Acknowledgments
Despite the popularity of KalÄ«la and Dimna in Europe, North Africa and Asia up the 1800s, this collection of animal fables had become for nearly a century a âblack box.â The shifts and turns of its tangled trajectories over one and a half-millennia, transmitted in numerous diverging manuscripts and versions could be grasped neither theoretically nor practically with the givens of conventional critical editing. Studying it is an exercise in infinity. The textual tradition itself is borderless, and the attempt to catch its movements resembles trying to photograph a waterfall. Its ceaseless remediations between prose and verse and its intra-lingual and cross-lingual translations and adaptations showcase the porousness of Arabic literature, which, in this case, transcends boundaries.
Our past six years of engaging with KalÄ«la and Dimna has coincided with a media shift, the use of computer science in the humanities, which has now come to be called Digital Humanities. It reminds of earlier media shifts propelling the history of Arabic studies, such as when the pioneer of Arabic studies in Europe, Thomas Erpenius at Leiden University created his own font to print his editions of Arabic sources (to be acquired and reused after Erpeniusâ untimely death in 1613 by Jakob Elsevier, printer of Leiden University). To turn manuscripts into numerical bits and bytes and to âcalculateâ textual interrelations is yet another instance of reinventing Arabic studies. After all, we had to grapple with centuries of complex and massive changes in what can no longer be called a âtext.â This necessitates the adoption of a multidisciplinary approach, now increasingly practiced across the Kulturwissenschaften, since there is much to learn, contrast and compare across textual traditions of great longevity, be it Sanskrit or Chinese.
In this, we owe a great debt to past scholars on whose work we still rely: Antoine Silvestre de Sacy, who made the first modern edition of the Arabic Kalīla wa-Dimna, Carl Brockelmann, Theodore Nöldeke, Johannes Hertel, Franklin Edgerton, Ignazio Guidi, Friedrich Schulthess, and Martin Sprengling, who dealt with sources and versions, many of them experts in multiple languages from Sanskrit via Pahlavi and Syriac to Arabic, in a manner we can no longer aspire to today.
Turning to the present endeavor in the first decades of the 21st century, we now tackle the spectrum of languages needed with collaborative research, as it uniquely characterizes the landscape of German public universities. This book represents the culmination of a transdisciplinary team work, with contributions from junior and senior researchers from various fields and subfields. It would have not have been possible otherwise, and although each chapter is credited to one or two individuals, many team members have contributed long-term to each otherâs research through constant interaction, shared reading sessions, and other ways of cooperation too many to account for. A special thanks goes here to Jan van Ginkel for his multilingual expertise and generosity in discussing in-depth the work of younger members of the team.
The individuals involved in the present volume are more than those contributing the chapters, since the basic research, such as transcriptions, editing, indexing, and commenting on manuscripts, programming the online edition platform, and providing redactional support to the present volume was provided by present and former team members Marwa Ahmed, Dima Mustafa Sakran, Doga Akpinar, Hala Abdalhadi, and Alice Woolston, Ruslan Pavlyshyn, Heba Tebakhi, Albert Schlosser, and Jens Inden. Ingrid Evans gave the volume a first read and ensured its consistency. Agnes Kloocke, the projectâs experienced financial coordinator and logistical soul, kept the tabs on all things, from immediate to long-term planning, and from the big picture to the smallest logistical detail with untiring effort.
As a project team, we have also undergone a period of collective growth and achievement, with numerous shared experiences from previous years playing a pivotal role in the creation of this volume. The collaborative process developed synergies in ways that no one could have anticipated. Many team members brought along unexpected second interests and competencies: Theo Beers programmed the âKalÄ«la Reader,â a digital tool that placed at our disposal all extant published editions in original and translation at a click. Matthew Keegan (a member of the team 2018-2019, now New York) inaugurated a reading session on fiction, and Johannes Stephan on framing narratives, which propelled the theoretical dimension of the project and led to conferences, an article in Poetica 52 (2021), and themed issues in the Journal of Abbasid Studies (vol. 8, 2021 and vol. 9, 2022) and the Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies (vol. 24/1, 2024) as well as an entry on the keyword âFraming Narrativesâ in Articulations, together with Simon Godart.
Rima Redwan latched onto the importance of images for the rhythm of the narrative, viewing text and image of KalÄ«la wa-Dimna jointly for the first time. The discoveries of Dima Sakran of an idiosyncratic version led to an article in the Geschichte der Philologien. Khouloud Khalfallah became an expert on all aspects of the Arabic manuscripts and contributed the volumeâs manuscript lists with the assistance of Doga Akpinar and Oualid al-Khattabi. Doga Akpinar also prepared all the volumeâs indices with unfailing precision. Oualid al-Khattabi managed the feat of replicating in English the textual variety of a synoptic edition and also systematized the overview of the transcription workflow. Ruslan Pavlyshyn provided the first comparison Arabic and Persian versifications of KalÄ«la wa-Dimna in the twelfth and thirteenth century CE. Marwa Ahmed created the projectâs first preview edition, which went online in 2020. Mahmoud Kozae, who designed to digital architecture of the project, taught himself in lightning speed any new programming language or feature he deemed useful, and created at every step of the way larger and smaller tools to observe and analyze aspects of the textual tradition. This led to an essay on the interactive process of eye and algorithm in this interdisciplinary research process between Arabic studies and computer science to appear in Interface Critique 5 (2024). And more. The years jointly spent on Kalila and Dimna have been a living proof that teamwork in the humanities harbors an enormous potential, which we are just beginning to tap.
