Making of the Arabic Book, Volume 2

Mathew Barber is Assistant Professor at AKU–ISMC Centre for Digital Humanities and Postdoctoral Researcher at the KITAB project. He is a historian specialising in Egyptian historiography, in particular Fatimid history writing (c. tenth–twelfth centuries). He has authored a number of articles focusing on the Fatimids and Egyptian historiography. Lorenz Nigst is Assistant Professor at AKU–ISMC Centre for Digital Humanities and manager of the OpenITI/KITAB corpus. He is a philologist of Arabic with a passion for language and interdisciplinary research. He has always been interested in trying to understand how people make sense of and talk about their worlds in their own terms. His main research interest has been on religious thought and movements, and he has worked on al-Maʿarrī, Ibn Taymiyya, al-Wāsiṭī, Islamic sainthood, and the Druze. He is fascinated by the collaborative creation of digital tools, but also by reflecting on their limits. Aslisho Qurboniev is a Research Associate at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. Aslisho received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2020 with a dissertation on early Fatimid scholarly culture before joining the KITAB project at AKU-ISMC (2020-2024). He has authored a number of articles on premodern scholarly and writerly culture in the Islamicate world. His current research applies digital methods and manuscript research to tracing dispersed texts in Arabic and Persian with a particular interest in Fatimid and Ismaili libraries. Gowaart Van Den Bossche is a postdoctoral assistant (Oberassistent) at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. Before taking up this position, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow funded by Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at Ghent University, and as a postdoctoral fellow with the KITAB project at Aga Khan University–ISMC. He obtained a PhD degree from Ghent University in 2019 for a thesis on literary biographies of sultans in the early Mamluk sultanate. This thesis won the BRAIS-De Gruyter prize in 2020. His first book, Literary Spectacles of Sultanship: Historiography, the Chancery, and Social Practice in Late Medieval Egypt, was published by De Gruyter in 2023. He has published on historiography and intercommunal relations in the Mamluk period as well as on the manuscript tradition of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Safāʾ). Peter Verkinderen is Assistant Professor at the Aga Khan University–ISMC Centre for Digital Humanities and Postdoctoral Researcher at the KITAB project. He is an enthusiast for collaborative research and development of new digital resources and tools. He has published articles on early Islamic geography, politics and economy, and a monograph (Rivers of Iraq and Iran) that used textual, archaeological, geological and remote sensing data to reconstruct the fluvial landscape of some of the early Islamic heartlands.

• List of FiguresIntroductionCorpus Memory, OblivionSo Much Work: Text Reuse 'from Within'The Preacher, the Polemicist and the PessimistManuscripts and Memory on the Margins of a Medieval Sultanate: Two Eighth/Fourteenth-Century Annals from Ayyubid Syria and Ismaili MayfA Community of JuristsCommunities of Brethren: Historicising the Reception and Elaboration of the Rasil ikhwn al-af, Rislat al-Jmia and Rislat Jmiat al-Jmia Among Ismaili CommunitiesGlossaryBibliographyIndex

The Making of the Arabic Book: Writerly Practices, Memory and Communities is a fascinating exploration of how texts were created, rewritten, and reused as sites of memory. It is a wonderful book showing how digital approaches are opening new horizons for Humanities research.