Bibliographie complète

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>