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Mediterranean Seminar co-directors, Brian Catlos and Sharon Kinoshita, interview Paul Love, whose “Provenance in the Aggregate: The Social Life of an Arabic Manuscript Collection in Naples” was the Mediterranean Seminar's Article of the Month for April 2021.

Abstract In this photo essay, I use the story of a private manuscript library belonging to the al-Baʿṭūrī family in Jerba, Tunisia to reflect on my foray into the world of social codicology and the historical anthropology of rumour surrounding manuscript collections on the island. In some cases, stories about manuscripts in Jerba often have little to do with manuscripts. Instead, they convey information about the people associated with them. In other cases, rumours and stories about manuscripts contain information that is anachronistic, contradictory, or even blatantly untrue. Drawing inspiration from Luise White’s work on vampire narratives in colonial East Africa, I maintain that the rumors about manuscripts and libraries need not contain information that is true in order to convey important information about people and manuscripts in Jerba.

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.

Episode 92: The Buffalo Agency: Maghribi Ibadis in Cairo, 1850-1950 In this interview, Paul Love discusses the early stages of his new book project on the history of Ibadi Muslims from the Maghrib who lived, worked, and studied in Ottoman Cairo. Tentatively titled The Buffalo Agency: Ibadi Muslims in Ottoman Cairo, the book follows the history of a trade agency, school, and library known as the ‘Buffalo Agency’ (Wikalat al-jamus), operated by Ibadis for nearly four centuries in the Tulun district of Cairo. From its founding in the 17th to century to its closure in the 20th, the Agency served as a waystation for students, scholars, and merchants on their journeys through Cairo. During that same period, it also became a school and library for Ibadi students and scholars connected to the famous al-Azhar mosque, some of whom stayed in Egypt for decades. By exploring the lives of Ibadi Muslims as they moved through the world of sharʿiah courts, made use of waqf to endow properties and books, and studied alongside and did business with their Sunni coreligionists, The Buffalo Agency shows the way in which Ibadis belonged fully to the Ottoman world. At the same time, the book shows how Ibadis in Cairo maintained connections with their coreligionists in North Africa, East Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula. The interview focuses on the early chapters of the book, including those based on research in the Tunisian National Archives during summer 2019. Paul spent part of the summer on an AIMS grant, which allowed him time to examine the correspondence of one of the most prominent Ibadis of the Ottoman Empire: Saʿid b. Qasim al-Shammakhi, who served as both the director of the Buffalo Agency and the representative of the Tunisian Bey in Egypt during the mid-19th century. Paul Love earned his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan (2016). He is currently Assistant Professor of North African, Middle Eastern, and Islamic History at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. His research focuses on the history of Ibadi Muslim communities in northern Africa, the Arabic manuscript traditions of the Maghrib, and colonial knowledge production in North Africa and the Sahara. His first book, Ibadi Muslims of North Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2018), traced the history of the formation of an Ibadi Muslim tradition in the Maghrib from the 11th-16th centuries. His recent publications have appeared in the Journal of African History, the Journal of Islamic Manuscripts, and Etudes et Documents Berbères. This interview was led by CEMAT Director, Dr. Laryssa Chomiak, and was recorded on July 19, 2019, at the Centre d'Études Maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT). Posted by Hayet Lansari, Librarian, Outreach Coordinator, Content Curator (CEMA).

Paul Love, actuellement Assistant Professor à l’Université d’Al Akhawayn (Ifrane, Maroc), est un spécialiste de l’histoire de l’ibāḍisme médiéval au Maghreb. Dans cet ouvrage, il livre le fruit de ses recherches de doctorat. L’ibāḍisme ne cesse d’attirer de nouveaux chercheurs et les récentes publications sur l’histoire de ces groupes religieux disséminés dans les marges de l’Empire islamique témoignent de la richesse du corpus de sources à explorer. Les sources ibāḍites maghrébines, que l’on...

This article focuses on letters in private Ibadi libraries and their importance for understanding the primary means of communication among Ibadi communities in the premodern Maghrib. Using the example of a letter from the 7th/13th-century Ibadi Shaykh Abū ʿAbdallāh al-Ṣidghiyānī from the island of Djerba (Tunisia) to the Ibadis of Warjalān (Algeria), it seeks to highlight the importance of the archive of unedited Ibadi manuscript letters. This corpus of correspondences has not received the care and maintenance it merits because these letters do not belong to a recognized volume or book and are today located in private libraries unavailable to the public. The article also uses the example of al-Ṣidghiyānī’s letter to emphasize the importance of the manuscript letters and their role in maintaining intellectual ties among the Ibadi cities of the Maghrib. This brief article consists of two parts. The first part offers a general presentation of the archive where the letter is today held: the El Barounia Library in Djerba, Tunisia. The second part presents the manuscript and its author in their historical context.</p></section>

This chapter presents the medieval history of the island of Djerba not through a chronological survey but rather through a series of overlapping landscapes: those of its Ibadi inhabitants and their communal organization, its links to the virtually invisible lines of commercial activity that crisscrossed its shores, as well as the ways in which its geography has interacted with its Ibadi communities over time. These different layers together form the uniquely Ibadi ‘islandscape’ of Djerba in the medieval centuries.

In this episode Dr Paul Love, grant holder for EAP993 "Conserving Endangered Family Manuscript Libraries on the island of Jerba, Tunisia" and EAP1216 "The Jerba Libraries Project: Preserving Endangered Manuscripts and Early Arabic Print Materials in Private Libraries in Jerba, Tunisia" talks about his EAP projects, the challenges the projects have faced, and gives advice on digitising an endangered archive.