Description
Book SynopsisExamining the Ibadi Muslims of North Africa, this book traces the history of Arabic texts to tell the story of how people and their networks build religious traditions. Combining the study of Arabic manuscripts with digital tools, it explains how this religious community created and maintained a tradition over nearly a millennium.
Trade Review'Using network analysis coupled to a scholarly examination of extant manuscripts, Love's study opens new perspectives on the developing traditions of prosopography among the dispersed Ibadi communities of the Maghrib. It would make a stimulating model for examining the reasons behind a generally dissimilar development in Oman.' John C. Wilkinson, Professor Emeritus, University of Oxford
'Love's work achieves something rare: it sheds new light on long familiar North African Ibāḍī prosopographical works by focusing on the written networks of scholars implied in their pages, as well as on the lives of the manuscripts. He significantly enriches our knowledge of how Ibāḍīs used books to create tradition and community.' Adam Gaiser, The Florida State University
'Love's study of the biographical tradition of the Ibadi communities of North Africa from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, copied and recopied in manuscript and latterly in printed form down to the present day, is a highly original and perceptive analysis of the way in which the tradition has developed and circulated among those communities over the past thousand years, serving to maintain their social cohesion and religious identity in the face of the tide of history. As a contribution not only to the study of the Ibadis, but to the history of Islam itself, it cannot be too highly recommended.' Michael Brett, Emeritus Reader in the History of North Africa, SOAS
Table of ContentsPrologue. 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.
