Register for a CSMC workshop

Legal texts and scholarly communities as reflected in the Raqqada collection

When: Friday, 17 June 2022, 9:00 am – 5:30 pm, and Saturday, 18 June, 9:00 am – 12:00 pm (CEST)
Where: Warburgstraße 26, 20354 Hamburg, Room 0001 (and online)

The National Laboratory for the Preservation and Conservation of Parchment and Manuscripts in Raqqada, Kairouan, Tunisia houses an exceptionally valuable collection of early Islamic manuscripts. These manuscripts are the legacy of a prestigious scholarly centre that was an intellectual and cultural magnet for students from North Africa and Andalusia from the eighth to the eleventh centuries and beyond. They were especially crucial to the formation of a school of jurisprudence followed by almost all Muslims in North and West Africa today. Due to its position in the centre of the Mediterranean, the collection contains manuscripts from the entire Muslim world, some written on paper centuries before its use in Europe. Already, scholars have used these manuscripts to rewrite the early history of Muslim scholarly communities.

This two-part workshop will focus on new research into the texts preserved in these manuscripts and the scholarly communities that produced and preserved them. The first part, to be held in Hamburg, will be conducted in English and will be titled 'Legal texts and scholarly communities as reflected in the Raqqada collection'. The second part will be convened by Professor Asma Hilali at the Université de Lille and titled ‘Les manuscripts religieux dans la collection de Raqqada et le problème du Genre’.