Big Stories Behind Small Treasures
The Joly Lecture Theatre at the National Library of Ireland.
Join us for this talk on manuscripts within the Chester Beatty collections.
Seven West African manuscripts sit quietly within the large Arabic manuscript collection at the Chester Beatty. Though tiny in number, this micro-collection has great potential to illuminate the underrepresented sub-Saharan manuscript tradition within a globally renowned repository. This talk will bring these artefacts together into the same frame so their stories can be heard: the hands that crafted them, the folios that held not only the ink but also markings and many other details, and the paths that moved them across time and space. Part of Dr Trad’s current research project at Chester Beatty, these stories will underline the richness, peculiarity, and diversity of the West African manuscript cultures.
Khaoula Trad has been the principal investigator in the project “From Erasure to Reuse: Exploring Palimpsesting and Paper Reuse in West African Manuscripts” in the Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’ at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC). She was a Post-Doc research associate in the DFG project African Voices in the Islamic Manuscripts from Mali: Documenting and Exploring African Languages Written in Arabic Script (Ajami) at the CSMC. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies at the University of Hamburg. She worked on Islamic embryology in the Islamic West, and now her main focus is on Islamic esoterism and palimpsesting techniques in West African manuscripts. She is the author of the book The Concept of Prenatal Life in the Medieval Islamic West: The Hermeneutics of Abū Bakr Ibn al-‘Arabī and Qāḍī ‘Iyāḍ (Ergon, 2024).
