The Southern Shores of the Mediterranean and its Networks by Patricia Lorcin

Author:Patricia Lorcin [Lorcin, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138931961
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 26408188
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Ahmad Bul’araf died in Timbuktu in September 1955. His family and library remained. A small number of items from his library’s holdings were sold and can be found in collections in Niamey, Niger but most were kept in Timbuktu. When his library was still functioning it reportedly had a manuscript conservation unit, a place for copyists and for checking copies, and a unit for making covers for the loose leaves of writing (sewn bindings have never been used in Timbuktu [Dabab 1986, 12–13]). It is remembered as an inspiration for other archival ventures and as an example of an indigenous initiative when the UNESCO General history of Africa experts visited Timbuktu in the late 1960s.11 His activities in the first half of the twentieth century are possibly the best recorded in their own terms as to how an archive came to be constituted in the region. Could Bul’araf’s work itself be a consequence of an even earlier regional book collecting, archiving, and conservation style? If for him a network was crucial then for his predecessors in Timbuktu it would also have been necessary. In this extensive bibliophilic network he was a generator of material and a medium for their circulation. In many ways, it is useful to think of him as mediator, middleman, and medium in a network.

We have looked at a single learned man who cultivated a network devoted to reproduction of texts and to grow his personal library and his business. His activity was genuinely ‘transnational’. This may not have been unique in the broader narrative of Islamic intellectual or material history but it was significant work over many decades to resuscitate and conserve a way of doing scholarship in a distant Sahelian town. There was originality in it even as it was explicitly concerned with the supposedly unoriginal task of reproduction or copying. Jurisprudence was the field he was keen on, not abstract or classical theories about the subject but the living jurisprudence of Timbuktu and the wider region. This type of jurisprudence was like a living record of his own contemporary society.

The distances his original manuscripts or copies and new books had to move were enormous. The objects of his passion literally had to travel through a network. The modern colonial postal service and linked technical innovations came to serve his network well. These machines of networking and mobility have been neglected but they were indispensable tools of communication especially over the long distances we are considering.

For Africa, studies of book history hardly exist; there is ample material in a number of places on the continent to look at the world and long history of writing and reading into which men like Bul’arāf entered or which they revitalised. His work presents us with an opportunity to work in some detail at the formation of a library and archive. Even though the data are most often fragmentary and partial – chronological gaps and missing materials – many material aspects of manuscript and printed book cultures could be

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.