Olly Akkerman wins BASAS Book Prize 2024

We're delighted to share that 'A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books: Arabic Manuscripts among the Alawi Bohras of South Asia', by Olly Akkerman, has won the British Association of South Asian Studies 2024 Book Prize.

The BASAS Annual Book Prize recognises and promotes cutting-edge research by awarding the best first sole-authored monograph in South Asian Studies.

From the British Association of South Asian Studies

'The BASAS Book Prize panel for 2022 publications had an excellent field of books to evaluate. Ultimately the Book Prize panel were unanimous about the decision to award the prize jointly to two very worthy winners for their outstanding scholarship: Olly Akkerman for 'A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books: Arabic Manuscripts among the Alawi Bohras of South Asia' (Edinburgh UP, 2022) and Sushmita Pati, 'Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi' (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Congratulations to Olly and Sushmita!'

Find out more about the British Association of South Asian Studies 2024 Book Prize

More on the book

'A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books' tells the story of a manuscript repository found all over the pre-modern Muslim world: the khizanat al-kutub, or treasury of books.

The book focuses on the undisclosed Arabic manuscript culture of a small but vibrant South Asian Shi’i Muslim community, the Bohras. It looks at how books that were once part of one of the biggest imperial book repositories of the medieval Muslim world, the khizanat of the Fatimids of North Africa and Egypt (909CE-1171CE), ended up having a rich social life among the Bohras across the Western Indian Ocean, starting in Yemen and ending in Gujarat. It shows how, under strict conditions of secrecy, and over several centuries, one khizana was turned into another, its manuscripts gaining new meanings in the new social realities in which they were preserved, read, transmitted, venerated and copied into. What emerged was a new distinctive Bohra Ismaili manuscript culture shaped by its local contexts.

Find out more about A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books: Arabic Manuscripts among the Alawi Bohras of South Asia