The National Laboratory for the Preservation and Conservation of Parchment and Manuscripts in Raqqada, Tunisia, houses what may be the oldest near-intact collection of Islamic manuscripts in the world, with dozens of manuscripts dated before 900 CE. Known as the Kairouan Collection, these manuscripts present a unique subject for academic inquiry. Scholars have unusually solid evidence of its contents and use over the past thousand years both from notes written by the community of scholars in early Kairouan, Tunisia, and from records of nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial representatives seeking "specimens" for exotic collections in Europe.
Kairouan Manuscript Cultures is the first book to focus on the full breadth of the Kairouan Collection within its historical context. Highlighting three current trends in Maghribi manuscript scholarship—Qur'?nic manuscripts, legal texts, and the history of the Kairouan Collection—this volume brings together various scholarly approaches, including paleography, codicology, biocodicology, textual analysis, and history, to shed new light on these important manuscripts and to raise the profile of the Tunisian scholars who specialize in these texts.
In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Arianna D'Ottone, Moez Dridi, Afef Hannechi, Nejmeddine Hentati, Khaled Kchir, Miklos Muranyi, Manel Rammah, Kristine Rose-Beers, and Clément Salah.