Ibadi Muslims of North Africa

Manuscripts, Mobilization, and the Making of a Written Tradition

Paul M. Love, Jr

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781108472500
• eBook ISBN: 9781108623742
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The Ibadi Muslims, a little-known minority community, have lived in North Africa for over a thousand years. Combining an analysis of Arabic manuscripts with digital tools used in network analysis, Paul M. Love, Jr takes readers on a journey across the Maghrib and beyond as he traces the paths of a group of manuscripts and the Ibadi scholars who used them. Ibadi scholars of the Middle Period (eleventh–sixteenth century) wrote a series of collective biographies (prosopographies), which together constructed a cumulative tradition that connected Ibadi Muslims from across time and space, bringing them together into a 'written network'. From the Mzab valley in Algeria to the island of Jerba in Tunisia, from the Jebel Nafusa in Libya to the bustling metropolis of early-modern Cairo, this book shows how people and books worked in tandem to construct and maintain an Ibadi Muslim tradition in the Maghrib.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration and Dates
• List of Library and Archive Abbreviations
• Prologue: Tunis, 2014
• Introduction: Mobilizing with Manuscripts
• 1 Ibadi Communities in the Maghrib
• 2 Writing a Network, Constructing a Tradition
• 3 Sharpening the Boundaries of Community
• 4 Formalizing the Network
• 5 Paper and People in Northern Africa
• 6 Retroactive Networking
• 7 The End of a Tradition
• 8 Orbits
• 9 Ibadi Manuscript Culture
• Conclusion: (Re)inventing an Ibadi Tradition
• Appendix: Extant Manuscript Copies of the Ibadi Prosopographies
• Bibliography
• Index