Intellectual Practice and Manuscript Culture in Early Islamic North Africa

Abstract

This article examines the figure of Abū al-ʿArab al-Qayrawānī (d. 333/945) as a scribe-scholar in early Islamic North Africa, situating his manuscripts within the broader history of intellectual and material practices in Ifrīqiya. Moving beyond his well-studied role as jurist and historian, the study highlights his intense scribal activity as a constitutive dimension of scholarly authority. Through codicological and paleographical analysis of nine manuscripts copied in his own hand and preserved within the Kairouan collection, it reconstructs the material formats, graphic conventions, and paratextual strategies through which Abū al-ʿArab enacted intellectual responsibility—clarifying ambiguous readings, correcting transcriptional slips, and documenting oral and written transmission chains. These fascicles, subsequently endowed and annotated by later readers, reveal how manuscripts functioned not only as textual vessels but also as enduring instruments of teaching, verification, and communal memory. By tracing their trajectory from private notebooks to endowed objects of collective learning, the article argues that the material labor of copying was central to the formation and transmission of scholarly authority in Kairouan. More broadly, it demonstrates how the study of manuscript culture reshapes our understanding of scholarly practice and authority in the Islamic West.