Join the Center for Palestine Studies on 28 October 2021 for the next event in our Readings in the Khalidiyya series with A. Tunç Şen (Columbia University) and Guy Burak (New York University).

Ottoman Librarians and their Metadata
1pm New York / 8pm Jerusalem
28 October 2021

The panel will discuss the inventory of the palace library of Bayezid II, located in Istanbul (early 16th century), the inventories of the library of the complex of Mehmet II, also located in Istanbul (15-16th centuries) and the inventory of the library of Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, located in 'Akka, Palestine (late 18th century).

A. Tunç Şen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University. He is a historian of Ottoman and modern Turkey whose published work focuses on sciences and divinatory practices, manuscript studies, history of emotions, and social history of scholarship in the early modern Ottoman and Islamicate context. He is currently finishing his first book, Masters of Time: Astrologers and Scientific Expertise at the Early Modern Ottoman Court, where he examines the layers and limits of the scientific authority of stargazers in measuring and interpreting time from chronological dating to calendars and auspicious moments.

Guy Burak is the Librarian for Middle Eastern, Islamic and Jewish Studies at NYU's Elmer Holmes Bobst Library. He is the author of The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 2015). His research focuses on the legal, intellectual and visual histories of the Islamic East in the post-Mongol period.

This event is co-presented with the Khalidi Library, the Center for the Study of Muslim Societies and New York University Libraries.

Located in Jerusalem, the Khalidiyya Library is arguably the most important manuscript collection in Palestine and one of the most significant family-owned Islamic manuscripts collections in the world. The library’s collection was recently digitized and made available to scholars by the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML). The accessibility of the collection to users around the world will surely open up new avenues for the study of the history and intellectual life of Palestine and the wider region.

Readings in the Khalidiyya celebrates the new accessibility of the Khalidiyya Library collection through conversations with scholars involved in manuscript studies. Recordings of previous sessions are available here.

Join us for the next installment of Readings in the Khalidiyya with Ahmed El Shamsy and Torsten Wollina on 28 September 2021 at 1pm New York / 8pm Jerusalem.

The Damascene manuscript aficionado Tahir al-Jaza'iri (1852-1920) not only catalogued the Khalidiyya library; he also used the manuscript fragments he found in the library's scrap paper cache to reconstruct its oldest texts. His activities illustrate the change in attitudes toward manuscripts and their value during his lifetime.

Ahmed El Shamsy is Associate Professor at the University of Chicago. He studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. His research addresses themes such as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law.

El Shamsy’s first book, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History, traces the transformation of Islamic law from a primarily oral tradition to a systematic written discipline in the eighth and ninth centuries. In his second book, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition, he shows how Arab editors and intellectuals  in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used the newly adopted medium of printing to rescue classical Arabic texts from oblivion and to popularize them as the classics of Islamic thought. Other recent research projects investigate the interplay of Islam with other religious and philosophical traditions, for example by exploring the influence of the Greek sage Galen on Islamic thought and the construction of a distinct self-identity among early Muslims. More Info

Torsten Wollina is Research Associate at Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz. He received his Ph.D. from Freie University in Berlin and his MA degree from the University of Jena. He has worked at the Orient-Institut Beirut, Hamburg University and has received a Marie Curie Cofund fellowship from Trinity College, University of Dublin (cohort 2019-20). He is currently working in the DFG funded project "Orient-Digital" at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. Torsten’s research focuses on questions of provenance, especially the translocations of Damascene manuscripts in the 19th and 20th centuries. Another research interest is in how intellectual and social history affect each other in textual production, e.g. in the writing of contemporary history. Some of his research can be followed at his blog Damascus Anecdotes.

Located in Jerusalem, the Khalidiyya Library is arguably the most important manuscript collection in Palestine and one of the most significant family-owned Islamic manuscripts collections in the world. The library’s collection was recently digitized and made available to scholars by the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML). The accessibility of the collection to users around the world will surely open up new avenues for the study of the history and intellectual life of Palestine and the wider region.

Readings in the Khalidiyya celebrates the new accessibility of the Khalidiyya Library collection through conversations with scholars involved in manuscript studies. Recordings of previous sessions are available here.