The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies

The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies

Elias Muhanna

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments VII

Elias MuhannaIslamic and Middle East Studies and the Digital Turn 1

Travis ZadehUncertainty and the Archive 11

Dagmar RiedelOf Making Many Copies There is No End: The Digitization of Manuscripts andPrinted Books in Arabic Script 65

Chip RossettiAl-Kindi on the Kindle: The Library of Arabic Literature and the Challenges ofPublishing Bilingual Arabic-English Books 93

Nadia YaqubWorking with Grassroots Digital Humanities Projects: The Case of the Tallal-Zaʿtar Facebook Groups 103

Maxim RomanovToward Abstract Models for Islamic History 117

Alex BreyQuantifying the Quran 151

Till GrallertMapping Ottoman Damascus Through News Reports: A PracticalApproach 175

José Haro Peralta and Peter Verkinderen“Find for Me!”: Building a Context-Based Search Tool Using Python 199

Joel BlecherPedagogy and the Digital Humanities: Undergraduate Exploration into theTransmitters of Early Islamic Law 233

Dwight F. ReynoldsFrom Basmati Rice to the Bani Hilal: Digital Archives and PublicHumanities 251

Subject index 269

VI Table of Contents

Joel Blecher

Pedagogy and the Digital Humanities:Undergraduate Exploration into theTransmitters of Early Islamic Law

The present volume has attempted to shed light on how the various methods andapproaches emerging under the umbrella of the digital humanities hold greatpromise for graduate students, faculty, and independent researchers in Islamicstudies. This essay goes a step further by arguing that digital humanities projectsalso hold great promise for instructors of Islamic studies in the undergraduateclassroom. Although faculty who teach in other areas of the undergraduate hu-manities curriculum have been incorporating such projects into their syllabi foryears, instructors of Islamic studies have, until now, been slow to follow suit. Al-though there may be several factors that explain this state of affairs, the princi-pal obstacle for undergraduates in the North American context is plain to see:the paucity of sources in English. While this impediment remains a constraintfor all but a rare few undergraduates who have a reading knowledge of an Islam-icate language, the recent publication of a number of English translations of keyIslamic texts has begun to open the door for digital humanities projects in theundergraduate context.

The present chapter documents one such project on the transmitters of earlyIslamic law, undertaken by twelve undergraduates of mixed years in an introduc-tory-level survey on the origins of Islamic civilization at Washington and LeeUniversity’s Department of History.¹ Students in the course combined the tradi-tional tools of historical inquiry with computational tools to explore, picture,and develop new insights into the political, social, and cultural history of thetransmission of early Islamic law. Practically, this meant students undertookclose readings of primary sources and critical reviews of secondary literaturewhile also mining data, creating a database, and using online visualization soft-ware.

The course was made possible by a Digital Humanities Incentive grant at Washington and LeeUniversity. I would like to thank Jeff Barry and Brandon Bucy for their assistance and alsoacknowledge the hard work of the students enrolled in History , “Islamic Civilization: Ori-gins to ” in the fall of : Jacob Barr, Thomas Claiborne, Amanda Dixon, Rowan Farrell,Alice Kilduff, Zejun Lu, Riley Messer, Lucas Payne, Matthew Sackett, Jerry Schexnayder,Chapman Sklar, Andrew Watson, and Pearson Wolk. Lastly, I would like to thank A.D. Goldmanfor his advice in designing the project.

The source for the study was an English translation of ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-La-knawī’s (d. 1886–7) biographical dictionary of the transmitters of one of the ear-liest canonical sources of Islamic law, the Muwaṭṭaʾ (The Well-Trodden Path), acollection of more than 1700 reports (ḥadīths) attributed to Muhammad, his com-panions, and the pious transmitters of the following generation.² These reportsaddress almost every area of Islamic law, including purity, divorce, offenses,and so on. Biographical dictionaries like al-Laknawī’s belong to a genre of writ-ing that emerged in the classical period of Islamic civilization and detailed thelives of these transmitters, in part to allow élite audiences to evaluate the trust-worthiness of each transmitter and, by extension, the authenticity of the ḥadīth.The compiler of this collection, Mālik ibn Anas (d. 795), narrated each of thesereports by a chain of oral transmission to their sources, typically three or fourdegrees between him and Muhammad, Muhammad’s companions, or thosewho followed them by a generation. As a consequence, Laknawī’s biographicaldictionary offers biographies of approximately 500 transmitters from the firsttwo Islamic centuries. The entries in this work often include transmitters’death dates and locations of residence or migration, so that ḥadīth criticscould evaluate whether each chain of transmission was historically plausible.Entries also indicate transmitters’ gender and frequently their tribal lineage. Ad-ditionally, but with less frequency, some entries reported whether the transmitterwas known to have converted to Islam, what their occupation was, and whetherthey were a partisan (shīʿa) of ʿAlī, a companion of the Prophet, a member of thegeneration that followed the companions, or were descended from a client(mawlā, a non-Arab Muslim dependent on an Arab patron). Lastly, entrieswould sometimes preserve remarks of praise or doubt concerning transmitters’trustworthiness.

