I have hesitated to write this piece because, as I told the person who commissioned it, everything about the archive(s), archivists, and their tepid relationship with historians and humanities folk has already been said in academic articles, books, conferences, and in less diplomatic ways on social media. Perhaps the most succinct and well-presented perspective of archivy’s relationship with other academics is Caswell’s (2016) article, “ ’The Archive’ Is Not an Archives: On Acknowledging the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies.” I would not be offended if you stopped reading this right here and just clicked on the link to that article now.
Caswell (2016) acknowledges in her article previous work on the topic by Lingel (2013), “This is not an archive” , who spoke about the limits of the archives as a metaphor especially when the theories are constructed “in ignorance of archival work.” Recently, Gibbons (2020) has written “Derrida in the Archival Multiverse” which begins with the important point all of our voices have grown hoarse repeating, “Archival theory did not start (nor end) with Derrida.” As Eastwood (2017) explained, archivists themselves “have long engaged in characterizing the nature of archives.”
I am a graduate student and manuscript cataloger based at Columbia University, and my research interest concerns Twelver Shi’ism, which thus requires frequent research trips to the Middle East, specifically to Iraq and Iran. With this background, I would like to contribute my experiences working in the relevant libraries of both these countries.
Hidden Entrance of Masjid al-Hindi Alongside a Clothing Shop(Photo Credit: Shabbir Agha Abbas)
Due to the turbulent last 50 years, the repositories of the two Shi’i dominated nations have in ways remained enigmatic for the typical western researcher. Enigmatic not because they are hiding anything, but because constant conflict has made them relatively inaccessible. Consequently, Shi’i studies, within Islamic studies, has been warped towards focussing on contemporary geo-political issues, whereas the rich Shi’i literary legacy ranging from jurisprudence to philosophy and so on has been veiled, seemingly only for certain experts to see. While it is true that travel to these regions is not at all easy, the historical libraries therein are indeed waiting for foreign researchers to come, and I have found that the staff are earnest in finding ways to assist in this proliferation of knowledge.
When it comes to Iraq and Shi’i studies, there are numerous libraries and manuscript collections where one can partake in research. From the National Archives in Baghdad and private libraries of Kazimiyah, to the collections of the ‘atabat (shrine) complex in Karbala, there is no single location that deserves to be the primal point of initiating research work, other than the seminary city of Najaf, and its al-Imam al-Hakim Public Library. This al-Hakim Library services the tens of thousands of students and scholars of the Najaf seminary, and thus can be considered the chief reservoir of Shi’ism as a school of thought. Therefore, visiting the al-Hakim Library is of vital importance for the Shi’i studies researcher, and hence the topic of this piece.
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.
I am an independent researcher working on early Qurʾānic manuscripts and fragments written in māʼil and Kūfī styles, which dates back to the period from the 7th century to the 11 century CE. I blog at quranmss.com. I am fascinated, too, by illuminated and gilded Qurans from later periods such as those in naskhī, thuluth, rayḥānī, biharī, and ṣīnī scripts. I spend most of my time researching, writing, translating, collecting books and volumes, and following-up on recent conferences, symposia, and events associated with the codicological and paleographical studies of Qurʾānic manuscripts. In addition, I tend to make regular journeys to distinguished libraries, museums, and public exhibitions in the Middle East, Europe, and North America to keep myself updated with current literature, look for unexplored materials convenient for publication in my field of interest, not to mention locating out-of-print books and references. This is not always an easy task considering factors such as date of publication, how rare it is, and whether it is available in many libraries or not.
This year, I decided to visit the British Library (BL) in London to explore some of the non-digitized Qurʾānic materials, focusing my eyes on bindings, frontispieces, illustrations, scribal errors, marginalia, and other impressive features of handwritten documents. It was a productive journey as I anticipated it to be. As you may know, the BL has one of the largest and finest collections of Arabic manuscripts in both Europe and North America, with over 100,000 volumes of printed books, periodicals, and newspapers, in addition to more than 15,000 manuscripts works in 14,000 volumes, covering various subject matters. These include Quranic sciences and commentaries, hadīth, kalām, Islamic jurisprudence, mysticism and philosophy, Arabic grammar and philology, poetry, history, science, medicine, and many other subjects and themes. Moreover, the Arabic manuscripts at BL consist of two major collections: the Arabic manuscripts of the old British Museum Library and those of the India Office Library; formerly part of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. These two historic collections, in addition to acquisitions made after 1973, were transferred to the newly-formed British Library in 1982.
