Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI)

Here is the line-up for our summer online reading group offerings- if you'd like to sign up sent us a DM or email us and we'll get you plugged in!

Here is the line-up for our summer online reading group offerings- if you'd like to sign up sent us a DM or email us and we'll get you plugged in!

A truly delightful array of pen trials and calligraphic doodles- including a couple of tughras- from the final pages of an early 19th century Ottoman Turkish poetic manuscript (Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Ms. Codex 1967):

The biyāż is one of the manuscript forms we preserve and study. One of us keeps one. His latest Substack shares an entry: on the self as a cloak that demands weaving, and what might remain if the weaving stops. With Ghalib and the Prophet as guides. tinyurl.com/selfcloak

#NewRelease #OpenAccess The Role of Italian Presses in Early Arabic Printing Third Volume of Collected Works of the TYPARABIC Project ed. Octavian-Adrian Negoiță, Ioana Feodorov, De Gruyter, 2026 #contents" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/1… PDF 🎯 degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/1…

@ShaykhIshraq This is something we've been exploring experientially in our Friday Persian reading groups- how to read super complex dense pages like this, how the various layers of text go together, and how people in the past might have approached them

Sometimes when I see these pages from South Asian Madrasa texts, I really question myself: has anyone ever read all the text on this page? With digital copies, it is impossible. With physical copies, while it might be possible, it would remain highly challenging.

love to be reading a manuscript and encounter a word and think "what the heck kind of food is معممة" and then immediately see that the narrator doesn't know either, makes me feel so much better about myself and my knowledge of Arabic lol

The scribe, or a later reader, of this manuscript- a majmū'a of Arabic texts (plus one in Ottoman Turkish) on matters astronomical- decided to erase the table on this page for whatever reasons, inadvertently creating something that feels very modern art-like (Columbia MS Or 285):

Read a story (r.) this morning in our Arabic manuscript reading session featuring the Rooster of the Throne, which is as good an excuse as any to share this miniature (l.) of said Rooster of the Throne

I think there's a strong connection between the aesthetics of manuscripts and manuscript "interaction" in the premodern world and the practice of wall-writing on shrines, mosques, khans, churches, etc, both of which look like "vandalism" to us but did not appear as such then

Two of the many images that will be featured in my forthcoming book. So this is really happening!

Well into the era of typographic print manuscript culture practices continued to be practiced in print environments, as in these two examples- marginal notation from an 1871 printing of Kitâbü'n-Necât (l.), illumined frontispiece from the 1741 edition of Târîh-i Çelebizâde (r.):

Here's something different: at some point in the 19th c. someone added prayers and lettrist invocations, among other things, to a late 18th c. devotional compilation in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, with pronounced serifs on the ascenders (Columbia MS Or 477):

Mapping Medieval Scholarship: Arabic Audition Certificates from the Leiden Special Collections. by Vincent Engelhardt. #101336" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">leidenspecialcollectionsblog.nl/articles/mappi…

Manuscripts- including beautifully and intricately illumined prestige ones- tend to accumulate new text over the course of their lives, texts that sometimes appear quite incongruent to our eyes as in this page from a 15th c. Ottoman Qur'an (Dallas Museum of Art K.1.2014.22.1):

Further reflections on the historiography, and historiographic absences, of 'Abd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī, link below:

We’re delighted to share our new article, “Crafting Global Typography: Origins, Dissemination, and Adaptation of Naskh Types from Istanbul,” co-authored by Borna Izadpanah and Onur Yazıcıgil, now published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.

For this month we highlight this rare treatise on the Tamerlane Chess – a medieval chess variant originated in the court of Timur. Currently on display at @AgaKhanMuseum in Toronto for their 'Game On!' exhibition! (RAS Persian 211)

My two articles on ninefold circle Ming plates with Islamic inscriptions are now available on Academia: academia.edu/166162698/Chin… academia.edu/122075761/Ming…

One of the oldest Javanese Islamic manuscripts held in Germany, presented in this important new article: Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan, Ali Yunis Aldahesh, & Adrian Vickers: A Newly Identified Islamic Text from Sixteenth-Century Java fuldig.hs-fulda.de/viewer/image/P… studiaislamika.ppimcensis.or.id/index.php/stud…