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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]

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.

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 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 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.)

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 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]

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]

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.

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]

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 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]

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 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]

Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts with complete vocalisation are rare, a problem which makes reconstructing the pronunciation of the medieval language challenging. This study presents an edition of a Judaeo-Arabic translation of Ecclesiastes from the Cairo Genizah with full Tiberian vocalisation. This manuscript exhibits noteworthy features of dialectal medieval Arabic and a palaeographic style which places it in twelfth-century Egypt-Palestine. The transcription system provides specific evidence for the pronunciation of a type of medieval Judaeo-Arabic, while the translation offers a window into the culture of popular Bible translations and scribal activity in the medieval Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present manuscript, we report the findings of a study that surveyed female college students' views of revamped Islamic and Arabic Culture courses embedded in the curriculum of a secular academic program in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Of interest were students' views of and responses to recently implemented features of the curriculum and instruction that exemplified active learning. The ancillary aim was to determine whether views and responses were linked to performance. At the end of the semester, students recognized that the courses' curriculum and instruction fostered active learning opportunities, and expressed an appreciation for learning that is impactful. Results involving performance were mixed though. In fact, whereas recitation and final test performance decreased with students' recognition that instruction prioritized understanding of facts and ideas, greater discussion of matters that engaged students' attention, such as cognitive distortions and personal views, was associated with higher midterm and final test performance. It was concluded that the novelty of activities capable of engaging students in the learning process might explain students' appreciation of active learning as well as such activities' mixed relationship with performance outcomes. [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.)

Copyright of Social Sciences & Humanities Studies / Društvene i Humanističke Studije (DHS) is the property of Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, University of Tuzla 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.)

