Workshop: Colonial Encounters and Manuscripts in Muslim Societies

Libraries and manuscripts have life histories that can be traced through a biographic approach (Hamilton 2011; Appadurai 1986). Like human beings, some moments in their lives can be particularly transformative. One such moment, in the history of the manuscripts of Muslim societies, was certainly the colonial encounter (Asad 1973). These moments could be considered as “philological encounters” or the contact between expanding European imperial powers and newly “discovered” written traditions found in other parts of the world (Delmas 2016). Although characterized by a substantial power imbalance, colonial encounters were complex, multidirectional historical dynamics. They were “determined, not only by the interests and agency of newly arrived Europeans but also by those of the different social groups of local peoples and their elites contacting them” (Lopez 2017).  

This workshop seeks to capture the complexity of these encounters. On the one hand, these encounters were often premised on the forced removal of objects, disruption of existing libraries and manuscript cultures, and epistemological violence. But on the other hand, they were also generative moments that fostered the emergence of new types of intellectuals, new manuscripts, and new types of libraries. Though these generative movements were largely by-products of what Edmund Burke III has referred to as “scientific imperialism” (Burke 2014), or the effort to produce knowledge in order to classify and control colonized peoples, they also make possible new inquiries on the material history of Muslim communities and their worlds. 

Through a multidisciplinary and expansive geographic approach, a key focus of this workshop is to gather different scholars to explore what contradictions, ambiguities, and new possibilities emerge in tracing the life histories of numerous manuscripts and libraries of the Muslim societies.