Notes on Contributors
Olly Akkerman is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Islamic Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. She is a specialist on Arabic manuscripts and Shiʾi Islam. Her research examines the social life of manuscript repositories, and other forms of material culture among the Bohras in South Asia and the larger Western Indian Ocean. Her publications include The Bohras as Neo-Fāṭimids: Documentary Remains of a Fāṭimid Past in Gujarat, Indian Ocean networks of Daʿwa, Tijāra, and Khizāna: The Bohras as Manuscript Agents in Yemen, and a monograph: A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books in Gujarat. Arabic Manuscripts among the Alawi Bohras of South Asia (EUP, 2022).
Zahir Bhalloo completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2013 on the practice of Islamic law in early modern Iran. Earlier he held positions at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and theFreie Universität Berlin. He is currently the PI at the Centre for Manuscript Cultures, Hamburg University, of a project on the Persian Documents from al-Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem (13th–14th centuries). He is the author of Islamic Law in Early Modern Iran (De Gruyter, 2023) and co-author with Said Aljoumani and Konrad Hirschler of the Catalogue of the New Corpus of Documents from the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem (De Gruyter, 2024).
Anouk Cohen is an anthropologist, a researcher at the CNRS (CNRS/LESC). The book, its producers, and its users are the center of her research. At the crossroads of an anthropology of knowledge and an anthropology of religions, she envisions the book as a field of actions and experiences involving actors, practices, techniques, and savoir-faire. Since 2019, her focus has been the making of the Sufi texts in Senegal where they represent the most important book production. Her publications include Fabriquer le Livre au Maroc (Karthala, 2016) and a co-edited volume entitled En Croire ses Sens (Gradhiva, 2017).
Carl Dávila holds a PhD in Arabic Studies from Yale University and is associate professor of history at State University of New York, Brockport, where he teaches on the Middle East and the Arab-Islamic world. He has published extensively on many facets of the Andalusian music tradition, including a recent series of articles exploring the complex and obscure history of Kunnāsh al-Ḥāʾik. He is currently working on his second volume of annotated translations of nūba songs, entitled Sunset in the Gardens of al-Andalus: Nūbat al-Māya in Translation.
Annabel Teh Gallop is head of the Southeast Asia section at the British Library in London. Her main research interests are in Malay manuscripts, letters, documents and seals, and the art of the Qurʾan across the Indian Ocean world. Recent publications include Malay seals from the Islamic world of Southeast Asia (NUS, 2019), a catalogue of over 2,000 seals from Southeast Asia inscribed in Arabic script. She curated various exhibitions, including “Early Malay Printing, 1603–1900” (1989), “Golden Letters: Writing Traditions of Indonesia” (1991) and “The Legacy of the Malay Letter” (1994) and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2019.
Anwar Haneef is an M.A. student in the Interdisciplinary Studies of the Middle East (ISME) Programme at the Department of History and Cultural Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. His research explores the domains of history of the environment, emotions, knowledge, and science and technology. Currently, he concentrates on understanding the role of multispecies entanglements in shaping vernacular cosmologies in the early modern Eastern Mediterranean and Indian Ocean regions, specifically within the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mashreq. He is the author of Tamaskiraṇaṅṅal: Mārksum Prati-Prakāśa Darśanavum (Raspberry Books, 2019) and Introducing Scholars: Nile Green (Other Books: 2025).
Sayyid Sadiq Husayni Ishkawari is the founder of Majmaʿ-i Dhakhāʾir-i Islāmī (The Collection of Islamic Treasures), a publishing house in Qum holding a collection of over 1,200 manuscripts and documents. He is at the forefront of safeguarding handwritten Islamic manuscripts and historical documents in Iran through in situ digitiazation efforts carried out in local, often inaccessible, libraries, private and institutional collections across Iran, and more recently in India and Pakistan. As a result of his work, over one hundred catalogues and editions of Islamic manuscripts and documents have been published by Majmaʿ-i Dhakhāʾir-i Islāmī with facsimiles.
Said Aljoumani is Associate Researcher at the Centre for Studies of Manuscript Cultures at the University of Hamburg in the Cluster of Excellence “Understanding Written Artefacts” (2019–2005), principal investigator in the RFE14 project “Reading Scholarly Archives in the Arab Middle East before the Ottoman Period” (2023–2025), and principal investigator in the “Ahmed Pasha al-Jazzar Library Project” (2022–2024). He is the author of The Library of a Madrasa in Aleppo at the End of the Ottoman Era: The Renewed Register of the Books Endowed by Uthman Pasha al-Duriki (Ergon, 2020).
Mahmood Kooria is Lecturer in the History of the Indian Ocean World at the Department of History, University of Edinburgh. Earlier he held positions at various institutions, including Leiden University, Ashoka University, University of Bergen, the National Islamic University Jakarta, and the Dutch Institute in Rabat (Morocco). He is the author of Islamic Law in Circulation: Shāfiʿī Texts across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean (CUP, 2022), and co-edited Malabar in the Indian Ocean World: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region (OUP, 2018) and Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean: Texts, Ideas and Practices (Routledge, 2022).
Paul M. Love Jr. is Associate Professor of History in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane. He is also currently the director of the university’s Mohammed VI Library. His research interests revolve around the history of manuscript cultures, private and public libraries, and the social and intellectual history of Ibadi Muslim communities in the Maghrib. He holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan in the United States. He is the athor of Ibadi Muslims of North Africa: Manuscripts, Mobilization, and the Making of a Written Tradition (CUP, 2018).
Nur Sobers-Khan is a researcher and curator of Islamic manuscripts, art and archival collections. She served as director of the Aga Khan Documentation Center, Lead Curator for South Asian Collections at the British Library, and was Iran Heritage Fellowship Persian Manuscript Curator at the British Library and Curator for Turkey and the Ottoman Empire at the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha. Her publications include Slaves Without Shackles: Forced Labour and Manumission in the Galata Court Registers (Klaus Schwarz, 2014), and Qajar Women: Images of Women in 19th-century Iran (Silvana Editoriale, 2016), co-authored with Mounia Chekhab-Abudaya.
Ismail Warscheid is an Associate Research Professor (Chargé de Recherche) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS/IRHT) in Paris. His research focuses on the history of Muslim culture and thought in the Maghrib and West Africa, with special emphasis on the study of local manuscripts. He is currently investigating the role of Islamic law in shaping social order in the southwestern Sahara from 1600 to 1850. He is the author of Droit musulman et société: la justice islamique dans les oasis du Grand Touat (Algérie) aux XVIIe–XIXe siècles (Brill, 2017).
Torsten Wollina received his PhD from Freie Universität Berlin and has worked in different capacities at Hamburg University, Trinity College Dublin, the Orient Institut Beirut, the Berlin State Library, and the Georg Eckert Institute, Braunschweig. His research interests include the social history of the Mamluk and Ottoman periods in Bilād al-Shām and Egypt, manuscript studies, provenance research and the history of collecting and collections. He is currently working as Acquisitions Editor for the publisher De Gruyter. He is the author of Zwanzig Jahre Altag. Lebens- Welt- und Selbstbild im Journal des Aḥmad Ibn Ṭawq (Göttingen, 2014).