in the Historical Manuscripts. One of the major features is the identification of the writer or copyist. Many researchers have worked on an automated system for writer identification, and with the development of deep learning techniques many approaches have been proposed. Most of the previous studies have developed a multi-steps system, while very few of them performed an End-to-End approach. Most of the systems rely on a pre-processing step to prepare the data in order to facilitate recognition. This paper presents an End-to-End deep learning system for writer identification, tested on four different datasets: ICDAR19 and ICFHR20 (Latin datasets), KHATT and Balamand (Arabic datasets). The system is based on the Deep-TEN approach using a customized ResNet-50 network for features and local descriptor extraction with an integration of a NetVLAD end-layer to compute and encode the global descriptor. It was compared with our state-of-the-art system, winner of ICFHR20 HisFrag competition, and showed an interesting performance on all datasets without any pre-processing techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses upon the arrangement of written words in geometric shapes or patterns—specifically in Arabic script. It takes the case of the Kitāb al-diryāq (Book of Antidotes, 595 AH/1199 CE, BnF arabe 2964), an illuminated and illustrated manuscript that features a series of geometric compositions created using Arabic script. The script is employed in conjunction with or independent of geometric lines and curves, with its ligatures compressed and elongated, and words repeated, ornamented, or oriented multidirectionally to augment the geometric shape. The aesthetic manipulation of the script in this manner severely compromises the legibility of the words—the pages invite a viewing of the script rather than a reading of the text. By closely examining a set of four such compositions—articulated as diagrams—the article demonstrates the semantic value of the visual script patterns when read in concert with the verbal content. Furthermore, by focusing on the extralinguistic components of the diagrams, I argue that the arrangement of text in geometric patterns is a vital medium of transmitting knowledge—the form not only shapes the reception of verbal messages but also augments an aesthetic image; operates as a cognitive device; and transforms the text into a scientific representation. The diagrams visually and semantically shape knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arts Magazine is the property of Thamar University 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.)

Copyright of Arab International Journal of Library & Information is the property of Arab Institution of Knowledge Management 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.)

Ettore Rossi, a distinguished scholar of the past century, gathered a library specialised above all in the Turkish world, but also including some materials in Arabic characters. The entire Rossi holdings — private library, manuscripts collection, personal archive — are now housed in Rome, with the Institute for the Orient 'Carlo Alfonso Nallino', which acquired the bulk of these materials in 1958. A recent project for the re-inventory and physical rearrangement of the archives and book collections brought to light two Yemeni manuscripts, originally owned by Rossi, but not previously known. The current note provides brief description, opening both manuscripts to public domain and serving to supplement the catalogue, Islamic Manuscripts from the Library of the Istituto per l'Oriente Carlo Alfonso Nallino , published in 2017. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the notion of linguistic variation in Arabic written sources from the premodern period. More specifically, it examines the two surviving manuscripts (ms. M-O-9 y ms. d3643) of Risāla fī Ādāb al-Ḥisba wa-l-Muḥtasib by ʿAbd al-Raʾūf, an Andalusi ḥisba manual from the 10th c. CE, with the goal of describing the use of non-standard features and identifying the factors that drive this type of alternation. The linguistic description of the ḥisba texts shows that the use of non-standard forms occurs at all levels: orthographic, phonetic, lexical, morphological, and syntactical. In addition, it suggests that there are, at least, four internal and external factors that seem to motivate the appearance of linguistic variation: orthographic conventions of non-classical or non-standard written sources, the dialectal environment surrounding the document’s composition, sociolinguistic context, and, finally, semantic and pragmatic aspects. The analysis reveals that non-standard forms in these documents perform similar functions to those attributed in other oral and written varieties of Arabic. These findings confirm that the linguistic variation shown in ms. M-O-9 and in ms. d3643 is not random; that is, it follows regular patterns of language use, which represents a promising path for future research on non-standard written varieties of Arabic from the Islamic West. [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]

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 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]

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.