In this blog post, I will be offering a detailed information guide—supplied by photographs and illustrations—to newcomers to the British Library, so they can thoroughly enjoy the experience and understand some of the requirements and regulations of the library before their arrival.
A large bronze sculpture of Sir Issac Newton displayed on a high plinth in the piazza outside the British Library in London. The work is based on William Blake’s 1795 portrayal of Newton, which depicts him sitting on a ledge while measuring with a pair of compasses (Photo Credit: Ahmed Shaker)
The lobby of the American Research Center in Egypt (photo credit: N.A. Mansour)
At MESA 2019, Djodi Deutsch, Academic Programs Manager for the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), participated in a discussion on doing research in Egypt today; she based this on years of working with ARCE fellows conducting dissertation research and other projects. She kindly shared this list of research sites in Egypt with us (and on social media!) to share with you. Note these are not archive reviews –we’ve hyperlinked the research sites that we do have reviews for– but we are working on bringing you Egypt-specific archive reviews, along with other content. Feel free to drop us a line at hazineblog@gmail.com if you want to write us a piece! For now, this guide should help you get a general sense of what is out there.
Statue of a Peasant Woman in the Agricultural Museum Gardens (photo credit: Taylor Moore)
Obviously Dar al-Wathaiq (the National Archives) and Dar al-Kutub are still accessible. Dar al-Wathaiq requires a lengthy application process you can begin by visiting the location on the Corniche. Dar al-Kutub, both at the Corniche and Bab al-Khalq are running as usual: these repositories are good for rare books, manuscripts, and periodicals.
Dar al-Kutub (Corniche Location) is on the right side of the image. The left side of the image is Zamalek, where the Majma al-Lugha al-‘Arabi can be found (photo credit: N.A. Mansour)
Here is the list itself, compiled by Djodi Deutsch
Maktabat al-Azhar (al-Azhar Library) in Cairo is reportedly about to move to a new location not far from the original location on Salah Salem Street, around the corner from al-Azhar mosque and al-Azhar Garden. Thus, it does not merit a full archive review. HOWEVER, one of our editors, N.A. Mansour, has been using it and she put together a Twitter thread with all the relevant information. Click through to read the thread in its entirety (you DO NOT need a Twitter account to read it) and we look forward to featuring an entire archive review when the library moves.
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.
Archnet for Bebek, Istanbul Fishing on the Bosphorus (Bebek, Istanbul, 1958, Walter Denny)
The Getty for Sainte Sophie (After 1883. Sébah & Joaillier. Pierre de Gigord collection of Photographs of the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey Series III, Getty Research Institute 96.R.14 (C19.8a))
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).
Manuscript digitization projects are increasing accessibility to researchers who, for a variety of reasons, cannot access collections in person. The Manuscripts of the Muslim World project is one such exciting project to hit the scene, not least because they actively share recently digitized manuscripts on their active Twitter account. We talked to Project Cataloger Dr Kelly Tuttle about its place in the digital humanities landscape and how to use this exciting new tool.
Describe your academic background and involvement with the MMW project?
