The cover image for Rumooz, an Arabic-language podcast focusing on the biographies of historical figures from al-Jazeera Arabic.
When we at Hazine released our first podcast list in 2020, the goal was both to boost high-quality podcasts and also, to give our audience something to listen to in the early days of the pandemic. While this new list fulfills some of those same goals, it is meant to add to the 2020 list, not to replace it, as it documents some of the growth in the field over the last few years: Both independent podcasters and more formal institutions, like university centers or museums, have launched different projects over the last few years. Audiences are clearly asking for more content, particularly on the Arabic-speaking world and in Arabic specifically. Like our 2020 list, most of the podcast series are interview-based, allowing communities to document their own narratives and discourses in real-time. Many podcasts are also scripted, like Rumooz, which tells the story of a different historical figure from a first-person perspective each episode. Others are conversations between hosts and occasional guests, like The Middle Geeks. For now, we’re just excited for what podcasts the next few years will bring us.
From the first commercial audio recordings at the turn of the 20th century to the 1940s, a dozen or so record companies made tens of thousands of audio recordings for sale across the globe to the peoples and diasporas of the southern and eastern Mediterranean regions.* The vast majority of these recordings were of music, but they also included recordings of comedy sketches, political speeches, Qur’anic recitations, and a smattering of other audio forms. Recording companies sought to capitalise on the region’s communal diversity by recording materials in Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, Greek, Armenian and other local languages; especially after realising that there was a market for these materials in diaspora communities from the region, particularly in the Americas. Beyond commercial recordings, the region’s audio heritage includes a large volume of one-of-a-kind recordings, such as radio transcriptions prepared for broadcasts, ethnographic recordings, home recordings by amateurs, and so on.
A sampling of records and their sleeves from UCSB’s Historical Recordings Collection (Photo credit: Heather Hughes)
Over a century later, several archives with varying breadths to their collection mandates have identified these recordings as priority areas for collection, preservation, exhibition and digital curation. In this piece, I aim to provide information that could be useful to researchers of the southern and eastern Mediterranean regions who are interested in such things as recording history, cultural heritage, music, and archival practices and provenance. I profile five institutions with some of the most substantial collections of relevance to the history of audio recording in the region: the AMAR Foundation (Lebanon), The Palestinian Institute for Cultural Development-Nawa (Palestine), Centre des Musiques Arabes et Méditerranéennes: Tunisian National Sound Archive (Tunisia), the British Library (UK) and the University of California at Santa Barbara Library (USA).
This list began on Reddit in response to the number of people I’ve come across on the subreddit interested in learning non-Arabic Sudanese languages, which you can still find here. The goal is to provide any prospective learners of non-Arabic languages spoken in Sudan with a variety of language-learning resources. The languages I’ve been able to find resources for (with the help of many others) are:
The Old Dongola Throne Hall, an ancient building used by the royal family of the kingdom of Makuria, which overlooked the kingdom’s capital of Old Dongola, which is approximately 50 miles from the modern city of Dongola, where Andaandi Nubian, also known as Dongolawi Nubian, continues to be spoken. (Photo by Hans Birger Nilsen, Creative Commons License)
Andaandi (Dongolawi Nubian)
Beria (Zaghawa)
Berta (Funj)
Bidawiyet (Hadandawi/Bishaari)
Fòòraŋ Bèlè (Fur)
Gaahmg (Ingessana)
Masarak (Masalit)
Nobiin (Halfawi/Mahasi/Fadijja Nubian)
Tìdn-Àal (Midob/Darfur Nubian)
Tigre/Tigrayit (Beni Amer/Habab)
Each and every language resource listed on here, unless stated otherwise, is completely free: as a lot of these languages are endangered and thus already have less learning resources than more widely-spoken languages, it’s important to ensure prospective learners aren’t further inhibited by financial barriers. Be sure to contact Hazine (hazineblog [@]gmail.com) or myself (Twitter: @HatimAlTai2) if you have any resources to add, or any comments on the resources here!
In light of recent events in Lebanon, we want to encourage you to donate to support domestic workersvia Egna Legna, an Ethiopian domestic worker-run organization based in Beirut Lebanon, which has over the past three years assisted domestic workers including victims of horrible abuses to the best of its ability.We also recommend donating to Beit el Baraka.Use this tool to find more places that need donations.
If you’re an Arabist, think about the digital library or archive catalogues you use and then try to count the number that have interfaces and data available in Arabic. There are few in Arabic, although there are more catalogues and tools that are in Turkish. In addition, the design of these resources often is adapted without much alteration from tools produced for European-language materials for European-language audiences. It dismisses even the possibility that other intellectual histories rooted in different contexts function differently and require different things from their organizational standards; it also dismisses the notion that technologies are neutral and that they are inclusive.
A doorway in the IDEO featuring mashrabiyya (Photo Credit: N.A. Mansour)
The Arabic intellectual tradition is built around commentaries all expressing different and often diverging opinions, although they are often tied to the same text. So in order to study, for example كتاب سيبويه Kitāb Sībawayh, you need to be familiar with existing critical editions of the text. You might also want the commentaries written on it. You also naturally want the secondary sources on it as well: Arabic journal articles and monographs, as well as those written in other languages. Your institution’s standard catalogue might not be as much help here. You need a catalogue built to these bibliographic purposes. The AlKindi catalogue, developed by the Dominican Institute for Oriental Studies (IDEO) is the best solution to this problem of needing research tools in Arabic, built for Arabophone audiences with the Arabic intellectual tradition in mind. It’s also the solution to our bibliographical problems, essentially letting you browse online more effectively. It’s not perfect yet, namely in that it does not include every Arabic book ever written but each day, the catalogue becomes a stronger engine, as more data is added to it and as more people use it; it is often the first result you find when using a standard internet search engine to look for a text, like, say كتاب سيبويه, Kitāb Sībawayh. The cataloguing team has needed to expand multiple times to accommodate the work-load and under the direction of Mohamad Malchouch, it is full-steam ahead for the project. Here, we’ll be giving you an introduction to using the system, as well as a crash-course in cataloguing standards.
By Torsten Wollina (MSC Cofund Fellow, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin)
There are several noteworthy initiatives in Germany that are pushing the boundaries of #openaccess to both sources and secondary literature. Only recently, a joint project of several German university and research libraries has received funding for creating an online union catalogues for manuscripts in the Arabic script held by those libraries (named Orient digital). Leipzig University is home to the long-term project Bibliotheca Arabica which aims at a reassessment of Arabic literary history by putting it in conversation with manuscript studies. Unofficially, it has already been described as Brockelmann 2 (or 2.0). The digitization project Translatio at Bonn University is currently identifying periodicals in Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish published between 1860 and 1945 and makes them accessible online. Yet another initiative is the Bamberger Islam-Enzyklopädie headed by Patrick Franke. It provides a framework which aims at engaging scholars to disseminate their expertise on Wikipedia in German. Through this encyclopedia, authored Wikipedia articles become visible as citable publications.
At the moment, by far the largest initiative towards #openaccess is hosted by the University- and State Library Saxony-Anhalt (Halle). It offers two main online resources: MENALIB is the virtual specialist library but I will be focusing here on the online repository MENAdoc because it is, in my opinion, a truly unique treasure trove of primary and secondary sources.
Throughout the 19th century, the periodical grew in importance as a means of mass communication in the Ottoman Empire. Some of the earliest examples of this form of publication were in allographic traditions such as Armeno-Turkish and Karamanlitic. As the Tanzimat reforms progressed, however, and European forms of text dissemination became more commonplace, the balance changed in favour of the dominant Arabic script. Periodicals addressed a wide variety of topics, but literature, especially original poetry, short stories, and translations, were especially popular. The imposition of strict censorship during the period 1878-1908 made discussions of literature and language a convenient means for addressing social and political concerns without angering the censors. Literary periodicals are of great importance in understanding social change and political concerns during the Empire’s final century.
