Ibadi Muslims of North Africa: Manuscripts, Mobilization, and the Making of a Written Tradition, by Paul M. Love

This interesting and concise book finds its origin in Paul Love’s doctoral thesis defended in 2016 at the University of Michigan. It presents an innovative study of medieval Ibadi North-African Siyar. In the Maghrib, Siyar are books containing anecdotal and biographical information about individuals, playing the role of chronicle-style history; they function as prosopographies, collective biographies in which stories about individual members come together to form the biography of the community, constructing a North-African Ibadi tradition (p. xx). Love’s book tells the story of the compilation, adaptation and circulation of that prosopographical corpus through five scholars’ works. The pioneer is Abû Zakariyyâ’ al-Wârjalânî who provided Ibadi scholars of the second part of the eleventh century with a cohesive narrative of their history, when the community was suffering an ongoing numerical decline; he chose to write in the Arabic language at a time when use of the Berber language was also in decline. The author then studies the works of al-Wisyânî, al-Darjînî and al-Barrâdî. The last Ibadi scholar is al-Shammâkhî (d. 1522), who compiled all of the biographies of his predecessors into one collection and brought that medieval tradition of Ibadi prosopography to a close.