Some of the topics we plan on covering- most sessions will be wide-ranging in historical background etc, though some will involve specifically Islamicate concerns:
Open Islamicate Texts Initiative
New essay today, taking a stab at making sense of our historical and political context as scholars of Islamicate history and deeply involved in digital humanities- with all of the fraught implications that involvement carries:
In this week's Arabic reading group we began working through SBB Wetzstein II 1743, a copy of a manāqib of ʿAdī ibn Musāfir- except that at some point it was reworked into a manāqib of Aḥmad ibn al-Rifāʿī through strategic erasure and rewriting. Lots going on in the title page:
Here is the line-up for our summer online reading group offerings, with details for each in the reply below- if you'd like to sign up sent us a DM or email us and we'll get you plugged in!
Manuscripts- including beautifully and intricately illumined prestige ones- tend to accumulate new text over the course of their lives, texts that sometimes appear quite incongruent to our eyes as in this page from a 15th c. Ottoman Qur'an (Dallas Museum of Art K.1.2014.22.1):
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Starting June 9, 10 am to 12 pm Eastern US via Zoom, we're doing a long deep dive into digital technologies, the political economy of data, histories of information, the haptics of longhand and electronic writing, reading thinkers from Adorno to Baudrillard to Pope Leo XIV:
There are two- possibly three- ownership notes, the possible third having been quite vigorously erased, while another owner and/or reader (whose Arabic is rather colloquial) added what I suppose we could call a book blurb, it's bit hyperbolic but then that tends to be the nature of the book blurb
n still another hand there is a lovely duʿāʾ for the alleviation of need, "Jibrāʾīl taught it to the Prophet of God Yūsuf, upon him be peace," iterations of this prayer can be found readily online today
Situating Our Work in Contemporary Political Reality
