Islamic Books in the American Research Library

Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies: “gender studies,” “women’s studies,” “Asian-Pacific-American studies,” and dozens of others.  The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves—thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine.

Tony Judt, “Edge People,” in The Memory Chalet, 2010

The concept of Islamic books has the significant advantage that it allows for situating research on manuscripts, printed books, and ephemera in Arabic script within the larger fields of cultural and material history.  The concept is derived from a definition of Islamic civilization as a catch-all: comprising more than Islam as a faith and reaching beyond the borders of the central Arab lands which are commonly associated with the Middle East.  The emphasis on openness is important as a counterweight to any form of essentialism.  From the eighth to the fifteenth century CE, Muslim elites ruled over parts of the Spanish Peninsula and Southern Italy, and afterwards the Ottoman Empire expanded into Central Europe and included parts of the Balkans until its demise after World War I.  The import of slaves from East and West Africa led to the establishment of the first Muslim underground communities in seventeenth-century North America, even though the savage conditions of slavery ensured that little to nothing has been preserved about these Muslim congregations.  Significant Muslim minorities in all societies of Western Europe and North America make it today irresponsible to approach Islam as an exclusively non-Western phenomenon.

It is impossible to predict how in the Western world Muslim citizens will change our research in Middle Eastern, South Asian, Arab, Iranian, Turkish, or Islamic Studies over the next decades.  But it seems a reasonable guess that American research libraries will adapt their current collection policies to these continuous transformations since the reigning Area Studies paradigm continues to treat Islamic civilization as mostly Middle Eastern.  A map of the world is neatly divided into blocs of twenty-first-century nation states, thereby obfuscating diversity, mobility, and migration in societies past and present, whereas contemporary national languages, in particular Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu, determine whether manuscripts, printed books or ephemera in Arabic script are under the responsibility of an Area Studies specialist for Middle Eastern, African, or South Asian Studies.  For Islamic books that were produced before World War I such a language-based classification scheme is spectacularly unsuited.  Premodern Muslim societies were multilingual, and Islamic books in different languages circulated widely from India to the Balkans, from West Africa to Central Asia.

How long it will take until American research libraries adapt their collection policies is an entirely different matter.  As long as universities continue to organize research on Muslim societies in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa within the Area Studies paradigm, research libraries will follow suit because libraries are strictly hierarchical institutions.  Their top-down structure is designed to build and protect collections whose content is determined by bibliographers or curators.  Librarians are usually open to their patrons’ input, as there are always more books on sale than there is money for purchases.  But the power of the purse makes librarians willy-nilly arbiters of each book’s merit and value.  Since the mission of a research library is the furthering of scholarship, not all patrons are equal before the librarians.  In the hushed reading rooms, patrons clamor for the librarians’ attention, while the librarians busy themselves with applying to a higher authority in order to stay above the fray.  Librarians are bound by both a professional ethos of service and their institution’s hierarchy.  When in doubt, librarians will ask professors for advice and consent, and the professors in turn decide the fate of their institution’s library collections ex officio.

The history of Jewish Studies collections in New York research libraries suggests, though, that extra-academic contingencies are more likely to determine whether an American research library will abandon the Area Studies paradigm to gather its diverse holdings in Arabic script as a comprehensively defined Islamic Studies collection.  In 1897 Jacob Schiff (1847-1920) initiated the establishment of an Oriental Division at the newly founded New York Public Library (NYPL) to ensure access to a Jewish Studies reference collection in Midtown Manhattan.  Since the division’s chief librarian Richard Gottheil (1862-1936) did not get along with his bibliographer Abraham Freidus (1867-1923), the Jewish holdings were separated from the Oriental Division, and in 1901 Freidus became chief librarian of an independent Jewish Division (Phyllis Dain, The New York Public Library: A History of its Founding and Early Years, New York: NYPL, 1972, pp. 116-117).  After the Second World War the Oriental Division was renamed Asian and Middle Eastern Division and dissolved, together with the Slavic and Baltic Division, in 2008.  In the Columbia University Libraries (CUL), the responsibilities of the Middle East bibliographer used to include Judaica.  But a few years ago, when a generous gift had made it possible to establish the Norman E. Alexander Library of Jewish Studies, CUL reorganized its Area Studies Library which continues to include Jewish Studies, and the Middle East bibliographer is now explicitly in charge of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies.

PS.  As of Fall 2012, Columbia University Libraries has renamed its Area Studies Library as Global Studies Library.  Yet Western Europe and North America, which were not included into the Area Studies Library, are still not aboard.

Updated, 12 September 2012.

Working with Manuscripts in the Digital Age

The importance of Islamic manuscripts as the most important resource for research about all aspects of Islamic civilization is widely recognized.  Walid Saleh describes the medieval Muslim Middle East as “one of the most bookish of pre-modern cultures” (Formation of the Classical Tafsīr Tradition, Leiden: Brill, 2004, p. 207), and Tilman Seidensticker observes that “the medium of the manuscript was intrinsic to the Islamic-Arabic culture” (in Manuscript Cultures, ed. Jörg B. Quenzer, Hamburg: SFB 950 Manuskriptkulturen Asien, Afrika und Europa, 2011, p. 78).  Scholars and institutions worldwide have heartily embraced digitization to facilitate access to the texts of manuscripts, as well as rare printed books, since the field of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies is still a discipline focused on the study of written texts.  The use of digitized sources has almost become best practice, and we routinely complain if sources are not digitally available with a good full-text search.  It is therefore noteworthy that the transformation of a three-dimensional physical object into a two-dimensional image on a screen has not ushered in a debate on whether the medium in which we encounter written texts impacts our understanding of their meaning.

