Reading the Scholarly Archive in the Pre-Ottoman Arabic Middle East

2023–2025

RFE14

Title page of MS Berlin Staatsbibliothek, Landberg 150, fol. 1r with paracontent documenting scholarly engagements.

Over the last decades, medieval Middle Eastern history has taken a ‘documentary turn’, bringing the question of the archive into focus for the first time. This development has thus far mostly focused on documents produced by and circulating within the political elite (the ‘state’). This project, in contrast, focuses on documents produced in scholarly contexts, namely the ‘audition certificates’ (ijāza/ṭibāq al-samāʿ) in which a teacher granted the participants of a reading session the licence to teach (or rather transmit) the read-out text. These audition certificates contain an unparalleled wealth of historical data. For instance, they contain the names of marginalised individuals, especially of women and slaves, who hardly appear as historical actors in narrative sources. Moreover, they provide topographical information, names of buildings, links of kinship, prices, historical events, and terms for various crafts and trades.

Despite its value, the material has still not received sufficient scholarly attention. To a large extent, this is the case because these notes are dispersed on thousands of manuscripts in libraries around the world, and are generally not even mentioned in the library catalogues. To date, the vast majority of audition certificates remains unedited or hidden behind a paywall.

The project has addressed this problem by creating the Audition Certificate Platform (ACP), the first large-scale digital resource for audition certificates. ACP is a unique and fully searchable corpus that has a long-term impact in fields such as social history, history of ideas, economic history, urban history, historical topography, and biographical studies. ACP 1.0 was launched in October 2023 with 3500 annotated certificates and 37.000 person annotations (DOI: 10.25592/uhhfdm.13525), version 2.0 followed in March 2024 with 4035 annotated certificates and almost 50.000 person annotations (DOI: 10.25592/uhhfdm.14168), and version 3.0 launched in October 2024 has 4643 with over 58.000 person annotations (DOI: 10.25592/uhhfdm.16114). Cooperation with the Research Field ‘Data Linking’ and with the Bibliotheca Arabica project ensure that ACP sits within a rich network of digital resources.

In addition to building a new research tool, the project conceptualises audition certificates as a distributed archive. We ask specifically for the materiality of how this scholarly archive was stored, transmitted, and accessed, including questions of the textual and material life-cycles through which audition certificates went. This focus on life-cycles is so crucial because these documents originate from very ‘unarchival’ contexts, namely codices. Once we start to take life-cycles into consideration, we are able to identify the different layers of attitudes towards these documents, and the different social uses to which they were put. Overall, this enables us to understand how scholars archived their scholarly practices, how they accessed this ‘distributed’ archive, and how they used this archive in composing biographical dictionaries.

People

Project lead: Said Aljoumani, Konrad Hirschler