A Subject Guide To Arabic Manuscripts

This index is intended as a summary subject-guide to the Arabic manuscripts in the British Library, one of the most importance storehouses of Arab and Islamic documentary heritage in the world. The manuscripts have been arranged into subject categories, and the more important bilingual texts have been included as well as manuscripts in the Arabic language but copied in other scripts. To date only some of the collection has been catalogued, other parts have remained undocumented. With this subject-guide researchers can exploit the full range of this resource.

Arranged alphabetically by subject and/or concept and richly illustrated, the present vademecum deals with various aspects of Arabic manuscript studies. A companion volume to my recently published The Arabic Manuscript Tradition (2001) and its Supplement (2008), this work constitutes an indispensible aid to students and researchers.

The present work supplements the original volume of The Arabic Manuscript Tradition (AMT), both its glossary of technical terms and bibliography. It includes new entries of technical terms, additional definitions of, and/or citations for, the entries already found in AMT, and recent publications on various aspects of Arabic manuscript studies.

The main sequence is comprised of approximately 200 entries dealing with almost all aspects of Arabic manuscript studies (codicology and paleography); includes appendices covering abbreviations, letterforms, sūrah-headings, major reference works, and a guide to the description of manuscripts, as well as charts of major historical periods and dynasties.

This Guide to OCR for Arabic Scripts is the first book of its kind, specifically devoted to this emerging field. Topics and features: contains contributions from the leading researchers in the field; with a Foreword by Professor Bente Maegaard of the University of Copenhagen; presents a detailed overview of Arabic character recognition technology, covering a range of different aspects of pre-processing and feature extraction; reviews a broad selection of varying approaches, including HMM-based methods and a recognition system based on multidimensional recurrent neural networks; examines the evaluation of Arabic script recognition systems, discussing data collection and annotation, benchmarking strategies, and handwriting recognition competitions; describes numerous applications of Arabic script recognition technology, from historical Arabic manuscripts to online Arabic recognition.

In this study, Vevian Zaki places the Arabic versions of the Pauline Epistles in their historical context, exploring when, where, and how they were produced, transmitted, understood, and adapted among Eastern Christian communities across the centuries. She also considers the transmission and use of these texts among Muslim polemicists, as well as European missionaries and scholars. Underpinning the study is a close investigation of the manuscripts and a critical examination of their variant readings. The work concludes with a case study: an edition and translation of the Epistle to the Philippians from manuscripts London, BL, Or. 8612 and Vatican, BAV, Ar. 13; a comparison of the translation strategies employed in these two versions; and an investigation of the possible relations between them.

Covering the entire spectrum of Arabic manuscripts, and especially the handwritten book, this book consists of a glossary of technical terms and a bibliography. The technical terms, collected from a variety of sources, embrace a vast range of topics dealing with the making and reading (studying) of Arabic manuscripts. They include: the Arabic scripts, penmanship, writing materials and implements, the make-up of the codex, copying and correction, decoration and bookbinding. A similar coverage is reflected in the bibliography.In view of the fact that, as yet, there is no concise monograph on Arabic manuscripts in the English language, this book is an important contribution to this field. And, since Arabic manuscripts represent an enormous resource for research, this work is an indispensable reference for all students of Islamic civilization.

Explores the relationship between revelation and reason in medieval Islamic intellectual history. In this original study, Elizabeth R. Alexandrin examines the complex relationships that can be inscribed between medieval Ismā‘īlī thought as an intellectual tradition with a devotional practice of reliance on the imām, and as a politico-esoteric system that redefined governance during the Fāṭimid caliphate in the eleventh century. Alexandrin’s work is a departure from recent Western scholarship that focuses on similarities among early Islamic traditions. She argues instead that, under the guidance of the Fāṭimid Ismā‘īlī chief missionary al-Mu’ayyad fī al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī (d. 1078 CE), the concept of walāyah (divine guidance) became closely associated with religio-political authority, on the one hand, and the perfection of the individual human being, on the other. By signaling and affirming how the Fāṭimid caliph-imāms were the heirs of walāyah and by proposing new definitions of the “seal of God’s friends” (khātim al-awliyā’ Allāh), al- Mu’ayyad broadened the contexts of making esoteric knowledge public and shifted the apocalyptic frameworks of Islamic messianism. Elizabeth R. Alexandrin is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and Senior Fellow at St. John’s College, the University of Manitoba, Canada.