Walid Ghali, Aga Khan Library

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.

(Questions prepared by Shabbir Agha Abbas)

Any opinions expressed are solely those of the interviewee.

Could you tell us about yourself, your academic background and how you became interested in manuscripts? Also, briefly recount your ascent to becoming the head librarian at the Aga Khan Library in London.

I received my Ph.D from Cairo University in 2012 in Arabic manuscript studies. However, my connection to manuscripts started way before this date. I grew up in a village in the Western Desert, where families always kept their valuable documents and manuscripts preserved for social and religious reasons. There, I saw Qur’an manuscripts for the first time in my life, as well as the famous Sufi text Dala’il al-Khayrat by al-Jazuli and many other endowment documents. As a kid, I was fascinated by the length and the calligraphic style of these documents and manuscripts. Nonetheless, when I was 15 years old, there was an unusual incident that increased my interest in manuscripts and Sufism together. I saw one of my neighbours putting a pile of manuscripts in the middle of the street and setting them on fire. He said that these are a collection of works on magic, which is prohibited in Islam. The sad thing is that these titles, including al-Buni’s Shams al-Ma’arif, had been collected by his late father and grandfather before him, who were both great Sufis and leaders of a particular order. This young man, however, followed a stream of an anti-Sufi ideology that was growing in Egypt after Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. 

This incident remained in my memory when I joined the Faculty of Arts where I studied subjects related to primary sources such as documents and manuscripts. I was fortunate to study a wide range of other subjects with great scholars such as classification of knowledge and archival science, modern Arabic literature, pre-Islamic poetry, history of the book and libraries, major encyclopedic works in Muslim culture and last the history of Arabic script. I was also asked to study artificial intelligence, database management systems (DBMS) and computer networking. Therefore, I later decided to use what I learned and orient it towards the services of manuscript preservation. I never assumed that studying library and archival science would have this great an impact on my academic and professional career.

Manuscript studies was not attractive amongst my peers, many of whom wanted to pursue studies in technological fields. After my graduation, I was lucky to have worked on a rich collection of microfilms, where I catalogued a considerable number of manuscripts. To fulfill both my passion for manuscript studies and Sufism, I completed all coursework towards an MA in Islamic studies from the American University in Cairo (AUC), where I studied textual analysis and codicology alongside with other modules in Islamic studies. Since that time, I have been involved in various teaching and professional projects that are all related to Islamic manuscripts and codicology. Now, I teach a course on Sufism for MA students where I try to draw their attention to the rich collections of manuscripts in the world.

 

Having begun your career as a cataloger working in the manuscript troves of Egypt, can you please describe any special moments there? Were you involved in any important discoveries or uncoverings?

Before moving to London to work as the Head of the Aga Khan Library in London, I worked in different universities in various librarian and teaching roles. Most of these roles had different aspects of working with manuscripts. Also, I worked on many manuscript projects outside of Egypt. 

One project that is still memorable is working as a consultant in the Ministry of Endowment in Egypt to establish the Central Library of Islamic Manuscripts, now known as the Awqaf Library. In this project, I was privileged to work with and lead a dedicated team of specialists to collect manuscripts from various mosques in Egypt. We were successful in collecting approximately 8,000 unrecorded and neglected manuscripts. More importantly, these manuscripts were adequately cleaned, catalogued, digitised, and finally deposited in the library storage. A great discovery in this project was identifying one large Qur’an manuscript that was located obscurely in the al-Hussain Mosque for decades. Most studies attributed this copy to ‘Uthman ibn ‘Affan; however, I still think that this manuscript requires further studies and attention from scholars. It has been a great honour to join the group to collect and move this invaluable item from the mosque to the Awqaf Library in order to make the proper preservation and digitisation.  

 

Are there any takeaways from your experiences as a cataloger that have affected you as a person, shaping who you are?

Cataloging can be a monotonous task, especially concerning general library resources, however manuscript cataloging is a different story. It is an intellectual task that requires a high level of training, language skills and last but not least, detective work when consulting the secondary resources. Working with manuscripts has always been a learning curve for me. It has greatly impacted my educational and personal abilities. I learned that jumping to conclusions without proper research and consultations is the biggest mistake in scholarship in general and manuscript analysis in particular. We know hundreds of manuscripts that were wrongly attributed to other authors because of inadequate research.

 

As the Head Librarian of the Aga Khan Library in London, can you speak on its invaluable collection of rare books and manuscripts? What is the size of the collection, and are there any unique themes within the collection, related to period, geography, or genre?

The Aga Khan Library in London is committed to fostering knowledge of Islam, past and present, and facilitating access for external researchers and students to resources on Islamic studies and Muslim cultures. Housed in state-of-the-art facilities, the Aga Khan Library now occupies two floors at the heart of its permanent home, the Aga Khan Centre in Central London. 

Currently, the library houses over 52,000 volumes covering a range of themes and topics from historical and contemporary studies on Islam in multiple languages. It includes a niche and focused collection on Isma’ili resources and Shi’a studies in general. In addition to the manuscripts and rare books collection in the library, there are more than 3,000 manuscripts housed in the Isma’ili Special Collections Unit that shares the same place in the Aga Khan Library.

