Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books: Arabic Manuscripts Among the Alawi Bohras of South Asia

A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books: Arabic Manuscripts Among the Alawi Bohras of South Asia

Akkerman, Olly

Hardcover

Medieval & Renaissance HistoryGeneral World HistoryIndian & South Asian History

ISBN10: 1474479561
ISBN13: 9781474479561
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: Jul 19 2022
Pages: 528
Weight: 1.64
Height: 0.94 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

This book tells the story of a manuscript repository found all over the pre-modern Muslim world: the khizanat al-kutub, or treasury of books. The focus is on the undisclosed Arabic manuscript culture of a small but vibrant South Asian Shi'i Muslim community, the Bohras. It looks at how books that were once part of one of the biggest imperial book repositories of the medieval Muslim world, the khizanat of the Fatimids of North Africa and Egypt (909CE-1171CE) ended up having a rich social life among the Bohras across the Western Indian Ocean, starting in Yemen and ending in Gujarat. It shows how, under strict conditions of secrecy, and over several centuries, one khizana was turned into another, its manuscripts gaining new meanings in the new social realities in which they were preserved, read, transmitted, venerated and copied into. What emerged was a new distinctive Bohra Ismaili manuscript culture shaped by its local contexts.

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