One of the unintended side effects of the vigorously championed digitization of Islamic books is the proliferation of a seemingly decorative use of manuscript pages on academic websites and publications, since the widespread use of digitization has made it so much easier to obtain affordable high-quality scans.  I hasten to add that it is of course not particular to Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies to treat beautiful manuscript pages as eye candy.   Moreover, I myself am guilty as charged, though on this blog I will provide identifying information about all featured images (NB – for the blog’s masthead, please see this page).  But I suspect that the use of undocumented images as illustrations most likely reflects a learned lack of interest for the materiality of written texts.  As long as graduate education in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies is centered on teaching scholars how to base their arguments on the meaning of words only, the text’s embodiment in any particular medium is perceived as secondary and illustrations, as nice as they may be, are accidental.  This logocentric attitude explains why we have moved with relative ease from books on paper to microfilms and e-books.

The following two examples of undocumented manuscript pages illustrate that in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies our scholarly appreciation of Islamic manuscripts has not initiated a turn to bibliography or material history.  Despite the immense potential of digital media for the study of images, it is the word that stands at the center of contemporary research in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies.

In Yemen, one of poorest Arab countries, the preservation of public and private manuscript collections presents a serious challenge, and digitization has long been used to address this challenge.  In 2011, Sabine Schmidtke and Jan Thiele of the Research Unit of the Intellectual History of the Islamicate World (Institut für Islamwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin) published an English-Arabic pamphlet about their department’s Yemen Manuscript Digitization Project.  The cover of the English version shows part of a rubricated table of content, set into a red frame, with a note on the margin:

As I wanted to know more about the formal manuscript to which this page belongs, I emailed Sabine Schmidtke and promptly received from Jan Thiele a very kind note with the available bibliographical details:  The illustrated leaf belongs to an undated copy of Taysīr al-maṭālib min Amālī Abī Ṭālib by Jaʿfar b. Aḥmad al-Buhlūlī (d. 1177 or 1178), written by Jābir b. Fatḥ Allāh al-Ghaffārī.  The work is preserved as part of a miscellany, which includes another work dated 1029 (began 8 Dec. 1619).  Although the miscellany is uncatalogued and its current owner unknown, the miscellany can be consulted, as it has been digitized by the Imam Zayd b. Ali Cultural Foundation (CD 450:3).  It is intriguing that Schmidtke and Thiele chose for the cover of a printed pamphlet a manuscript that at the moment is only accessible as a digital copy.   Their decision may first and foremost reflect that the work of Jaʿfar b. Aḥmad al-Buhlūlī is important to the department’s research project on theological rationalism.  But what is the ontological status of a digital manuscript copy, for which any knowledge about its original’s size, paper, ink etc. can no longer be ascertained?

The second example concerns the 2008 website of the research project on the Rational Sciences in Islam (Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University).  A very beautiful illustration of two kinds of kabīkaj plant (Lat. ranunculus asiaticus) – and the word kabīkaj is clearly legible on the top of the right column – is prominently displayed on the homepage and the related three project pages.     The illustration (MS arab., fol. 277a) belongs to a mid-thirteenth-century fragment of the Kitāb al-adwiyah al-mufradah by Abū Jaʿfar Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Ghāfiqī (d. 1165), which is owned by McGill’s Osler Library of the History of Medicine.  In 1989, Adam Gacek published the manuscript’s description in “Arabic Calligraphy and the ‘Herbal’ of al-Ghâfiqî” (Fontanus 2, pp. 49-51 and figs. 8-9).  Pharmacology is not directly related to philosophy and the mathematical sciences which are at the heart of the McGill research project.  Yet the kabīkaj presents a fascinating case of the rational sciences in premodern Islam.  What is the status of material evidence for any research on medieval Islam?  As Gacek had shown in an earlier article about “The Use of ‘kabīkaj‘  in Arabic Manuscripts” (Manuscripts of the Middle East1, 1986, pp. 49-53), the kabīkaj plant and the jinn Kabīkaj who protects books from pests are clearly related.  But Gacek’s research on invocations of the Kabīkaj has nonetheless been adduced to argue that the jinn Kabīkaj has been an Orientalist misreading; for example in the description of an Arabic manuscript (dated 1202/began 13 Oct. 1785) of the Kitāb tanbīh al-hādī wa’l-muhtadī by Ḥamīd al-Dīn al-Kirmānī (fl.1020) in the Institute of Ismaili Studies.  In a final twist to this reflection on working with manuscripts in the Digital Age, the title page with the invocation “yā Kabīkaj,” though explicitly mentioned in the description, is not among the four pages shown on its website.

PS.  On February 15, 2012 Tim Parks published “E-books Can’t Burn” on the blog of the New York Review of Books.  Parks’ paean to the many benefits of e-books has generated a lively debate on how the medium in which literature is read and enjoyed is related to its meaning and understanding.

Updated, 21 February 2012.