Since we did not cover all the needed manifold linguistic expertise, we were grateful for being able to rely on collaboration with Florinda Di Simini, Naples, for Sanskrit, especially for the MahÄbhÄrata, François de Blois, London, on the early New Persian indirect tradition, Florencia Miranda, Buenos Aires, for the Old Castilian, Rachel Peled Cuartas, Madrid/Alcalá de Henares, and Maysoon Shibi, Berlin, for the Hebrew, Lilli Hölzhammer, Uppsala, for the Greek, Christine van Ruymbeke, Cambridge UK, for the later New Persian, and Yoones Farsani-Dehghani and Friederike DâAssandri, both Berlin, for the Chinese versions of KalÄ«la wa-Dimna.
Some colleagues helped with encouragement and advice at the projectâs outset, such as Aboubakr Chraïbi, Paris and Maxim Romanov, Hamburg. Others visited our weekly colloquium and our conferences, enriching our work and contributing to special aspects, such as István Kristó-Nagy, Exeter, on the Arabic translator-adaptor. Ignacio Sanchez, Toledo, contributed on sundry matters, among them the Indian sources of one of the prefaces, and Chia-Wei Lin shared her research on Chinese Buddhism in later Arabic sources. Boris Liebrenz, Leipzig, Said Aljoumani, Berlin, and Yousry Elseadawy, Cairo helped us decipher manuscript notes. Ulrike Becker, Bonn, gave us the context of the early Castilian reception of KalÄ«la wa-Dimna and Helène Condylis, Athens, shared her insights on the terminology of Greek translations. Ulrich Marzolph, Würzburg, in two intensive workshops, helped us understand the role of KalÄ«la wa-Dimna within the corpus of Arabic fables, and Heba Tebakhi, Berlin, discovered and documented oral telling of sub-stories from KalÄ«la wa-Dimna. Our exchanges and conferences with the Paris team, Annie Vernay-Nouri, Aïda El Khiari, Ãloïse Brac de la Perrière, and Sipana Tchakerian, gave us insights on the art historical dimensions of KalÄ«la and Dimna.
The Präsidium of Freie Universität Berlin has supported the project from its inception, including the expert assistance of the colleagues from the grant- writing and grant administration section. The uniquely rich array of fields of the Faculty of Geschichts- and Kulturwissenschaften gave us a broader context and the ability to consult colleagues of adjacent disciplines on numerous issues. The Facultyâs chief administrative officer Michael Vallo gave our project a home in the âNeubau for Kleine Fächer,â or lovingly called âHolzlaubeâ (âwooden bowerâ) in Berlin parlance, and the Facultyâs IT-Support provided continuous care.
Aware of the integral part Digital Humanities played in our research and the core piece of the digital edition, we thank Brigitte Grote, FUB-IT for her conceptual advice, Johannes Posel, for helping to deploy our edition in the universityâs website, and the University Library for support with book acquisition and research data management. In our initial phases we were fortunate to be able use the LERA-tool, developed at Universität Halle-Wittenberg for our first online editions, curated by Marcus Pöckelmann. We also thank other large projects in Arabic Digital Humanities for sharing with us their experiences, such as the KITAB project, led by Sarah Savant, Aga Khan University, London, and the Bibliotheca Arabica, led by Verena Klemm, Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften.
We thank the manuscripts libraries that have supplied the sources for our research and permitted us to include images of the work: the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, the John Rylands Library, Manchester, the King Faisal Center Library, Riyadh, and the Archaeology Museum (Arkeoloji MuÌzesi), Istanbul. A special thanks goes to those libraries that made their holdings available online and give general permission to use their images for scholarly research, such Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge.
The generous grants of the European Research Council (ERC, Advanced Grant 742635) and the Gottfried-Wilhem-Leibniz-Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG) awarded in 2017, for both of which we are immensely grateful, gave our project an unusually long time span â without these the investigation of such a complex textual tradition could not have been dared. Last but not least the cosmopolitan city of Berlin, made it easy to find or attract talent, notably the still rare combination of Arabic and computer science, and which honored the field of Arabic Studies with the award of the Wissenschaftspreis to one of the present authors in 2019. We thank Teddi Dols and Pieter te Velde at Brill De Gruyter for the pleasant cooperation, and the anonymous peer reviewers for their valuable suggestions.
Our shared work since 2018 has allowed us to bring some light into the KalÄ«la and Dimna âblack box,â and indeed grasp the movements of this textual tradition in its first five centuries. However much remains to be done. A full online edition of the identified representative MSS (we now know which they are), a companion volume presenting this variety in readable form, a study of the numerous emulations of KD in Arabic and translations made from Arabic (directly and indirectly) after the thirteenth century into the languages of the globe (which have yet to be counted) remain desiderata. To encourage such future endeavors, we hope to lay the groundwork and ease the path with the present volume.