About

The Kairouan Manuscript Project (KMP) is an international cooperation project between the University of Hamburg’s Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures and Tunisia’s National Heritage Institute (NHI).

The KMP team is a multi-national group of academics and heritage management professionals dedicated to facilitating and advancing the care, management, study, and promotion of the collection of manuscripts held at the National Laboratory for the Preservation and Conservation of Parchment and Manuscripts (NLPCPM) in Raqqada, Kairouan, Tunisia, a division of the NHI.

The NLPCPM holds one of the largest collections of Islamic manuscripts in North Africa – and one of the most historically and intellectually significant anywhere in the world, especially for manuscripts dating to the 10th century CE or earlier. Assembled from Kairouan’s teaching mosques and other religious institutions, this collection represents a major scholarly legacy.

Long-term goals of the KMP include:

• Developing a sustainable strategy for collections care and management through the implementation of physical measures and administrative policies and procedures;
• Developing a long-term plan for improving the work environment in the NLPCPM, including improvements to the building;
• Training a new generation of Tunisian manuscript conservators;
• Helping enable access to the collection in order to foster academic research;
• Promoting the collection as a site for academic scholarship and encouraging research and publications on the on NLPCPM’s holdings from a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives, such as Islamic intellectual history, codicology and book history, and comparative Mediterranean societies;
• Promoting collaborative research projects amongst academics, heritage professionals, and NLPCPM staff that will lead to joint publications in academic and professional journals.