‘Printed Manuscripts 2.0’

Notes on a book in progress on the history of Quranic printing in Kano, Nigeria

Andrea Brigaglia and Auwalu M. Hassan

Friday, 26 June 2026, 12:15 apm – 1:45 pm CEST
Warburgstraße 26, 20354 Hamburg

This talk will present the plans for a book in progress on the history of planographic printing of copies of the Quran penned by calligraphers from Kano, Nigeria, from the 1950s to date. After summarizing the ways in which the researches of two authors converged towards the plan for this monograph, the talk will present the tentative outline of the book and focus on some of the general issues that the book will try to address: the relationship between the Kano tradition of Quranic calligraphy and its older Borno antecedent; the reasons why Kano emerged in the mid twentieth century as a regional hub for Nigerian calligraphers; the relationship between calligraphers, printers, publishers, and public; finally, the exceptionality of the Kano calligraphic boom in the wider context of global Muslim print cultures of the late twentieth century.