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Historians interested in Ibadi and other Arabic manuscripts (including me) often treat manuscripts separately from printed materials in private libraries. But in the second half of the 19th century…
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Over the past several years, I have worked with private manuscript collections belonging to families in Jerba, Tunisia. The island is home to several well-known libraries, including those belonging…
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Using the example of a recent inventory carried out in 2015 of the private library of the late Ibadi scholar and historian Salim b. Ya’qub (d.1991) in Tunisia, this presentation argues the late 19th and early 20th centuries represent a formative period for many major Ibadi manuscript collections in Tunisia. The Bin Ya’qub library, similar to manuscript collections through the Maghrib, the Sahara, and West Africa, reflects the archive-building travels and efforts of a Muslim scholar during the early 20th century and typifies a broader trend in Northern Africa toward the accumulation of large manuscript collections that today represent the main repositories of primary source material used by historians to write the history of Islam in the region. By offering a brief history of the creation of the Bin Yaq’ub library and the accumulation of its contents, the presentation suggests that thinking of the history of these and other Ibadi manuscript collections in terms of a network of scholars and books, constantly in motion, can help reshape the way historians use the texts of Ibadi archives. In addition, this paper considers the impact of the history of this and other Ibadi libraries in Tunisia on current research on pre-modern and early modern Ibadi history. In short, it considers the ways in which the story of the creation of this 20th century collection influences the ways in which we understand the history of pre-modern Ibadism.
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This a preliminary catalog of the Arabic manuscripts held at the Association pour la Sauvegarde de l’Île de Djerba (ASIDJ) on the island of Djerba, Tunisia. These manuscripts (bound volumes and assembled collections of fragments, representing many more titles) are all stored in acid-free boxes or folders. All items are housed in the association’s library in a former zawiya in the city of Houmet Souk. The association also has a sizeable collection of family and other documents in manuscript form that are awaiting cataloging—in case you are interested! Many of the manuscripts carry content related to the history of Ibadism (e.g. MS 013) and the history of Djerba (e.g. MS 01). For example, chronicles or legal compendia containing cases of disputes in Djerba, where there has been a sizeable Ibadi population for centuries.
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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.
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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.
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The Jerba Libraries Project (JLP) was an initiative carried out between 2019 and 2021 to document and digitize private and public collections of Arabic manuscript and early print collections on the island of Jerba, Tunisia. In this article, we present the project's aims, its achievements, and the obstacles it faced for those considering embarking on similar projects. We also use the example of this project to argue that manuscript documentation and digitization projects like it must speak to local actors, both engaging and benefitting them. We begin by explaining the origins of the project's pilot in 2017. In addition to generating a methodology for documenting and digitizing textual materials, the pilot allowed the project team to establish connections and build a reputation on the island that was important for acquiring local supporters and participants. We describe the methodology itself as followed in JLP, including some of the challenges faced by the team. To make the results of the project more concrete, we offer some quantitative data on its outcomes and a short qualitative example. We close with the perspectives of different team members on the impact and politics of projects like the JLP: public engagement, the labor behind the production of the images, the users of the images, and the knowledge produced from them.
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