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2 results

  • Introduction

  • Christopher D. Bahl, Durham University
  • Book:
    Mobile Manuscripts
    Published online:
    30 January 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025, pp 1-38

  • Summary

    The Introduction sets out the main analytical framework to probe a transregional formation of Arabic learning. Building on a rich historiography of the Indian Ocean world and its various regions it formulates an approach to studying mobile manuscripts with a view to exploring the shared social and cultural histories of learned communities. It discusses ‘mobilities’ as the potential of manuscripts to move around and ‘histories of circulation’ as actualised or ‘enacted’ movement among scribes, readers, and owners of manuscripts. In particular, it engages with the concepts of ‘enactment’ to study social and cultural mobilities of manuscripts and ‘entanglement’ to plot these mobilities on a transoceanic field of Arabic learning. Arabic philology takes centre stage in this study and represents a diverse and many-sided field of Arabic learning. Manuscript collections which form the empirical basis of the research are delineated and discussed.

Mobile Manuscripts
  • Arabic Learning across the Early Modern Western Indian Ocean
  • Christopher D. Bahl
  • Published online:
    30 January 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • In this essential new work, Christopher D. Bahl departs from the established historiography on trade, shipping, and pilgrimage to argue for the emergence of Arabic learning as a crucial form of transoceanic mobility from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. From Egypt to the Hijaz, Yemen and further on to Gujarat and the Deccan, networks of manuscript circulation created shared social and cultural spaces across the early modern western Indian Ocean, in which South Asia was a key node of connection. Largely unstudied Arabic manuscripts from collections in eight different archives offer a new source base to explore the region as a hub of Arabic scholarly culture, while marginalia and notes provide an empirical treasure trove for the study of social spaces and cultural practices. This is the first book to trace these truly transoceanic encounters between scholars, sultans, scribes, readers, and librarians.