The Islamic Manuscript Tradition: Ten Centuries of Book Arts in Indiana University Collections.

• Author: Simpson, Marianna Shreve
• Position: Book review

The Islamic Manuscript Tradition: Ten Centuries of Book Arts in Indiana University Collections. Edited by CHRISTIANE GRUBER. Bloomington: INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2010. Pp. xviii + 286, illus. $39.95.

The study of the Islamic book arts continues to flourish among Anglophone scholars, with its own specialized association (The Islamic Manuscript Association, based in England) and academic meetings, and a steady outpouring of publications, including monographs on specific media (notably calligraphy and painting), on individual codices (primarily those with illustrations), and on current approaches to such material (particularly codicology), as well as catalogues of special exhibitions, museum and library holdings, and private collections. This volume adds a new tributary to this scholarly stream, one that flows from an important source in the United States and at the same time joins newcomers to the fluid mix. The University of Indiana Bloomington (IUB) has long been renowned as a center for Asian (near, far, and central) and Islamic studies. What perhaps has been less well known, or at least less widely heralded, is that the university's various library, museum, and research institute collections include a significant and diverse number of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Indian manuscripts and printed books, dating from the early Islamic era to modern times. This material formed the basis of a graduate student seminar on Islamic codicology and paleography, led by Christiane Gruber during the fall term 2006, a course that resulted in an exhibition, symposium, and website (accessible through www.artmuseum.iu.edu) in spring 2009, and finally to the multi-authored publication under review here. Unlike other such compilations, however, which tend to comprise catalogues raisonnes of an institution's holdings, this one contains a series of essays derived from their authors' original seminar papers and focused, with one exception, on individual or related groups of Islamic books at IUB. Interestingly, considering the evident breadth of the university's Islamic collections, these case studies concentrate on genres that fall outside the conventional boundaries defining the Islamic arts of the book and that often have been overlooked or, at the very least, given short shift in the scholarly literature of the field. It is almost as if the intention here was to draw attention to the periphery, rather than to the center, of Islamic manuscript studies and, in the process, to reveal the extent to which works long regarded as either marginal or inconsequential can inspire original observations and interpretations and offer valuable insights about the nature of Islamic material culture in general and historical practices of verbal and visual communication within various Muslim regions in particular.

The volume begins with a brief foreword by the distinguished (and sadly recently deceased) art historian Oleg Grabar, whose comments on the reading and collecting of Islamic books provide a kind of imprimatur for the subsequent essays, and then with a preface by Gruber explaining the publication's origins and choice of essay topics. These prefatory remarks are followed by a thorough and thoughtful introduction, again by Gruber, to the history of Islamic manuscripts and its constituent arts, incorporating discussions and reproductions of specific IUB writing implements and...