Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 24 Sep 2018)

Mobilizing with manuscripts -- Ibadi communities in the Maghrib -- Writing a network, constructing a tradition -- Sharpening the boundaries of community -- Formalizing the network -- Paper and people in northern Africa -- Retroactive networking -- The end of a tradition -- Orbits -- Ibadi manuscript culture -- (Re)inventing an Ibadi tradition -- Extant manuscript copies of the Ibadi prosopographies

The Ibadi Muslims, a little-known minority community, have lived in North Africa for over a thousand years. Combining an analysis of Arabic manuscripts with digital tools used in network analysis, Paul M. Love, Jr takes readers on a journey across the Maghrib and beyond as he traces the paths of a group of manuscripts and the Ibadi scholars who used them. Ibadi scholars of the Middle Period (eleventh-sixteenth century) wrote a series of collective biographies (prosopographies), which together constructed a cumulative tradition that connected Ibadi Muslims from across time and space, bringing them together into a 'written network'. From the Mzab valley in Algeria to the island of Jerba in Tunisia, from the Jebel Nafusa in Libya to the bustling metropolis of early-modern Cairo, this book shows how people and books worked in tandem to construct and maintain an Ibadi Muslim tradition in the Maghrib