This list focuses on literary periodicals in Ottoman Turkish. In the interest of providing as comprehensive a listing as possible, the criteria for inclusion is relatively simple. I have opted to list any periodical publication (defined below) produced in the Ottoman Turkish language, or in a multilingual format that includes Ottoman Turkish, that expressly describes itself as a “literary” (“edebi”). Distinction will not be made between those works published inside the Ottoman Empire or outside of it. On occasion, works that do not include an explicit statement about their content will be included in the list if they exhibit many of the characteristics of a literary journal, i.e. literary criticism; publication of original poetry or prose works of fiction; translations of foreign literary works.
At the moment, even if you can concentrate on work, you might encounter several unanticipated challenges. One of them is access to literature absent from the large-scale repositories such as JStor, academia.edu or your own library. Archives and libraries remain unreachable. Archivists and librarians are doing all they can to move as much online as they can but they too should look out for themselves and their loved ones first and foremost. And while researchers and teachers cannot (I repeat: can not) do the work that archivists and librarians do, what we can do at the present moment is come together and engage in the age-old practice of sharing resources. And while this is being done already in many instances bilaterally, this contribution is concerned with a way to do it communally, to help students and teachers get around paywalls and other current inhibitors. Of course, this will always be useful to those without institutional access.
Here, I will present one way of using an existing platform to share documents, be they books, articles, images, or even sound files. The general idea is to bring together people needing a certain article, book, image or other sort of image, recording or source with others who have access to it. A kind of academic Ebay, maybe? While the browser based app Trello is first and foremost a project management tool, it is flexible enough to serve this purpose. It has several advantages.
Applying to annual meetings is a minefield. Which ones to go to? What are the organizations looking for? How do you assemble a panel? What are the strategies to employ when putting together multiple entries? Hazine has got you covered: we crowdsourced advice on social media from annual meeting veterans over the last few weeks then put it up here to immortalize their comments.
As usual with Hazine content, we rely on YOU for submissions, so tweet us or email us with advice for applying to an annual conference and we’ll get this information up ASAP. We also realize we have included information on a limited number of annual meetings: please send us tips and tricks by emailing us (hazineblog@gmail.com) or starting your own thread on social media (tag us please!). Then we can include AAA, MELA, MELCOM, BRISMES, BRAIS, ASOR and whatever other acronyms floating out there. We will also try to update with tips for what to do when actually going to the meeting.
Big thank yous to everyone who contributed: Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst, Kecia Ali, James Ryan, Candace Mixon, Kristian Petersen, Joshua Donovan, William Carruthers, Evan Berry, and Matthew B. Lynch.
We at Hazine love our lists. So hot off the heels of our visual resource guide and our regularly updated blog-list, we have a list of online resources to share with you all: this is where you can find primary sources online or resources to help you get at primary sources. An earlier incarnation of this list is here, written by Zachary Foster. We’re including links to digitized Islamic manuscripts, digitized periodicals, digitized books, oral history repositories, online syllabi and material history archives, all relevant to Middle East, North African, Islamicate world, and Islamic studies. Note while many of these are open access, some are not. Standard rules apply: this is not a comprehensive list so tweet at us or email us and we’ll add things to our semi-annual updates to this list.
Let’s face it: every publication is better with images. Whether it’s a presentation, a blog post, a book, or just a paper, images engage an audience instantly. The internet is flush with images from Islamic art, architecture, and society, but reliable sources (with credit information) are more difficult to track down. So we’ve done it for you! Here are some of the best sites for finding credited visual resources for Islamic, Middle Eastern and North African Studies. Feel free to suggest more in the comments and we’ll update the list! Note this list is specifically focused on images and visual resources, but not necessarily manuscripts (for a guide to online manuscript collections, look at Evyn Kropf’s list here).
