The Making of the Arabic Book, Volume 2 : Writerly Practices, Memory and Communities

Examines the construction of cultural memory through text reuse within the Arabic written tradition.

This book is one of two volumes presenting the results of the KITAB (Knowledge, Information Technology, and the Arabic Book) project and their application of text reuse detection to a digital corpus of thousands of Arabic texts spanning eight centuries. The authors begin by examining the function of text reuse in ensuring the survival of books, highlighting the perspectives of individual authors as well as the effect of regional chronological conditions on memories of the past. The second half then goes on to show how memorialisation and recycling of communal texts (such as annals, legal compendia and biographical collections) served to create a shared idea of the past and to sustain a social group’s memories and identity. Using the KITAB project's expansive digital corpus, this book analyses case studies that span North Africa and the Middle East and the Indian Ocean: from the Isma?ili communities of India, Yemen and northwestern Syria, to Egyptian courts, to Maliki scholars in North Africa. Altogether, this volume aims to demonstrate the huge potential for digital study of written traditions alongside traditional methods of close reading and manuscript studies, and provide templates for similar studies within Arabic literature and beyond.