Path of Knowledge

Ms 43 has several elements that provide important evidence toward another historical layer: the period in which the manuscript was copied and first read in Latakia, Syria, in the 1850s. Its production was an expression of what has been termed the “Alawite awakening,” a rise in Alawite social and political identification that was one outcome of identity realignment brought by French colonization. Thus, in a marginal scribal statement dated 1852, a certain Sulayman al-Rahib states that he completed his copying in 1852 in the village of Makhus, and presents himself as an ancestor of the Sinjaris, a prestigious Nusayri family who ruled the mountain area of Sinjar and led the Nusayri community in the 13th century. Elsewhere in the margins of several pages, another hand wrote “may God curse them”—a hostile reading note, perhaps by the Ottoman officials who, as physician’s letter mentions, took the text from the Nusayri community during “a punitive expedition to the Ansyri mountains” east of Latakia.

Such extra-textual aspects of Ms 43 will also figure into our project. With the assistance of a Mellon Foundation grant, Ms 43 has already been made freely available online by the University of Pennsylvania Rare Books Room. Building on Ms 43’s online accessibility, and with thumbnail images that the University of Pennsylvania libraries has agreed to provide the University of Oregon Libraries, UO’s Knight Library’s Head of Digital Scholarship Services Franny Gaede, in conjunction with the project directors, will develop a project website which will focus on these extra-textual elements. This website will allow us to show elements of Ms 43 pertaining to its existence as a material book that are best demonstrated graphically, and to present archival material. The website will be independent of the future print publications. The site will allow us to more fully elaborate aspects of the manuscript—scribal and readership notes, the presence of different manuscript hands, ornamental flourishes to letters, stamps, and other extra-textual features—that will only be briefly discussed in our published edition. By using thumbnails of these scribal and readership notes, and links to the virtual original on the University of Pennsylvania Library website, as well as archival materials such as the letter by the Philadelphia physician Metheny, scholars will have access to aspects of the source that might otherwise go unnoticed.