For the first time, strong links between three copies of the 'Morisco Qur'an' (in Arabic [Aix 1367], Aljamía [BRAH T5], and a bilingual Arabo-Aljamía version [BRAH T19]) have been described. They involve codicological, linguistic, and aesthetic features common to these manuscripts and lead to the identification of a single Aljamiado translation transmitted by the same copyist in two different codices (BRAH T5 and BRAH T19). This result allows us to demonstrate the coherent and systematic nature of the work of the Morisco copyists and provides the possibility of establishing a stemma codicum of some of the Aljamiado translations of the Qur'an. The relationship of these manuscripts with an Arabic copy of the 'Morisco Qur'an' makes it possible to conclude that these three copies were produced around 1609 ce, the year in which the Moriscos' final expulsion from Spain began. These links illuminate our understanding of the production and uses of these Morisco copies of the Qur'an at a very late date, enriching the field of Qur'anic studies in medieval and early modern Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a study and a descriptive list of alchemical works attributed to Prince Khālid b. Yazīd b. Muʿāwiya, both in prose and poetry, which are found in Arabic manuscripts. This list is compared to medieval biographers' accounts. A first appendix describes all the manuscripts containing works of Khālid that have been identified so far. A second appendix provides a catalogue of the first verses of all alchemical poems attributed to Khālid, as well as the manuscripts that transmit them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the manuscripts located into the Central Library of the Sicilian Region "Alberto Bombace" in Palermo there is a corpus of Arabic manuscripts coming from the Benedictine Monastery of San Martino delle Scale, as testified by the shelf-mark S.M., indicating that they used to belong to the Library of San Martino delle Scale's Monastery. Through an in-depth philological and historical investigation, the author will try to give a general description of the documents providing a reconstruction of their arrival to San Martino delle Scale first and then to the Central Library of the Sicilian Region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All 7 oriental manuscripts of the Mainz City Library (Wissenschaftliche Stadtbibliothek) were catalogued in 2017/18 at the Jena research centre "Arabic Manuscripts" as part of the project "Cataloguing of Oriental Manuscripts in Germany" (Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities). Since the beginning of 2019, the database KOHD Digital is accessible online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores women's uses of Islamic legal institutions in the Tuwāt oases in southern Algeria during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. It challenges the common view of Islamic law as an essentially urban phenomenon that stood in contrast to rural customary law and offers an anthropological analysis of women as social actors in Islamic courts in pre-modern North Africa. Empirically, our research is based on the close examination of a series of unedited collections of casuistic jurisprudence (nawāzil) compiled by local scholars between 1750 and 1850. The materials conserved in these collections allude to a profound ambiguity that characterized female agency in pre-modern tuwātī society. On one hand, Islamic legal institutions allowed women to claim rights and defend economic interests and, on the other, they worked as powerful devices for perpetuating patriarchal social structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the established scholarship on Sir William Jones (d.1794) by providing a detailed overview and analysis of the Arabic and Persian manuscript collection that Jones acquired both before arriving in India in 1784, and during his time living in Kolkata. 118 manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and Urdu and 69 Sanskrit manuscripts, as well as nine Chinese manuscripts, were transferred to the Royal Society library by Jones in 1792. These were then transferred to the India Office Library in 1876 and are currently housed in the British Library. As well as an in-depth survey of these manuscripts, this article provides important information on the manuscripts which remained in the Jones's possession after 1792 and which were sold, along with the rest of Lady Jones's (d.1829) library, at auction in 1831 after her death. Within this overview of the Arabic and Persian manuscript collections, there will be a sustained focus on the methods of acquiring manuscripts and Jones's curatorial management of his library. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines an Arabic mathematical manuscript at Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library (or. 45), focusing on a previously unpublished set of texts: the treatise on the mathematical method known as Double False Position, as supplemented by Jābir ibn Ibrāhīm al-Ṣābī (tenth century?), and the commentaries by Aḥmad ibn al-Sarī (d. 548/1153–4) and Saʿd al-Dīn Asʿad ibn Saʿīd al-Hamadhānī (12th/13th century?), the latter previously unnoticed. The article sketches the contents of the manuscript, then offers an editio princeps , translation, and analysis of the treatise. It then considers how the Swiss historian of mathematics Heinrich Suter (1848–1922) read Jābir's treatise (as contained in a different manuscript) before concluding with my own proposal for how to go about reading this mathematical text: as a witness of multiple stages of a complex textual tradition of teaching, extending, and rethinking mathematics—that is, we should read it philologically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution explores a peculiar kind of annotation in Arabic multiple-text manuscripts. These manuscripts were often compiled as a personal ‘one-volume library’, containing copies and excerpts of a unique selection of texts. Further, they were often used for less guided writing activities. The owners left notes, lists and sometimes even sketches in the margins or on blank pages between the texts. Among these, lists of life dates of relatives are a valuable source for studies on domestic devotion. On the one hand, they give glimpses on the composition of households. How many people lived together and who were they? These lists inform us about names regardless of gender. On the other hand, the penning of these list is in itself a trace of a practice intricately tied to the familial and domestic spheres. These lists are usually the only place, in which the memory of those people is preserved.

Although Muslims in Ethiopia are a large part of the total population, nevertheless, their literary tradition and their cultural heritage have, until the present, hardly been studied by the academic community. The present article aims to shed light on the Islamic manuscript tradition in Ethiopia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by focus-ing on several codices owned by al-Šayḫ Ḥabīb, a renowned scholar and respected walī from Wällo, in north-eastern Ethiopia.

