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Edinburgh Studies in Classical Islamic History and Culture

The Making of the Arabic Book, Volume 2Writerly Practices, Memory and Communities

By Mathew Barber, Lorenz Nigst, Aslisho Qurboniev, Gowaart Van Den Bossche and Peter Verkinderen

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Published 31 December 2026

About this book

Examines the construction of cultural memory through text reuse within the Arabic written tradition

  • Demonstrates the significant potential for the digital study of the Arabic written tradition
  • Employs text reuse detection among other digital methods and close reading to study cultural memory
  • Discusses case studies from North Africa (Mālikī scholars), Northwest Syria (Ismaʿili communities), Egypt (Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk historiography) and the wider Islamicate world (Ikhwān al-Safāʾ)

This book is one of two volumes presenting the results of the KITAB (Knowledge, Information Technology, and the Arabic Book) project and their application of text reuse detection to a digital corpus of thousands of Arabic texts spanning eight centuries. The authors begin by examining the function of text reuse in ensuring the survival of books, highlighting the perspectives of individual authors as well as the effect of regional chronological conditions on memories of the past. The second half then goes on to show how memorialisation and recycling of communal texts (such as annals, legal compendia and biographical collections) served to create a shared idea of the past and to sustain a social group’s memories and identity.

Using the KITAB project's expansive digital corpus, this book analyses case studies that span North Africa and the Middle East and the Indian Ocean: from the Ismaʿili communities of India, Yemen and northwestern Syria, to Egyptian courts, to Mālikī scholars in North Africa. Altogether, this volume aims to demonstrate the huge potential for digital study of written traditions alongside traditional methods of close reading and manuscript studies, and provide templates for similar studies within Arabic literature and beyond.

Table of contents

List of Figures
Introduction

  1. Corpus Memory, Oblivion
  2. So Much Work: Text Reuse 'from Within'
  3. The Preacher, the Polemicist and the Pessimist
  4. Manuscripts and Memory on the Margins of a Medieval Sultanate: Two Eighth/Fourteenth-Century Annals from Ayyubid Syria and Ismaili Mayf
  5. A Community of Jurists
  6. Communities of Brethren: Historicising the Reception and Elaboration of the Rasil ikhwn al-af, Rislat al-Jmia and Rislat Jmiat al-Jmia Among Ismaili Communities

Glossary
Bibliography
Index

About the contributors

Mathew Barber

Mathew Barber is Assistant Professor at AKU–ISMC Centre for Digital Humanities and Postdoctoral Researcher at the KITAB project. He is a historian specialising in Egyptian historiography, in particular Fatimid history writing (c. tenth–twelfth centuries). He has authored a number of articles focusing on the Fatimids and Egyptian historiography.

Lorenz Nigst

Lorenz Nigst is Assistant Professor at AKU–ISMC Centre for Digital Humanities and manager of the OpenITI/KITAB corpus. He is a philologist of Arabic with a passion for language and interdisciplinary research. He has always been interested in trying to understand how people make sense of and talk about their worlds in their own terms. His main research interest has been on religious thought and movements, and he has worked on al-Maʿarrī, Ibn Taymiyya, al-Wāsiṭī, Islamic sainthood, and the Druze. He is fascinated by the collaborative creation of digital tools, but also by reflecting on their limits.

Aslisho Qurboniev

Aslisho Qurboniev is a Research Associate at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. Aslisho received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2020 with a dissertation on early Fatimid scholarly culture before joining the KITAB project at AKU-ISMC (2020-2024). He has authored a number of articles on premodern scholarly and writerly culture in the Islamicate world. His current research applies digital methods and manuscript research to tracing dispersed texts in Arabic and Persian with a particular interest in Fatimid and Ismaili libraries.

Gowaart Van Den Bossche

Gowaart Van Den Bossche is a postdoctoral assistant (Oberassistent) at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. Before taking up this position, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow funded by Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at Ghent University, and as a postdoctoral fellow with the KITAB project at Aga Khan University–ISMC. He obtained a PhD degree from Ghent University in 2019 for a thesis on literary biographies of sultans in the early Mamluk sultanate. This thesis won the BRAIS-De Gruyter prize in 2020. His first book, Literary Spectacles of Sultanship: Historiography, the Chancery, and Social Practice in Late Medieval Egypt, was published by De Gruyter in 2023. He has published on historiography and intercommunal relations in the Mamluk period as well as on the manuscript tradition of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Safāʾ).

Peter Verkinderen

Peter Verkinderen is Assistant Professor at the Aga Khan University–ISMC Centre for Digital Humanities and Postdoctoral Researcher at the KITAB project. He is an enthusiast for collaborative research and development of new digital resources and tools. He has published articles on early Islamic geography, politics and economy, and a monograph (Rivers of Iraq and Iran) that used textual, archaeological, geological and remote sensing data to reconstruct the fluvial landscape of some of the early Islamic heartlands.

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