Archive to Gotha Manuscript Talks

April 5, 2023, 6.15 pm

Farid El-Ghawaby (Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies)

Local Agents and their Power Articulation in Manuscript Translocations: The Case of Jamāl/ Aḥmad al-Miṣrī and Johann Gottfried Wetzstein

In this presentation I will discuss the records and correspondence on Wetzstein’s acquisition ventures recently found in the internal archives of the Berlin State Library. Building upon Christoph Rauch, this presentation will re-visit Wetzstein’s lately found letter Nachrichten zum Catalog der arabischen Handschriftensammlung des Dr. J. G. Wetzstein among other sources. While touching upon the degree of Wetzstein’s embeddedness in Damascene society, this presentation aims to elucidate the agency of a local antiquities dealer, Jamāl al-Miṣrī, in translocating Arabic manuscripts. My argument is that al-Miṣrī – like other local agents – played an active and important role in shaping what has become the material corpus of knowledge of nowadays manuscript repositories. The function of local manuscript dealers as ‘gate keepers of manuscript trade’ will be further stressed by briefly looking at other non-local and less successful agents involved in manuscript translocations, highlighting the power local agents were capable of articulating.

Farid El-Ghawaby is a Ph.D. student at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies of Freie Universität Berlin. His thesis deals with Quranic fragments of the Qubbat al-Khazna (Damascus), their translocation histories and (local) actors involved therein. He conducted archival work in Cambridge, Cairo and Berlin. He teaches Arabic at Freie Universität Berlin as an Associate Lecturer since 2016 and studied Islamic Studies and Religious Studies in Berlin (2013-2019).

October 12, 2022. 6.15 pm

A Treasury of Books Across the Indian Ocean: Isma’ili Manuscripts from to Yemen to Gujarat 

Dr Olly Akkerman (Freie Universität Berlin)

This paper addresses the question of communities, and the mobility of their manuscripts between continents over the Indian Ocean. It tells the story of a manuscript repository found all over the pre-modern Muslim world: the khizanat al-kutub, or treasury of books. We focus on the survival of one such treasury of books, belonging to the Bohras, a small but vibrant South Asian Isma’ili community.

Through Bohra manuscript culture, we investigate how books that were once part of one of the biggest imperial book repositories of the medieval Muslim world, the khizanat of the Fatimids of North Africa and Egypt (909CE-1171CE), ended up having a rich social life among the Bohras across the Western Indian Ocean, starting in Yemen and ending in Gujarat. Under strict conditions of secrecy, and over several centuries, one khizana was turned into another, its manuscripts gaining new meanings in the new social realities in which they were preserved, read, transmitted, venerated and copied. What emerged was a new distinctive Bohra Ismaili manuscript culture shaped by its local contexts in Gujarat.

Olly Akkerman (Institute of Islamic Studies, Freie Universität Berlin) is a specialist on Arabic manuscripts and Shi'i Islam. Her research examines the social life of manuscript repositories, and other forms of material culture among the Bohras in South Asia and the larger Western Indian Ocean. Her publications include “The Bohra Manuscript Treasury as a Sacred Site of Philology: a Study in Social Codicology” and a monograph: A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books in Gujarat: Arabic Manuscripts among the Alawi Bohras of South Asia (EUP).

Watch the video of the event in the media library.

October 26, 2022. 6.15 pm

Mobile Arabic manuscripts across the early modern western Indian Ocean

Dr Christopher Bahl (Durham University)

Arabic manuscripts and texts of South Asian provenance abound in collections across Europe, the Middle East and India. Refracted during the nineteenth century through practices of looting, cultural appropriation, and commercial transactions, many of those manuscripts were initially the product of an extensive Arabic text circulation across the early modern western Indian Ocean. Based on corpora from Hyderabad, Cairo, Istanbul and London, the talk will excavate the early modern transoceanic encounters that those manuscripts negotiated between scholars and sultans, scribes and readers, librarians and slaves. I elaborate on the notion of “mobile manuscripts” and how they crafted distinct sociabilities that helped build transregional Arabic cultures of learning. Marginalia and manuscript notes provide an empirical treasure trove to study those social spaces and cultural practices. From the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries Arabic learning spread in the subcontinent and fostered long-term entanglements with the Red Sea. By the seventeenth century new political and cultural dynamics across South Asia reconfigured scholarly movements and pursuits. Local libraries and scholarly communities spread across the subcontinent. Their book cultures offer a source-base to explore the western Indian Ocean as a prolific field of Arabic scholarly culture.