This contribution presents the edition and translation of a new manuscript witness to the Arabic tradition of Galenic summaries On urine (ms Collegesville, Minnesota hmml olm 00041). Uroscopy appears to be a complementary diagnostic element in ancient medicine, which gained increasing popularity in later centuries, as attested by the rich traditions in Greek and Arabic. The summary, as attested in this manuscript witness, compares the four bodily humours to dyes, creating a concrete and tangible frame for the study and memorization of this diagnostic branch. This text, moreover, stresses the performative dimension of uroscopy, particularly in the form of instructions for physicians on how to recognize devious fake samples offered by obnoxious people seeking to test the physician in order to undermine his authority and credibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aviva Butt has just finished translating in collaboration with the author, Salim Barakat's first novel Fuqahā' al-alām (Sages of Darkness) written in 1985. The translation was done from a later original Arabic manuscript roughly the same as the 1994 Baghdadi edition. Sages of Darkness is a Kurdish Sufi novel depicting Kurdish life in late Ottoman times. It is, in fact, a philosophical novel with a strong dose of psychological realism, written in a style derived from Classical Modernism. And so, it is mainstream literature, an achievement in view of the late start in novel-writing by the Kurdish far-flung writers' community. The action line, full of suspense, violence, and murder, is greatly about the tribal notable Avdei Sarei, who does everything he can to ensure the survival of his business and the economic health of his endeavors. In this article, the translator of Sages of Darkness analyzes Barakat's novelistic techniques for the purpose of prompting a better understanding of the novel, and by-the-by, if possible, to solve the enigma of the meaning of the title. [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.

Introduction. The article examines the subjectivity in the representation of Turkic clans in ibn Fadlan’s famous memoirs devoted to the Arab mission trip undertaken from Baghdad to the Volga Bulgaria in early 10th c. Informed by the latest linguistic theories, the authors aim to analyze how the modus of his text, i.e. the meaning of the entire historical document, is influenced by the memoirist’s personality as a bearer of certain cultural characteristics and of specific religious beliefs, as well as by historical and everyday circumstances at the time the travelogue was written. Data and methods. Both the reconstructed Arabic original and available Russian translations and commentaries were used in a comparative mode. In addition, the authors considered the recent works of Arab scholars discussing the issue of discourse types of ibn Fadlan’s heritage in the context of the medieval Arab history and thinking. The article focuses on the prevailing themes and motifs in the text of the Arab traveler, when describing the social structures, traditions, and rituals of the Turkic ethnic groups he encountered (chiefly Oguzes), to identify the moduses (of condemnation, fear, surprise, admiration, etc.) through which these were realized, as well as the linguistic means of their expression that disturbed the neutral style of the story. The results of the analysis allow to draw a conclusion that the modus of the work was largely shaped by the medieval way of thinking and the world picture characteristic of the Arab-Muslim traveler, as well as by the official status of ibn Fadlan’s work at the court of the Abbasid Caliphate in its heyday. Also, the authors point out that there is a passage in the text that may be fictional, its morphology being largely of a fabulous character. Notably, attention should be drawn to ibn Fadlan’s attempts to find some possible commonalities between the civilizations, especially in the heavenly realm, and to promote an understanding between the peoples, even if neither cultural nor trade interaction between them existed at the time.

This year marks the seven decades of the death of Игна́тий Юлиа́нович Крачко́вский, (1883-1951), Russian Orientalist and one of the translators of the Qur'an. His translation is one of the most famous translations of this holy book. This essay deals with Крачко́вский primarily as Arabist and Islamicist who published over 500 works, and one of the foremost names in Russian Oriental Studies. His studies of Arabic literature, both contemporary and classical, as well as Arabic history and geography served Крачко́вский as a background for his translation of the Qur'an done at the end of his life. His famous translation was published posthumously, in 1963. The edition was supported by the Russian Academy of sciences in Moscow.

This article concerns the manuscript collection of the Syrian Catholic priest Paul Sbath (Aleppo, 1887–1945), who is regarded by some as one of the twentieth century's most controversial collectors. This is primarily due to the mysterious circumstances under which he obtained and consolidated his collection of 1,325 manuscripts, part of which he sold to the Vatican Library in 1927. Through a close study of the negotiations around the acquisition of Sbath's manuscripts by the Vatican, this article explores the different, and sometimes conflicting, conceptualizations of a manuscript library in the early post-Ottoman period. Physically displaced following the historical events that were drastically transforming the Middle East in the early 20th century, Sbath's collection has been a moving library—during his life and after—from Aleppo to Jerusalem, then from Cairo to the Vatican, and back to Aleppo. Using previously unresearched archival sources at the Vatican, this article explores how Sbath's goal was to create a modern Western waqf (endowment) of books: a hybrid library reflecting the continuation of the Middle Eastern manuscript tradition in dialogue with the Western perception of a manuscript library, as well as representing Sbath's identity as an Arab Catholic priest living through the contemporary challenges of war, plague, displacement, and migration in the Middle East in the interwar period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 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]

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]

Copyright of Journal of Islamic Manuscripts is the property of Brill Academic Publishers 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.)

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]

The article reviews the web site "On Qur'an Tools" located at https://quran tools.mst.edu.au/ offering a range of tools to search the Muslim scripture like Qur'an in the form of Arabic text.

Copyright of Journal of Islamic Manuscripts is the property of Brill Academic Publishers 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.)