Ibadi Muslims of North Africa: Manuscripts, Mobilization, and the Making of a Written Tradition (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 9/27/2018
EAN 9781108472500, ISBN10: 1108472508
Hardcover, 228 pages, 23.9 x 15.5 x 1.3 cm
Language: English
The Ibadi Muslims, a little-known minority community, have lived in North Africa for over a thousand years. Combining an analysis of Arabic manuscripts with digital tools used in network analysis, Paul M. Love, Jr takes readers on a journey across the Maghrib and beyond as he traces the paths of a group of manuscripts and the Ibadi scholars who used them. Ibadi scholars of the Middle Period (eleventh–sixteenth century) wrote a series of collective biographies (prosopographies), which together constructed a cumulative tradition that connected Ibadi Muslims from across time and space, bringing them together into a 'written network'. From the Mzab valley in Algeria to the island of Jerba in Tunisia, from the Jebel Nafusa in Libya to the bustling metropolis of early-modern Cairo, this book shows how people and books worked in tandem to construct and maintain an Ibadi Muslim tradition in the Maghrib.
Prologue. Tunis, 2014
Introduction
mobilizing with manuscripts
1. Ibadi communities in the Maghrib
2. Writing a network, constructing a tradition
3. Sharpening the boundaries of community
4. Formalizing the network
5. Paper and people in Northern Africa
6. Retroactive networking
7. The end of a tradition
8. Orbits
9. Ibadi manuscript culture
Conclusion
(re)inventing an Ibadi tradition
Appendix
extant manuscript copies of the Ibadi prosopographies.