I have a PhD in Arabic from the University of Pennsylvania and use manuscripts frequently in my own research. Right after I completed the degree, I worked in a library for a year while I looked for a traditional academic job. Once I found one, I discovered that was not really what I wanted to be doing, so when this position was posted, I jumped on it. It has been great to return to library work and to see this variety of manuscripts. Every day is different and I’m learning so much. As far as what I do for the project itself, I’m the cataloguer, which means that I try to identify and describe each manuscript that is part of the project. I’m sure I make mistakes, but fortunately, there is a growing team of volunteers who are willing to contribute their advice to the project, when asked. I also produce the metadata for the digital images that appear on OPenn, an open access repository for primary source materials.What is MMW, and what is its current status
MMW stands for Manuscripts of the Muslim World (also called Muslim World Manuscripts by one of the participating repositories). It is a project supported by a 3-year Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and is currently in the beginning of its second year. As the grant name suggests, it is a cooperative effort to digitize and catalog the ‘hidden’ Islamicate manuscripts held in three repositories: Columbia University, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania. Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College are also contributing holdings to the project. The collections were considered ‘hidden’ because many of the Islamicate manuscripts have been lingering uncatalogued in these repositories and therefore have remained largely unseen and unresearched. We hope that this grant will help make researchers, students, and other interested parties more aware of the holdings at each of these repositories and encourage their use. Since the manuscripts will also all be digitized in high quality file formats, anyone will be able to make use of these resources even if they are not able to come to the area in person. Since this is a cooperative project, there are many different players involved. Each institution has a project lead, Mitch Fraas at Penn, Caitlin Goodman at Free Library, and Kate Harcourt at Columbia along with many other support personnel who help keep everything running smoothly. Deserving of special mention here are the staff at the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI) at Penn and the Digital Imaging Lab at Columbia, who photograph everything, as well as the Digital Content team at Penn, who make everything available on OPenn, and at Columbia who add the holdings to the Internet Archive.
Andrea-Nunez: She is the photographer for this project at Penn. Here, she is photographing a Shāhnāmah from Free Library.
Do you have any advice for researchers who plan to use these collections?
Many of these manuscripts have been languishing unattended for a good, long while. Therefore, the time is right to poke around, find fun things to study, and bring the knowledge to the public. Browse the collections! I’m sure you’ll find something that interests you. So far, things that have stuck in my head while cataloging are that Columbia holds quite a number of teaching texts, and math and science works, in addition to some rather rare items, like a commentary in Aljamiado (Ms. Or. 515) and a forgery (Ms. Or. 388) produced in Palermo in the late 18th century. A blog post from the Columbia library gives some details about the collectors who provided most of the collection and some of what you will find in it. The Free Library has an excellent collection of illustrated manuscripts, including one illustrated version of part of the life of Emperor Akbar which is quite different from anything I’ve seen before (Lewis O 45). Penn and Bryn Mawr each have rather eclectic collections with some unique items. What immediately comes to mind from Penn is a Qur’ān that was copied in Malta (Ms. Codex 1904) and a divination book that has some fun illustrations (Ms. Codex 1898) and from Bryn Mawr a Shāhnāmah that is in an excellent state of semi-finishedness (BMC 65) with illustrations in all stages of development. Haverford has a good collection of Syriac manuscripts along with some Arabic and Persian, one of which a former owner has decorated with a number of rather awesome marginal doodles (Haverford College, Quaker & Special Collections mss. RH 66). The project is only half done, though, so more interesting things will surely be turning up!
Columbia_MsOr515: Folio 4v, Risālah, late 16th century. Text in Aljamiado, Spanish in Arabic letters.
For those of you browsing the digital collections, OPenn is a great repository, but it can look a little bare bones if you are used to the page-turning type of digital repository. With that in mind, if you go to the OPenn site you can read the introduction to find out how to use the repository and cite the works . You can then browse by repository , or, for this collection you can go to ‘Curated Collections’ and then to ‘Manuscripts of the Muslim World’ . Once you are there, you can search by Shelfmark, or browse through the holdings. The images, records, and metadata are all there for the taking. Please do help yourselves; it is all open access.
What are some challenges you’ve encountered in cataloging these manuscripts?
