This site approaches Islamic books as the material evidence of cultural and intellectual history. As physical artifacts, whether written by hand or mechanically printed, they preserve not only written texts, but also information about mode of production, reading habits, book ownership, and the book trade. An Islamic book can be made by and for Muslims or non-Muslims, because the adjective “Islamic” refers to Islamic civilization and is not limited to the faith itself. This definition is derived from Oleg Grabar's The Formation of Islamic Art (rev. ed., New Haven, Conn. 1987, pp. 1–18), and reflects that after the emergence of Islam in the seventh century CE Muslim-ruled societies continued to have religiously, linguistically, and ethnically diverse populations.

The site is inspired by the FlickR pilot project of the Library of Congress. It has been created to test whether crowdsourcing will work for a census of extant copies of popular works of Arabic and Persian literatures, such as ʿIyāḍ ibn Mūsā's al-Shifāʾ. It will be used to post the images of manuscripts and printed books, lithographed as well as typeset, accompanied by information about cataloging, provenance etc., even though this information can be inaccurate at times. I would be grateful for your contribution of names, descriptions, locations, or tags, and welcome your general reactions and information about other copies of this early 6th/12th-century work of hadith scholarship.

While the Collaboration in Cataloging Project of the University of Michigan and the Islamic Seals Database of the Chester Beatty Library Dublin rely on crowdsourcing to identify works and decipher seal impressions, this project aims at building a bibliographical and codicological data collection for quantitative research projects on the transmission of knowledge in Muslim societies in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.

The idea for the project originated from my research for the Seminar on "Editing and its Futures", directed by Jeffrey Masten (Northwestern University) and organized by the Folger Institute of the Folger Shakespeare Library in fall 2011.

For questions or comments, please write to

islamicbookcensus@gmail.com

I will follow this crowdsourcing experiment on my Columbia University Libraries research blog on Islamic Books.

Manhatten, November 2011

Dagmar A. Riedel

Columbia University

Center for Iranian Studies