In this video, Sabine Schmidtke, Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, sounds the call for work on the Islamic manuscript tradition, which is uncounted and endangered – thus in need of identification, preservation, and digitization to ensure manuscripts are well-maintained and accessible. As Schmidtke explains:
For scholars of Islamic culture and civilization, the recourse to manuscripts is indispensable. Moreover, the digital turn and resulting accessibility of a much larger corpus of Islamic manuscripts has given rise to entirely new fields of scholarship, such as social practices of knowledge transmission, the history of libraries, as well as material history of the book.
Watch the video here.