Christopher Bahl is an Assistant Professor in South Asian History in the History Department of Durham University. He was a Research Associate at the Orient-Institut Beirut, Lebanon from 2018-2020. He completed his PhD in History at SOAS, University of London in 2018 and conducted field work in Cairo, Istanbul and across India. He studied Islamic Studies and South Asian History in Heidelberg, Damascus, Hyderabad and London.

Watch the video of the event in the media library.

November 9, 2022. 6.15 pm

Constantinople: Capital of Arabic Literature

Dr Boris Liebrenz (Saxon Academy of the Sciences and Humanities)

For those interested in the manuscript sources of Arabic literature, the rich book collections of Baghdad, Berlin, Cairo, Damascus, Leiden, London, or Princeton can pride themselves with immense treasures. But there is no place to rival the libraries of modern Istanbul in scope and splendor. This talk will look at the roots of this current state, when the Ottoman capital was the main nexus for the trans-regional circulation of Arabic books for nearly half a millennium between the 15^th and 19^th centuries.

More than a simple point of provenance, Constantinople and the ways books took to and from its markets and book-shelves represents the lives, often rich, sometimes tumultuous, of books and those who interacted with them. As a gravitational center of great attraction for books from all over the vast Ottoman empire and beyond, it was also the source for many who wanted to collect on their own. This paper will highlight some of the central actors in this process, particularly of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, and show how they helped shape the Arabic literary tradition as we still have it today. Central among these will be Abū Bakr b. Rustam al-Širwānī (d. 1135/1723), one of the era’s most ferocious bibliophiles, whose many books are now scattered all over the world and thus allow us to follow the currents of the book market in every direction.

I will also discuss the basic methodological question of how to write the history of such a book culture. How can we reconstruct the routes a given codex took, the content of libraries, the social settings in which particular texts were circulating?

Boris Liebrenz studied history and Arabic philology at Leipzig University and, after postdoctoral positions in Bonn, Berlin, and New York City, is currently a research fellow at the Bibliotheca Arabica project at the Saxon Academy of the Sciences and Humanities. His publications explore documentary and manuscript sources from several eras, from early Arabic papyri to 18th-century merchant letters. His second book, Die Rifāʽīya aus Damaskus: Eine Privatbibliothek im osmanischen Syrien und ihr kulturelles Umfeld (Leiden: Brill, 2016), was awarded the Annemarie Schimmel Research Prize in 2017. Recent projects include the edition and study of an Aleppine weaver’s notebook from the 16th century (The Notebook of Kamāl al-Dīn the Weaver, with Kristina Richardson, Beirut: Orient Institut, 2021) and Arab Traders in Their Own Words. Merchant Letters from the Eastern Mediterranean Around 1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2022).

Watch the video of the event in the media library.

November 30, 2022. 6.15 pm

Literary and historical manuscripts in seventeenth-century Aleppo: The “Dervish” Aḥmad revisited

Dr Simon Mills (Newcastle University)

The “Dervish” Aḥmad has been familiar to historians for some time, thanks to his activities in Ottoman Aleppo on behalf of seventeenth-century European Orientalists. This talk will position this extraordinary figure in his own cultural milieu, by presenting some new findings about his identity, and exploring his work as a copyist of and dealer in Arabic manuscripts. It will argue that Aḥmad’s career sheds some light, not only on the history of European scholarship, but on the production and sale of books more broadly in an early modern Ottoman city. This, in turn, might help us better to understand aspects of Ottoman Aleppo’s intellectual culture – in particular, contemporary interest in Arabic literary and historical writing.

