The Arabic-Islamic Manuscript Tradition and the Rise of the Professional Editor in 19th and 20th Century Egypt

April 9

7:00-8:00pm 

Faculty House, Columbia University 

Islam Dayeh

Free University Berlin

In the nineteenth century, the advent of the printing machine and the influence of orientalist, classicist and reformist attitudes in the Arab East gave rise to a new type of professional scholar: the editor of manuscripts. These scholars­-whose training may have been in traditional Qur'anic and hadith philology and text criticism or in the methods of biblical and classical text criticism brought to them by European scholars teaching at Arab universities-came to play a pivotal role in the intellectual debates over what constituted Arabic/Islamic 'tradition' (al-turath), how it should be read and its relevance to contemporary questions. 

The talk will begin at 7:00pm. If you would like to join for dinner at 6:00 pm, please RSVP to the seminar's rapporteur Ouijdane Absi (oa2171@columbia.edu) no later than Monday, April 6th, 2015. Please note that the cost of dinner is $25, payable by check made out to "Columbia University."

For more information click here.

Sponsored by University Seminars at Columbia University.