Texts, Scribes and Transmission

Published by: I.B. Tauris, London, 2022, 480pp. ISBN: 9780755645381.

The area of manuscript studies and especially the Ismaili manuscript tradition has remained until now understudied. An important field, the study of manuscripts, has played a crucial role in shaping our understandings of cultural practices of the scholarly elite. This invaluable volume will be of immense value and interest to scholars working primarily in the field of, manuscript studies, Ismaili studies and cultural studies of the Islamic world. The voluminous work is made up of seven sections and consists of eighteen chapters.

The first section, “the shaping of a new field”, focusses on the way the Ismaili tradition came to be a subtopic within Islamic studies. The first chapter gives a comprehensive overview of the way this field emerged and subsequently became established. Farhad Daftary starts from the 19th century and takes the reader through the different stages up until the present time. The second chapter by Francois de Blois, focusses on the correspondence of two early scholars in the field on the Ismaili manuscript studies in the 20th century, Paul Kraus (d. 1944) and Husayn al-Hamdani (d. 1962) and underscores the relationship between the two scholars who were instrumental in making some of the most seminal contributions in this field.