Writing a Network, Constructing a Tradition: Ibadi Prosopography in Medieval Northern Africa (11th-16th c.)

Abstract

This dissertation explores the history and historiography behind a corpus of Arabic prosopographical works composed from the mid-11th to early 16th centuries in Northern Africa by the Ibadis, a Muslim minority community whose adherents have inhabited the villages and towns of the Maghrib since the 8th century. It traces the history of this corpus over the longue durée, following these texts over nearly a millennium from their compilation beginning in the 11th century through the early modern period and into the 20th century. The dissertation argues that the production, transmission and movement of this corpus of manuscript books and the Ibadi scholars who composed, compiled, bought, sold, and read them helped construct and maintain the Maghribi Ibadi tradition and its history by marking its boundaries and forming ‘written’ and material networks connecting multiple generations of religious scholars across time and space.

The study demonstrates this process of network construction and tradition building in two distinct but interrelated ways. The first half of the dissertation traces the history of the formation of the corpus, examining the ways in which each work established connections between individuals to create a ‘written network.’ It then employs tools from network analysis, including degree distribution graphs and the network mapping software Gephi, to study the structure of each version of the network. The second half of the study explores the material network in the form of an analysis of extant manuscripts of these texts using a relational database. This analysis combines tools from historical study with those of codicology to demonstrate how the material network complemented the written network. Through their circulation and orbital movement, the books and people who made up this network insured the survival of the Ibadi prosopographical corpus from the medieval period up to the 20th century.

Together, the two halves of the dissertation offer a historical analysis of these complementary written and material networks of people, books, and places that allowed for the construction, maintenance, and continuation of the Ibadi Muslim tradition in Northern Africa over nearly a millennium.