Simon Mills is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Newcastle University, UK. He is the author of A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, c.1600-1760 (Oxford University Press, 2020). His research focuses on the intellectual connections between early modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire, and the histories of biblical and Oriental studies.

Watch the video of the event in the media library.

March 16, 2022. 6.15 pm

Looted, Lost, Forgotten: The Libraries of the Hafsids (c. 1250–1574) before the Sack of Tunis in 1535 and After

Dr. Laura Hinrichsen (Berlin)

On 21 July 1535, Johannes Marquart von Königsegg found himself in the “capital of the Barbaric land called Thunis”, where he had joined a military expedition with the armies of Charles V against the Ottomans. During the sack of Tunis, which followed the conquest of the city, he pocketed a handwritten copy of the Qur’an, which he “carried away with [him] for [his] memory” and brought to Europe (note in a manuscript now kept in the Vadiana Library in St. Gall, VadSlg Ms 387, fol. 74v).

As this paper will show, in the course of the so-called Tunis expedition in 1535, the libraries of the Hafsids (the local ruling dynasty, c. 1250–1574) were plundered and many other manuscripts were taken as booty to Europe by the imperial armies of Charles V. There they were sold or donated to scholars and collectors of Arabic books. Both Arabic and European historiography declare the libraries of the Hafsids as lost since the Ottoman-European proxy wars in North Africa. Today, the Hafsid manuscripts are scattered in numerous European and Turkish collections – only a few manuscripts can still be located in Tunis.

The paper presents a selection of these Arabic manuscripts and focuses on the disruptive moment of the sack of Tunis and its libraries. It sheds light on the consequences this disruption had for the manuscript culture of the Hafsids and, more broadly, of the Maghrib. The paper explores the question of what the reconstructed corpus can still tell us today about the lost book culture of the Hafsids – and what it cannot.

Laura Hinrichsen is curatorial assistant at the Museum für Islamische Kunst in the Pergamonmuseum (Berlin). She studied Islamic Studies and Arabic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and Islamic Art and Archaelogy at Oxford University. Her research focuses on material culture in North Africa and the transfer of culture and knowledge in the Mediterranean. Her dissertation Looted Letters (Oxford 2021/22) deals with the Arabic manuscripts that were taken as booty to Europe in the course of the looting of Tunis in 1535.

Watch the video of the event in the media library.

March 30, 2022. 6.15 pm

From Ségou to SAVAMA: Destruction and Creation of West African Archives 1892-2022

Dr. Ali Diakite und Dr. Paul Naylor (Collegeville, Minnesota)

Manuscript culture and preservation in West Africa has been punctuated by moments of destruction. In 1591, Moroccan armies invaded the Songhai Empire, leaving the library of the famous Timbuktu scholar and jurist Ahmad Baba in ruins. Three hundred years later, French colonial authorities seized the library of al-Ḥājj ʻUmar Tal after their conquest of Ségou, renamed it Les Fonds Archinards and, in 1892, moved it permanently to the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. But in many instances, the creation of new archives can also be destructive. In the 1960s, as West African countries gained their independence, nationalist leaders in Nigeria, Niger, and elsewhere co-opted private archive collections into the service of the state. Meanwhile, advances in digitisation and, also, a flood of international development money, threatens to turn the preservation of African archives into a “numbers game” in which hundreds of family libraries are subsumed into a few vast collections. The most ambitious digitisation project is, again, in Timbuktu, where SAVAMA-DCI, a local NGO, evacuated twenty-eight family libraries to the Malian capital Bamako, following the Islamist occupation of northern Mali in 2013. Our talk will assess how the study of primary sources is closely intertwined with the histories of the archives within which they are found, and discuss how the growing transnationalization of West Africa’s archives will affect access and study.

Ali Diakite completed his PhD at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, on West African intellectual life in the 19th century. A native speaker of Arabic, Fulfulde, and Bambara, Diakite completed his MA work in Arabic Studies at the Université de Bamako, Mali. He has contributed to the West African Arabic Manuscripts Microfilm Project (MMAP) and is currently working as Cataloger of West African Manuscripts at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library.

