Ibadi Muslims of North Africa
Manuscripts, Mobilization, and the Making of a Written Tradition

Combining manuscript analysis with digital tools to show how people and books worked together to build a religious tradition in North Africa.

Paul M. Love, Jr (Author)

9781108459013, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 18 June 2020

231 pages, 27 b/w illus. 1 map
23 x 15.3 x 1 cm, 0.32 kg

'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

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.

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.

Subject Areas: African history [HBJH]