Courses

Prerequisites: Knowledge of a relevant research language (Arabic, Persian, or Ottoman Turkish) is required to be able to work on a particular manuscript to be chosen by the student. Students who lack the necessary skills of any of these languages but are interested in pre-modern book culture are still encouraged to contact the course instructor.

This course studies the material, textual, and institutional characteristics of the Islamic manuscript culture from the 9^th to the 19^th century and before the widespread adoption of print technology. The course will be run as a seminar with discussion of primary and secondary sources drawn from library and information science, history, area studies, and art history. One important component of the course will be the hands-on practice with select examples from the rich Islamic manuscript collection of the Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Concerning this firsthand experience, the course aims to contribute to the Manuscripts of the Muslim World project, a grant-funded initiative between Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Free Library of Philadelphia. To this end, participants of this course will be expected to contribute to the generation of descriptive metadata for manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish from the collections of the Columbia University Libraries.