Paul Naylor holds a PhD in African Studies from the University of Birmingham (UK). His book, From Rebels to Rulers, studies Arabic manuscript tradition in the Sokoto Caliphate and required extensive engagement with archives in Niger, Nigeria, the UK, France and the USA. Having catalogued the British Library’s collection of Arabic script manuscripts from Africa, he now works at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library as a Cataloguer of West African Manuscripts.

Watch the video of the event in the media library.

April 13, 2022. 6.15 pm

After 1683: The Circulation of Türkenbeute Manuscripts

Dr. Paul Babinski (Kopenhagen)

In the years following the Ottoman retreat from Vienna in 1683, waves of orientalia looted from the conquered cities of Ottoman Europe came westward with returning soldiers and traveling merchants. In a short time, hundreds of Türkenbeute manuscripts arrived in private collections, circulating as trophies of war, exotic souvenirs, and objects of scholarship. Some of these manuscripts contain inscriptions that describe the circumstances of their looting, casting light on the violence that followed conquest. On the flyleaves of others, we find traces of the legends told about them, their status as gifts, and their gradual consolidation in major collections. Other inscriptions provide glimpses of their earlier Ottoman readers and the world from which they were torn.

This talk will use a variety of sources—letters, works of scholarship, and the manuscripts themselves—to retrace the lives of looted manuscripts, focusing on the dispersal of Buda’s collections in 1686. The trajectories of Buda’s manuscripts show both the wide reach of Türkenbeute and the broader shift in German orientalist scholarship toward the study of Islamic sources.

Paul Babinski is a Postdoctoral Researcher with the ERC Synergy Project ‘The European Qur’an. Islamic Scripture in European Culture and Religion 1150-1850 (EuQu)’ at the University of Copenhagen. His work focuses on early modern orientalist scholarship and the movement of philological knowledge between the Near East and Western Europe. He is currently writing a book on how early modern orientalists read the Qur’an.

Watch the video of the event in the media library.

April 27, 2022. 6.15 pm

What is the Delhi Collection and why does it matter? Looting, Restitution and Islamic Manuscripts in 1857 Delhi

Dr. Nur Sobers-Khan (Cambridge, Massachusetts)

My talk will propose that the collection known as the “Delhi Collection” currently housed in the British Library, London needs to be analysed with greater attention to the provenance of its manuscripts. The Delhi Collection was long considered to be the remnants of the Mughal library, consisting of roughly 1957 volumes of Arabic manuscripts, 1550 Persian, and 157 Urdu. Through a close examination of the scribal output of one particular nineteenth-century scholar whose manuscript library seems to have been included in the Delhi Collection – but who was not part of the milieu of the Mughal court but rather associated with the anti-colonial network of Muslim scholars of the Madrasah Rahimiyah – not only can the intellectual network of this scholar be reconstructed, but it also becomes possible to argue that the Delhi collection contains the libraries of private scholars whose collections were looted in 1857. By using evidence from colophons and inscriptions in tandem with the content of the manuscripts, this scholar’s biography, patronage connections, as well as intellectual motivations and trends that caused him to copy the texts can be outlined, capturing something of the pre-1857 Muslim intellectual world of Delhi that British colonial violence attempted to destroy.

Nur Sobers-Khan is the director of the Aga Khan Documentation Center, a research center and archive of Islamic visual culture and urbanism at MIT. From 2015–2021, she was the Lead Curator for South Asia Collections at the British Library, London, where she was responsible for curating the South Asian printed book and manuscript collections and was Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project Two Centuries of Indian Print (2016–2021). Her current research focuses on the transition from manuscript to print in South Asia and the creation of new genres and forms of reading through the circulation of lithographed texts on cosmology, dream interpretation, and other divinatory literatures. She has taught at the University of Cambridge, St Mary’s University College, and Habib University, where she designed the undergraduate courses, “Dream Interpretation: A Decolonial History” and “Islamic Art and Visual Culture: From the Middle East to South Asia.”

Watch the video of the event in the media library.