The project was intended to show students how to do historical research‘from farm to table’ and unfolded in four broad phases: planning, collection,cleanup, and visualization. After I consulted with colleagues and a team of uni-versity librarians to plan the project, students worked as a single group to extractdata from Laknawī’s biographical dictionary and enter it into a master- databasethey created. They formed several small groups to clean up the data they collect-ed by standardizing transliterations and place names, converting dates from hijrīto Gregorian, and so on. Lastly, they worked as individuals to visualize and an-alyze patterns in the data, placing their findings in the context of the broader

See the appendix of Mālik ibn Anas and Muhammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānī, The Muwaṭṭaʾof Imam Muḥammad, trans. Abdassamad Clarke (London: Turāth Publishing, ), –.The translation was based on ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Laknawī, al-Taʿlīq al-mumajjad li-Muwaṭṭaʾ al-Imām Muḥammad, ed. Taqī al-Dīn al-Nadwī (Damascus: Dār al-Qalam, ).

234 Joel Blecher

topics surveyed in the course, such as the transformations brought about by theearly Islamic conquests and evolutions in the transmission of Islamic religiousand legal authority.

Is Laknawī’s biographical dictionary reliable as a historical source? This wasa question I posed to the students, and one that created an important teachingmoment regarding the practice of history and historiography. After some debate,students were able to justify the merit of the project without fully settling thequestion of reliability: even if the point were granted that Laknawī’s dictionarydid not preserve the precise number of transmitters who were women, converts,partisans, companions, clients, and so on, it did preserve a precise number oftransmitters who were reported by scholarly authorities to have been women,converts, partisans, companions, clients, and so on. To this end, studentswould often remind one another that their data did not represent ‘converts’ or‘partisans’, but ‘transmitters reported to be converts’ or ‘transmitters reportedto be partisans’. Nevertheless, the outcome still shed light on the constructionof authority in early Islamic law.

Since the project was semester-long, the workloads for both the students andthe instructor were very manageable. For most of the term, the project felt as if itwere running itself, often enriching but never intruding on the broader surveycourse. Students made a little progress each week, either on data collection,cleanup, or visualization, but still had time to do the assigned readings andwrite a mid-semester and a final paper. Having support from the university li-brarians was crucial in keeping the workload manageable for the instructor,and any instructor would be wise to make sure there is knowledgeable technicalassistance in place before embarking on such a project.

1. Before Class: Planning the Project

Before students were able to collect data from Laknawī’s dictionary, I workedwith a team of four librarians to brainstorm what tools would be most appropri-ate for the project. Initially I had proposed that students use a shared spread-sheet (such as the Sheets application available through Google Drive) to enterthe data. In that case, the preparation phase would have simply involved label-ing the columns to indicate what information we wanted—name, death date,gender, and a range of other items—and students would have entered the appro-priate information directly into the table. This plan could have worked, but itseemed to me that confusion might arise if a number of students were editingthe document simultaneously. The librarians and I were also concerned that ty-pographical errors might be more likely to be introduced into the spreadsheet if

Pedagogy and the Digital Humanities 235

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Subject index

algorithm 6, 8, 117, 127, 133, 165 f., 171, 230Arab 1, 49, 123, 130, 147, 234, 237, 240,

246– politics 112 f.– reading public 99Arabic 1 f., 4, 6–8, 11 f., 12, 14, 17–23, 25–

32, 34f., 38–41, 43–58, 65, 68 f., 72,75 f., 78, 82, 84–87, 93f., 97–102, 117,119 f., 147 f., 151 f., 158, 160–162, 178,180, 182f., 185, 189f., 199–202, 216,220–224, 227, 230, 237, 253, 256, 259,261–264

– periodicals 3, 65– poetry 6, 18, 23, 51 f., 52, 54, 69, 94f.,

97, 107, 259– script 11,17– texts 2–4, 6–8, 15 f., 18–22, 25 f., 29,

31 f., 35 f., 38–40, 44, 47, 65, 68–74,79, 81–87, 93–101, 103, 107, 113, 119,182, 199–203, 209f., 214, 219f., 224f.,227, 230, 233, 249, 253–255, 257, 259,261–264

big data 117 f., 118 f., 252, 262bilingual texts 93, 95, 101biographical dictionaries 25, 113, 117, 119–

121, 124, 133, 136, 141, 147, 203, 234f.,240, 242–245, 247f.

books 2–4, 11–13, 17–19, 21–25, 29–34,39–46, 51, 53–56, 58, 65–80, 82–87,93–102, 107, 121, 126, 138, 143, 153,160f., 168, 170, 200f., 207, 254f.