Over the years, many acclaimed scholars in the field of Islamic Studies have graciously donated their collections to the Aga Khan Library, further enriching an already valuable repository of materials. These include the collections of the late Professor Mohammed Arkoun, Professor Anne Marie Schimmel, a renowned scholar in Indo-Muslim cultures; Peter Avery, a distinguished British scholar of Persian studies and more recently Dr Farhad Daftary, an eminent historian of Isma’ili Studies and the Co-Director of the Institute of Ismaili Studies. Being in the heart of London’s knowledge quarter, the library’s collections and services offer an excellent environment for research and teaching. 

 

The Aga Khan Library plays a crucial role in acquiring and preserving Islamic manuscripts, especially related to Isma’ilism; it is assumed that this would require daring missions to far out places like the mountains of Northern Pakistan. Can you shed light on some of these efforts? 

Inspired by the great intellectual traditions and historical libraries from across Muslim cultures, particularly from the Fatimid era in North Africa and Egypt, the Aga Khan Library is much more than a space for holding valuable collections. It is a space that facilitates the cross-fertilization of ideas, through research, analysis, debate and discussion, with the underlying ethos of the universality of knowledge accessible to everyone.

The library collection on Isma’ili and Shi’i studies complements the unique and significant collection of Isma’ili manuscripts. It is worth mentioning that this collection is the largest of its kind in the world, making the Aga Khan Centre the premier reference point for research on Isma’ili studies. 

One crucial mandate of the Aga Khan Library is the preservation of Islamic manuscripts. This is evident in many activities we are doing in the library such as digitisation, conservation, and even offering courses and lectures on manuscripts. I would like to share a story with you: a few years ago, one donor brought a Qur’an manuscript from the 18^th century with East African features. The manuscript was nothing but a pile of damaged folios with water stains and worn edges without binding whatsoever. The library took the challenge, and we started the process of conservation. It took more than ten months to restore the manuscript entirely, create a suitable leather binding and digitise the manuscript. 

Due to advancements in technology as well as the urgent need for distance education, digitization of manuscripts has become in many ways the need of the hour. How was the Aga Khan Library able to perceive this need so quickly and then respond in such an effective manner? What can other institutions learn from your library? 

COVID-19 shows the importance of libraries in supporting communities and education systems. There are also some key lessons learnt from this outbreak, one of which is the urgent need to digitise heritage and make it available online. The gains from digitisation are undeniable; it is probably the only solution if we want to preserve the cultural heritage in general and manuscript traditions in particular. Although there are many digitisation initiatives in the world, there is a lack of attention in Muslim countries.

Since the inauguration of the Aga Khan Library, London in June 2018, we have been looking at solutions for how we could help safeguard Islamic studies collections and improve access for research. We decided to launch the Aga Khan Library Digital Collections as our contribution towards serving a wide range of scholars and users around the world. So, we launched the Digital Collections website, in collaboration with Bloomsbury Publishing in the UK. The aim is to showcase manuscripts, artworks, rare books, out-of-print publications, photographs, and maps from the library holdings.

In the first phase of this project, we digitised books from the Ottoman Collection, which reveal almost a century of profound transformations in the Ottoman Empire, and cover the foundation of the Republic of Turkey and the rise of Ataturk and his social and cultural reforms. We will resume the project as soon as we get back to normal operations.

Following the launch of the Digital Collections website, the Aga Khan Library organised a public lecture entitled, The Strength and Promise of a Shared Idea, which explored global initiatives which have been undertaken in the field of heritage preservation. In my view, there are still lots of work to be done in heritage preservation. However, it is not the responsibility of a sole agency or university. This type of work requires collaboration, strategies and thinking beyond the mechanical digitisations. Knowledge is for sharing, and research on Islamic manuscripts history and authorship traditions can not be completed without digitising and sharing the enormous institutional and private collections.

Lastly, as the head librarian at Aga Khan Library, what would you say is your lasting signature or characteristic on the library, be it in the curating of books or other managerial duties?

When I joined the Aga Khan University in 2012, the planning for the new building was in the early stages. So I had the opportunity to participate in the planning of the new library, especially as I had previous experience in designing and furnishing some new libraries in Egypt. Working with different teams of architects,  interior designers, and contractors was a great experience for me. The second major achievement is merging the two libraries of Aga Khan University and the Institute of Ismaili Studies, making it one library. In this, I have to credit my colleagues in the library for their patience and hard work of one year to complete the merger. Relocating the library from the old building to the permanent Aga Khan Centre is a story with many details to be told on another occasion. Also, as an academic, I decided to bridge the gap between the two worlds of scholarship: Academia and Libraries. 

To this end, I have organised a seminar on curatorship in the field of Islamic studies. The aim was to send a wake-up call that Islamic studies collections in the world are at considerable risk because of political, economic and professional reasons. The seminar is available online, and some of the papers were published in Abdou Filali’s Occasional Papers.

 

Dr. Walid Ghali is the head librarian of the Aga Khan Library in London as well as an assistant professor at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations at the Aga Khan University. He can be reached at walid.ghali@aku.edu. You can also follow him on Twitter: @DrWalidGhali.