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A lecture, published at the website of the Omani Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs: www.mara.gov.om/library/book/tanthimat.html (July 2003), (18 pp.).*

This paper discusses the links, through correspondence found in the Zanzibar archives, in the late 19th and early 20th century maintained between the remote community of Wādī Mīzāb, in the person of the great Algerian Ibāḍī scholar, Muḥ. b. Yūsuf Iṭfayyish (1820/1-1914) and the Sultans of Zanzibar. The letters, in an obscure classical format, inter alia raise questions of patronage, the precarious impecunious position of scholars and problems of publishing. The paper was kindly made available to me before its publication. Sadgrove also treats al-Maṭb. al-Bārūniyya in Cairo and al-Maṭb. al-Sulṭāniyya at Zanzibar. See Custers 2006a.

This paper depicts social and cultural life in Zanzibar early 20th century, with special emphasis on the important role played by the Shāfiʿī Qāḍīs Aḥmad b. Abī Bakr b. Sumayṭ (1861-1925), Burhān b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Amawī (1861-1935) and Ṭāhir b. Abī Bakr al-Amawī (1877-1938), and the Ibāḍī Qāḍī ʿAlī b. Muḥ. al-Mundhirī (1866-1925). A description of the Zanzibar legal system at the time is given, and questions like Waqf regulations, religious instruction and the language question (Swahili-Arabic) are treated.

This paper discusses the role of North African Ibadis, Mzabis in particular, in movements of religious reform and nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It unravels the intellectual networks in which Mzabis had been integrated since the late nineteenth century and that spanned from North Africa to East Africa and Oman. Mzabis’ membership in such networks highlighted the reformist trends within Ibadism that led to a rapprochement with the other sects of Islam. This also consequently facilitated the assimilation of Mzab and of Mzabis into the nationalist movements of Algeria in which Mzabis played a leading and formative role. Sources include manuscripts from the Mzab valley, Mzabi newspapers and French archival material.

à l'UQAM

This workshop will introduce scholars to the doctrines, terminology, history and major sources on Ibadi Islam, utilizing sources in the Sultan Qaboos Collection.

From the 17th-20th centuries, Ibadi Muslims from the Maghrib traveled to Ottoman Cairo to seek financial, spiritual, or intellectual gain. At the center of their community lay a trade agency, school, residence, and library known as the “Buffalo Agency” (Wikālat al-jāmūs), located just around the corner from the famous Ibn Tulun Mosque. Using the Agency’s manuscript library as its material and geographic anchor, this project sketches the lives of Ibadi merchants, students, and scholars to show how Maghribi Ibadis participated in the legal, intellectual, and commercial worlds of Ottoman Cairo.

The digitization of archives is usually approached from the starting point of the physical archives, looking toward the end user experience. Libraries give figures for how much of their collections they have digitized, yet assessing the extent of digitization in a given archive or library tells only part of the story. Beyond the perspective of the archivist—who is concerned with the progress so far made in digitizing a given collection—is the interest of the user investigating Ibadism online, a user who may be an Arabic-speaking student or English-speaking scholar, and many in between. As such, a review of the online experience for this user is desirable. This paper first contextualizes Ibadi studies in the larger movement towards mass digitization of libraries and then investigates on a more general level the state of Ibadism online, from the perspectives of the researcher and student. Rather than a catalog of what sources have been digitized, this paper surveys the Ibadi materials currently available online filtered by their ease of use and discovery. I break the field of Ibadi studies online into two main groups: digitized Ibadi sources, such as those by classical authors and modern scholars, from both official outlets and informal sharing sites, and religiously-oriented sites where Ibadi Muslims communicate outside of traditional platforms of publication. Throughout, I focus on the availability of materials online to a user interested in classical and contemporary Ibadism in order to approach the questions of how Ibadism is presented on the internet and where further development is warranted from the perspective of the online user.

Although the Sultanate of Oman’s Ministry of Heritage and Culture has published many classics of Ibāḍī scholarship and small bookstores like Maktabat al-Ḍāmirī and Maktabat al-Istiqāma have also contributed many valuable publications, much Ibāḍī scholarship remains unpublished. This paper will describe the major archival sources of Ibāḍī manuscripts in Oman and Zanzibar, and will discuss the following: the types of Ibāḍī manuscripts found in various archives and libraries; what those contents tell us about Ibāḍī scholarship and readership in Oman and Zanzibar in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the extent to which and manner in which these manuscripts have been catalogued; the state of preservation and digitalization of the manuscripts; and the manuscripts’ accessibility to researchers and conditions of research. On this subject, Oman and Zanzibar have some points of comparability, such as the existence of private, uncatalogued collections, but there are also important points of contrast: whereas the Sultanate of Oman has a major interest in specifically Ibāḍī scholarship, for the people of East Africa Ibāḍīs, who were all of Omani descent, were often seen as foreigners, sometimes admired and sometimes hated. Arabic manuscripts, which had undoubtedly already suffered from humidity and insects, were torn apart by angry revolutionaries in the Zanzibar revolution of 1964; the remnants were boxed and hidden away in the recesses of the Zanzibar National Archives, where for years the staff insisted that they had no Arabic manuscripts. Whereas Oman has had the financial wherewithal to invest in manuscript preservation and digitalization, Zanzibar has not. Nonetheless, there are significant things to be learned from these manuscripts, including the interest that Ibāḍīs in Zanzibar had in Sunni literature, as is evident from the presence of many Sunni texts in Ibāḍī-owned waqfs. Texts by Ibāḍī scholars resident in Zanzibar in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries indicate a broad range of scholarship, including works on Ibāḍī fiqh and theology, local herbal medicine, and a refutation of the ninth-century Nestorian Christian work known as The Apology of al-Kindi. Copies of books and manuscripts from Oman and other Arab countries may also be found. The Zanzibar Sultanate established a printing press in 1879 and published works by Ibāḍī scholars in Oman and Algeria, as well as one by a Zanzibari scholar.

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.