– production of 25–27, 32, 36, 38, 72 f.,101, 114, 151 f., 160, 165, 172, 175, 179,252, 261, 265

Borges, Jorge Luis 8, 80

clustering analysis 165, 166f., 167, 168 f.,193, 195

codicology 54, 72coding 5, 42, 96, 175, 185, 206Companions of Muhammad 234, 235, 242,

243

computational analysis 4, 5–7, 182, 201,233

contextual search 225, 229co-occurrence analysis 166f., 171 f.Cook, Michael 7copying texts 71 f., 86copyright 39–43, 86, 253, 264Creative Commons License 176, 186, 264cultural heritage 18, 20, 28, 69, 73, 75,

78f., 79 f., 86

Damascus 141, 145, 175, 178–180, 185–187, 190, 195 f.

databases 2f., 5, 8, 21, 23, 47, 67, 75 f., 80,83, 88, 101, 103, 152, 175 f., 178 f., 182–186, 188–190, 192, 203, 233f., 236–239, 242, 247f., 252, 256, 263

data mining (see also text mining) 26, 206,239

DecoType Naskh 98, 100al-Dhahabī 4, 119 f., 126, 133f.diacritics 220, 236dictionaries 1, 25, 101digital– accessibility 4, 35, 70, 112, 115, 176, 264– archive 2, 4, 7–9, 11, 17 f., 22–24, 27,

29f., 35–37, 39, 43, 52, 54, 58 f., 76, 78,85, 103–106, 109–115, 158, 178f., 251–256, 262–266

– corpora 5, 6, 24, 79, 85, 101, 117, 199,201, 252, 256

– scholarship 2–6, 9, 17, 33, 35, 37, 47–49,68, 71, 80–82, 85, 94, 101–103, 105,141, 147, 244, 257, 261

– surrogate 4, 67, 70–72, 75–81, 86f.– technology 12 f., 16–19, 21, 23 f., 33, 44,

65, 68, 70–74, 79, 83f., 87, 103, 108,178, 255 f., 261, 263

– versus analogue 5, 7, 9, 12 f., 16–18, 25 f.,32, 36 f., 39, 54 f., 68, 79, 169

digital humanities 3, 5 f., 30, 44, 65, 68–70, 74, 77, 79, 82, 84, 100, 103–105,117, 147f., 233, 237 f., 241, 248, 251 f.

– definitions of 3–7

– grassroots 103f., 106, 108, 112 f., 115– projects 4–7, 46 f., 69f., 75–80, 84, 88,

93, 96, 100, 103–105, 115, 169, 184f.,233, 239, 241 f., 248, 263, 265

– sustainability 4, 83digitization 4f., 12 f., 19, 21 f., 25–29, 32 f.,

35–37, 42, 46, 49, 51, 65, 67–80, 84,86f., 101 f., 151 f., 201

distant reading 4, 117 f., 144

e-book (=ebook) 4, 30, 40, 65, 68, 70, 73–77, 80, 97–101

EPUB 99f.exegesis 19f., 23, 34, 50, 52–54, 160

Facebook (see also social media) 69, 103–106, 108–115

film 103, 107, 114, 255

gender 114, 234–237, 243, 248Geographical Information Systems (GIS) 5,

175–97geography 18, 31, 38 f., 41–46, 48, 109,

114, 119, 200, 230Google 2, 23, 39, 41, 65, 75, 76, 185f.,

188f., 191 f., 206, 235

Hadith (ḥadīth) 22– female transmitters of 244– transmitters of 5, 17, 233 f., 237, 241 f.,

244, 247 f.High Dynamic Range 153, 155, 157historiography 32, 86, 168, 200, 235HTML (HyperText Markup Language) 42,

176f., 177, 191., 203, 206, 229, 236, 264

Ibn al-Nadīm 12imaging 5, 152, 156f.indexing (=index) 6, 34f., 58, 65, 200,

202–205, 207, 211, 215–220, 228Islamic studies 12, 34, 68–72, 81–85, 87,

93, 118 f., 233, 248, 252isnād 34, 203, 206, 247

Jedli (toolkit) 199, 202, 205, 207, 209, 225,229f.