From the 15th century onwards, a network of Muslim scholarly communities developed in the western and central parts of the Sahara, covering present‐day southern Algeria, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, and Niger. The massive diffusion of Islamic literate culture led to the constitution of a rich tradition of scholarship that materialized in various types of texts: doctrinal treatises, biographical dictionaries, chronicles, commentaries, poetry, and, most important, comprehensive fatwa collections. In the last decades, increasing academic attention has been given to this astonishing cultural heritage of the people of the great desert. This article intends to give a short survey of works and research orientations, focusing on projects of identification and edition of Arabic manuscripts and on the mobilization of Muslim scholarly writing as a source for social and cultural history. Résumé: Depuis la fin du Moyen Âge, les sociétés nomades et sédentaires de l'espace sahélo-saharien ont été travaillées en profondeur par la diffusion à grande échelle d'un Islam savant et normatif. La constitution d'une classe de lettrés musulmans s'est accompagnée du développement d'importantes traditions littéraires. Tout en couvrant l'ensemble des disciplines et des genres du curriculum de l'époque, celles-ci se distinguent par un intérêt marqué pour l'étude du droit, ce dont témoigne en particulier l'essor remarquable des recueils de fatwas (nawāzil, ajwiba) à partir de la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle. Depuis une vingtaine d'années, l'héritage littéraire des peuples du grand désert fait l'objet d'une attention croissante de la part d'une nouvelle génération de chercheurs procédant à une réévaluation de la place de l'Islam dans l'histoire de l'Afrique de l'Ouest. L'objectif de cet article est de proposer un aperçu sur les principaux travaux et axes de recherche, en mettant l'accent sur les projets d'identification et d'édition de manuscrits arabes et sur la mobilisation de la littérature savante musulmane comme source pour écrire l'histoire sociale et culturelle de la région. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ancient Arabic manuscripts are a treasure for humanity. They are living witnesses of a millennial civilization. The Arabic manuscripts are highly sought-after documents, but at the same time almost inaccessible. Therefore, digitization is a salutary way for the accessibility of these resources, but the different documentary institutions in the Arab world face great difficulties related to technical, human and financial but especially legal aspects such as copyright on the net. This study is an attempt to shed light on the need to develop a strategy for manuscript digitization projects in Arab countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Djoussour El-maarefa is the property of Association of Arab Universities 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.)

A short treatise attributed to Ibn al-Ǧazarī (born Damascus 751/1351) deals with what was considered necessary knowledge about the art and craft of penmanship. Along with linguistic and antiquarian remarks, scribal practices, and social applications of writing, an entire section is devoted to the preparation of inks. The selection of recipes includes different ink typologies and technical approaches to ink making, with a preference for metallic compounds; the manipulation of metallic substances often absorbed technological aspects of alchemical practice. This article provides an edition and a commented English translation of the section on inks in the Book on the Art of Penmanship , as preserved by its unique manuscript witness, MS Berlin Sprenger 1918. A recipe for the distillation of an artificial golden ink has been replicated in order to better understand the interaction between the text and the chemical reality behind it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the social meaning of philology in Arabic from the perspective of a contemporary Indian Shīʿī Muslim community, known as the Alawi Bohras. Rather than approaching philology as a tradition of canonical texts, it considers philology as a social act: a set of practices that are imbedded socially in the community. We focus on the community's khizāna , or manuscript treasury, and investigate its social role as a sacred site of philology, its Arabic manuscripts being only accessible to the highest clerics. Even though inaccessible to believers, the khizāna manuscripts have rich social lives as objects of concealment, agency, and healing. These social lives precisely lay bare the encounter between the philological and the community. As a study in social codicology that explores this encounter, the case of the Alawi Bohras is an invitation to rethink the social meaning of philology and manuscripts in Muslim societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes part in the recent project of reevaluating the place, role, and importance of different forms of engagement with Arabic and Arabic manuscripts in seventeenth-century Spain, and more broadly in Europe, by focusing on a single institution—the royal library of San Lorenzo of the Escorial. I examine if, and how, the Escorial fits within the new narrative of the history of Arabic in seventeenth- century Spain. Did the presence of an exceptionally sizeable collection of Arabic texts facilitate, hinder, or have no effect on the new Orientalism of the seventeenth century? More specifically, the article explores four questions: (1) What did Spanish and European scholars think about the collection of Arabic manuscripts in the Escorial? (2) What did the Hieronymites, the friars in charge of the library, do with its Arabic manuscripts? (3) What did the Hieronymites think about the study of Arabic? and (4) What access to the collection, if any, did Spanish and European scholars have? The answers to these questions suggest that the Escorial became a shrine of Arabic knowledge, to which scholarly pilgrims sought access, and that during seventeenth century Spain preserved its reputation among European orientalists as an important site for the study of Arabic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]