September 5 Talk: "How were so many Arabic writers so prolific? The Role that recycling played in the growth of the history Arabic tradition"

The historic Arabic tradition is one of the largest up to its day, partly because of the way that authors collected and recycled earlier texts. For example, many works now reckoned as lost are in fact preserved, in whole or in part, within large texts, and arguably, for medieval audiences, were not lost, per se. In this paper, I first introduce the KITAB project’s ~1.5 billion word corpus, its text “reuse” detection methods, and its latest data set documenting the intertextual relationships across all texts and the repeated transmission of many substantial chunks of texts. I argue that our methods – which might usefully be called a “textual forensics” – can show us a great deal about how Arabic writers conserved the past. I illustrate this through case studies showing Arabic writers at work, common expectations around the recycling of texts, and the underlying cultural patterns that gave rise to this recycling. Amid the cases, I raise issues that become more evident with our evidence, including the highly selective nature of what survives.

Professor Sarah Bowen Savant (Aga Khan University-ISMC) is a cultural historian, focusing on early Islamic history and history writing up to 1400, with a special focus on Iraq and Iran. She is the author of The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory, and Conversion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), which won the Saidi-Sirjani Book Award, given by the International Society for Iranian Studies on behalf of the Persian Heritage Foundation. Her other publications include The Excellence of the Arabs: A Translation of Ibn Qutaybah’s Faḍl al-ʿArab wa l-tanbīh ʿalā ʿulūmihā (with Peter Webb; The Library of Arabic Literature; Abu Dhabi: New York University Press, 2016), as well as articles and edited volumes dealing with ethnic identity, cultural memory, genealogy, and history writing. Her current project focuses on the history of books in the Middle East. With a team and partners she is developing digital methods to collect texts and to study the origins and development of the Arabic and Persian textual traditions. Her next monograph arises from this work, and interrogates concepts of the book and authorship. Please see kitab-project.org and https://github.com/OpenITI.