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) 176f.,190–192

Kindle 75, 93, 98–100

Laknawī, Abd al-Ḥayy (d. 1886–7) 234f.,237, 240, 242–248

libraries 2, 4, 5, 7 f., 18, 20–24, 26, 28f.,36, 39, 41–45, 51 f., 58, 65–67, 69, 71,75–81, 83f., 94 f., 97, 158, 183, 200,207, 230, 251, 262–264

Library of Arabic Literature 4, 93, 95, 97,99–102

literacy 24, 71Loeb Classical Library 95f., 98

al-Maktaba al-Shāmila (=Shamela) 2, 7, 20,22, 40–43, 58, 200, 204f., 209f

Mālik ibn Anas 234, 244, 247f.Manichaeans 13–16, 29, 58manuscripts 4, 5, 8, 12, 14, 17, 19, 22, 30–

32, 34, 38, 39, 44f., 47, 51–54, 56–58,65 f., 68, 71–76, 78 f., 80, 82–87, 94,151–154, 156–160, 162–164, 167, 169,172, 253, 257, 259 93f.,

mapping 3, 5, 36, 38, 109, 157, 175 f., 185 f.,189f., 238, 248, 262

markup 3f., 42, 74, 84, 96, 176, 186material artifact (=artifact) 65, 67, 72 f.,

76 f., 79, 81, 86, 88mawlā 234, 237, 245 f., 248medieval 2–4, 7, 14, 16, 26, 31, 44, 48, 55,

68f., 73, 84, 95, 117 f., 122, 138, 141,145, 157, 169, 230, 253, 266

– authors 7, 40, 52, 74, 96 f., 117, 199,201 f., 204, 230, 253

– book culture 11, 17, 31, 46, 68, 71, 73– Islamic history 4, 14, 26, 28f., 46, 57,

82–84, 117, 120f., 148, 201, 221, 236,245

– Islamic world 3, 7, 11, 66, 71, 119, 122f.,131, 134, 138, 158, 169, 244, 252

– learning 5, 18 f., 21, 29, 44, 46–51, 57,81, 95, 98, 101, 128, 141–144, 171, 201,207, 209f., 213, 219, 228–230

270 Subject index

– literary collection (=safīna) 253– Near East 31, 68–71, 75, 81 f., 84, 86, 93,

99, 110, 114, 129, 178 f., 183, 252, 262Medina 239, 243, 244, 247memory 7 f., 36, 109–111, 114, 194, 209 f.,

219 f., 226, 257MOBI (ebook format) 100modeling 117–121, 148, 230, 236museums 4, 51, 76, 109, 151 f., 154, 158 f.,

252, 262

Named Entity Recognition 190nisba 119–122, 125 f., 128–133, 138–141,

143, 203, 224, 237, 240

occupations, historical 121 f., 122 f., 124,126, 139, 144, 234, 237, 240, 244f.,247f.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) 23, 39,84, 253, 261

oral traditions 252, 255, 257ornamentation 121, 158, 162–171.Ottoman Empire 29, 49, 58, 85, 175, 178 f.,

182, 185, 193oXygen (XML editor) 177

Palestine 106–115, 158Palladio 238–241, 243 f.performance 111, 256–261, 263f.Persian 12 f., 13, 15 f., 16, 19–23, 26–32,

34f., 38, 40, 46–54, 57 f., 66, 69, 78,84f., 151, 160f., 253

preservation 13, 16 f., 29, 68f., 73, 77 f.,86f., 113, 251, 263

Principal Component Analysis 163public humanities 251f., 266publishing 4, 16, 28, 31, 39, 43, 45, 65,

68f., 74, 77, 79 f., 83, 86, 93 f., 97, 99,101, 177, 207, 230, 234, 258f.

Python (programming language) 7, 199,201, 207, 209–215, 217–221, 225, 228–230

Quran (=Qur’an) 5, 11, 18, 20, 23, 28f., 50–54, 69, 97, 101, 151f., 152, 154, 157–163,200, 240, 245

RAW (file format) 239–243, 245regular expression(s) 201–205, 207, 211–

213, 216f., 220–222, 225–228

Sanskrit 58, 94f., 97Shīʿa 234, 248Sirat Bani Hilal Digital Archive 4, 256,

262f., 265social history 26f., 121, 141social media 22, 68f., 81, 104, 108, 112string (programming) 182 f., 189, 210–217,

219–222Syria 93, 111, 132f., 140, 158, 175, 178, 189,

196

Tall al-Za‘tar 103–115Ta’rīkh al-islām 120–48TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) 84, 96f., 179,

184–188text mining 6, 68, 120–48, 199–230translation 4, 14–16, 20, 39, 43, 45–48,

50f., 53–56, 82, 94f., 97, 100, 102,160f., 179, 182, 189, 233f., 241, 247,261–263

tribes 122f., 130f., 237, 240f., 245–248,256, 258–260

universities 3–5, 36, 80–85, 93–95, 103,233–236, 252, 261–264

visualization 5, 158, 178, 186, 194, 201,203, 233–235, 238, 240–242, 244,246, 248

al-Warrāq (online text library) 18–20

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) 25, 95–102, 176f., 179–181, 183–186, 188f.

XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Trans-formations) 176f., 183, 186, 188, 194

Subject index 271