No one can be expert in all aspects of Islamicate manuscripts, and for a collection like this one, which is eclectic, spans 10 centuries, and covers areas from West Africa to India, I frequently run into things I’ve not seen before and for which I have very little reference. Thankfully, there is a growing set of resources for Islamicate manuscripts. There are still large areas, however, that are yet to be studied more fully. Perso-Indian manuscripts are one obvious example. I am not familiar with the tradition from my own training or research, but they exist in these particular collections in fairly significant numbers, and I am undoubtedly missing nuances of the copies and history as I catalog. Illustrated manuscripts present another type of challenge since I have had only minimal art historical training. I ask for outside help about the manuscripts with which I have difficulties, but sometimes answers are slow to come. I hope that having all the manuscripts available publicly will encourage people to get in touch with suggested revisions and improvements to the records, especially with regard to the structural metadata for illustrations. Another challenge has been with languages that I cannot read, but which form part of the collection; fortunately, volunteers have come to my rescue in cases like that. The project has been lucky, and I am extremely grateful, that so many people have been willing to donate their time and expertise when we need it. I hope the volunteers will continue to contribute their input.
What is your favorite manuscript you’ve worked on so far?
I don’t have a favorite, because there are cool things about each of the manuscripts I’ve worked on so far. I like anything that is a bit of a challenge, for which I need to do some digging. I also like anything that teaches me something new (so that is basically every manuscript out there). I also like finding connections between these manuscripts and manuscripts in other repositories, for example shared owner’s notes or stamps, or a scribe who copied one of these manuscripts and who I can actually then find listed elsewhere. The collections in the project were not built very systematically and so these connections do not often appear, so when they do, it is particularly nice. I also quite like it when the manuscripts seem like they’ve had a long, interesting life—when they have lots of marginalia, for example, or numerous owner’s notes, or tipped in notes and explanations. All of that is fun.
Could you tell us a bit about the advantages and disadvantages of working with digital images of manuscripts?
Since the project is based at Penn, I don’t actually see the Columbia manuscripts in person, for the most part. I therefore catalog their holdings from digital images and preliminary records that graduate students at Columbia have been learning to create. This has the advantage of letting me work remotely, but the disadvantage of obscuring some elements that would be noticeable in person. Knowledge of the paper is the most obvious drawback to digital images. You cannot look through a digital image as you would a piece of paper to see watermarks and laid and chain lines, for example. It is also more difficult to tell anything about the weight or texture of paper. Sometimes, it is hard to tell whether it has been blind-ruled or not. So, that’s a drawback. Another drawback is size distortion that comes about via digital images. A side effect of having all the images show up the same size on the monitor is that I sometimes lose track of whether I’m looking at a pocket-sized or a monumentally-sized Qurʾān, for example. That isn’t the fault of the digitizers or anything, and the measurements are of course provided along with the images, but it is easy to forget and think of all the books as the same size when they aren’t in front of you in person. A benefit of digital images, though, is the manipulability of them, which is to say they can be enlarged, cropped, rotated, and flicked through quickly without doing damage to the item. That aspect of digital images has been supremely useful in this project for reading small text, scribbly notes, for magnifying portions of the page for detail.
Is it possible for people to contribute to MMW?
In the sense that people can contribute their observations about the manuscripts, yes! Contribution is welcome and encouraged. Please do look at the digital images and decipher things that still need deciphering. Owner’s notes for example, stamps, other notes that were illegible to me, but might be legible to you, identifying what’s going on in an illustration so that I can update the structural metadata. In that sense, yes, we welcome contributions. In fact, if you have observations about provenance agents (owners, scribes, buyers, sellers, borrowers, lenders, readers, brokers, waqf donors/recipients, etc.) that you can identify in any of these manuscripts and you want to enter that information, along with the transcribed note, into the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts, that would be a significant help.
Penn_LJS405: Folio 1v, copy of Tasʹhīl al-naẓar wa-taʻjīl al-ẓafar, 14th century? This is an example of a leaf covered in owner’s notes. Help transcribing this type of thing is welcome and can be added to the Schoenberg Database by you, yourself! Please contribute.
Dr Kelly Tuttle is the project cataloger for the Manuscripts of the Muslim World grant. She is located at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts and is reachable via email at tuttlek@upenn.edu. You can also follow the project on Twitter: @MmwProject.
