A General view from Silêmanî/Sulaymaniyah “The Capital of Kurdistan” which was founded by the leader of Kurdish Baban Principality, Ibrahim Pasha Baban in 1784. Silêmanî has been one of the major centers for education, culture, and history in Kurdistan. William Heude, A Voyage up to the Persian Gulf, and a Journey Overland from India to England in 1817” (London: 1819).
Kurds, especially in Turkey, have faced some of the most systematic assimilationist policies in the Middle East since the early years of the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. The Kurds have not been allowed to establish their own centers for the production of knowledge under the uncertain and perilous conditions in Northern Kurdistan and Turkey. Therefore, the Kurds and their friends have created some indispensable organizations and platforms in diaspora to preserve Kurdish written materials and cultural artifacts from attempted state annihilation.
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.
Dr Walid Ghali preparing a manuscript for digitisation (Photo Credit: Nourmamadcho Nourmamadchoev)
In a time when online learning has become a critical necessity, a select few institutions have proven to be a step ahead. The Aga Khan Library in London is one such institution that began digitizing its collections a few years ago with the goal of facilitating research all over the globe on Islam. Their head librarian Dr. Walid Ghali has played an indispensable role in this multifaceted process, and we have had the good fortune to discuss with him his experiences both in the position as well as those leading up to it.Continue reading “Walid Ghali, Aga Khan Library”
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.
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
When historians refer to ‘training,’ we often refer to being able to read an archive and understand how the source itself fits into the grander scheme of the archive. But part of the problem, at least in Middle East and North African studies, is having archives to read into at all. The last two decades have witnessed multiple archive crises in the region. Archives have been rendered inaccessible, often by conflict, in the case of Syria and Iraq, or sources have been deliberately removed from archives by security states, such as the Israeli State Archives; Lebanon’s national archives, meanwhile, are under ‘renovations’ and there’s little word on when they might be accessible to the general public. But perhaps the problem is that we’re not thinking archive-first: we dive into topics without thinking of the availability of sources. Another layer of training we might receive is to construct projects while thinking source-first and readily reading available sources against the grain.
Jafet Library at the American University of Beirut (AUB) is one such repository of primary sources that might inspire researchers to think critically when building their own collections of sources. The Library has an impressive microfilm collection of Arabic-language periodicals. Furthermore, its Archive and Special Collections have accumulated some noteworthy unique documents, including private papers of the region’s elites.
