Symposium: “The Libraries and Archival Practices in the Early Modern Eastern Islamic World”

Date: March 20, 2025
Venue: Online and The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, The University of Tokyo, welcomes all interested parties to the symposium “Libraries and Archival Practices in the Early Modern Eastern Islamic World,” whose organization it is supporting. Pre-registration is required for both on-site and online participation.

Libraries and archival practices played a pivotal role in shaping the intellectual, cultural, and religious landscapes of the pre-modern Islamic world. Since the early 21st century, substantial research on libraries and book culture, based on manuscripts and documentary sources, have emerged, particularly within the fields of Arabic and Turkish historical studies. However, comparable scholarship focusing on other regions of the Islamic world, notably Iran and India, remains relatively underexplored. This symposium aims to address this gap by bringing together scholars from the UK, Iran, Germany, and Japan to examine the complex histories of manuscript provenance, endowments, library cataloguing, and preservation in early modern Iran and India. Through these investigations, the symposium seeks to deepen our understanding of the cultural, intellectual, and religious dynamics of book culture in these regions and its broader significance within the Islamic world.

Lectures

• Four Centuries Later: Tracing Shah ʿAbbās’s Book Endowments to Ardabil in Istanbul
  Philip Bockholt (University of Münster)
• Shāh ʿAbbās I’s Manuscript Endowments and Shrine Practices: Early Kufic Qurʾāns Endowed to Mashhad and Ardabil
  Yui Kanda
• Barrasī-ye kohan-tarīn fehrest-hā-ye bejāmande az Kitābkhāne-ye Astān-e Qods-e Rażavī (in Persian)
  Elahe Mahbub (Organization of Libraries, Museums and Document Center, Astan Quds Razavi) and Behzad Nemati (The Islamic Research Foundation, Astan Quds Razavi)
• The Library of the Eighteenth Century Mughal Prince Acchai Sahib
  Andrew Peacock (University of St Andrews)

Chair

Kazuo Morimoto (Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia/Asian Research Library, The University of Tokyo)

Co-organized by: Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (Joint Research Project “Adaptation and Reorientation of Texts and its Actors in the Medieval and Early Modern Middle East” [Yui Kanda, Philip Bockholt, Kazuo Morimoto]; Core Research Project “Field Archiving of Memory: Dynamics of Cooperation within the Islamic Society”) and the Asian Research Library, The University of Tokyo.

More information on: Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia