Although the Sultanate of Oman’s Ministry of Heritage and Culture has published many classics of Ibāḍī scholarship and small bookstores like Maktabat al-Ḍāmirī and Maktabat al-Istiqāma have also contributed many valuable publications, much Ibāḍī scholarship remains unpublished. This paper will describe the major archival sources of Ibāḍī manuscripts in Oman and Zanzibar, and will discuss the following: the types of Ibāḍī manuscripts found in various archives and libraries; what those contents tell us about Ibāḍī scholarship and readership in Oman and Zanzibar in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the extent to which and manner in which these manuscripts have been catalogued; the state of preservation and digitalization of the manuscripts; and the manuscripts’ accessibility to researchers and conditions of research. On this subject, Oman and Zanzibar have some points of comparability, such as the existence of private, uncatalogued collections, but there are also important points of contrast: whereas the Sultanate of Oman has a major interest in specifically Ibāḍī scholarship, for the people of East Africa Ibāḍīs, who were all of Omani descent, were often seen as foreigners, sometimes admired and sometimes hated. Arabic manuscripts, which had undoubtedly already suffered from humidity and insects, were torn apart by angry revolutionaries in the Zanzibar revolution of 1964; the remnants were boxed and hidden away in the recesses of the Zanzibar National Archives, where for years the staff insisted that they had no Arabic manuscripts. Whereas Oman has had the financial wherewithal to invest in manuscript preservation and digitalization, Zanzibar has not. Nonetheless, there are significant things to be learned from these manuscripts, including the interest that Ibāḍīs in Zanzibar had in Sunni literature, as is evident from the presence of many Sunni texts in Ibāḍī-owned waqfs. Texts by Ibāḍī scholars resident in Zanzibar in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries indicate a broad range of scholarship, including works on Ibāḍī fiqh and theology, local herbal medicine, and a refutation of the ninth-century Nestorian Christian work known as The Apology of al-Kindi. Copies of books and manuscripts from Oman and other Arab countries may also be found. The Zanzibar Sultanate established a printing press in 1879 and published works by Ibāḍī scholars in Oman and Algeria, as well as one by a Zanzibari scholar.

Using the example of a recent inventory carried out in 2015 of the private library of the late Ibadi scholar and historian Salim b. Ya’qub (d.1991) in Tunisia, this presentation argues the late 19th and early 20th centuries represent a formative period for many major Ibadi manuscript collections in Tunisia. The Bin Ya’qub library, similar to manuscript collections through the Maghrib, the Sahara, and West Africa, reflects the archive-building travels and efforts of a Muslim scholar during the early 20th century and typifies a broader trend in Northern Africa toward the accumulation of large manuscript collections that today represent the main repositories of primary source material used by historians to write the history of Islam in the region. By offering a brief history of the creation of the Bin Yaq’ub library and the accumulation of its contents, the presentation suggests that thinking of the history of these and other Ibadi manuscript collections in terms of a network of scholars and books, constantly in motion, can help reshape the way historians use the texts of Ibadi archives. In addition, this paper considers the impact of the history of this and other Ibadi libraries in Tunisia on current research on pre-modern and early modern Ibadi history. In short, it considers the ways in which the story of the creation of this 20th century collection influences the ways in which we understand the history of pre-modern Ibadism.

Tracing the arrival of printed books, the evolution of their format and the opening of public libraries between the late 19th century and the 1960s in Mizab (a region located North of the Algerian Sahara desert), this paper argues that Ibadi patrimony (turâth)—as Ibadis and scholars understand it today—was formed recently and represented a massive change in the Ibadi literary and scholarly culture. From the 1880s onwards, Ibadi books began to be printed, although it was only during the interwar period that the scholarly formats began to change radically and that Ibadi scholars shaped and magnified a literary patrimony, throughout the edition of ancient texts and the opening of public libraries. Showing how the use of the printing press went hand-to-hand with the end of the lively 19th century scholastic culture and the building of an ideal Ibadi library, I suggest that a social and cultural history of Ibadi patrimony and archives would shed new light on our vision of modern Ibadism and Ibadis in Algeria. This presentation also considers the role played by the ideological and political context in the invention of this patrimony: the increase of Algerian nationalist ideas during the 20th century influences deeply the way Ibadis framed their history and culture. In sum, the aim here is to provide a critical reading of Ibadi classical sources as productions of the colonial period cultural ruptures.

The digitization of archives is usually approached from the starting point of the physical archives, looking toward the end user experience. Libraries give figures for how much of their collections they have digitized, yet assessing the extent of digitization in a given archive or library tells only part of the story. Beyond the perspective of the archivist—who is concerned with the progress so far made in digitizing a given collection—is the interest of the user investigating Ibadism online, a user who may be an Arabic-speaking student or English-speaking scholar, and many in between. As such, a review of the online experience for this user is desirable. This paper first contextualizes Ibadi studies in the larger movement towards mass digitization of libraries and then investigates on a more general level the state of Ibadism online, from the perspectives of the researcher and student. Rather than a catalog of what sources have been digitized, this paper surveys the Ibadi materials currently available online filtered by their ease of use and discovery. I break the field of Ibadi studies online into two main groups: digitized Ibadi sources, such as those by classical authors and modern scholars, from both official outlets and informal sharing sites, and religiously-oriented sites where Ibadi Muslims communicate outside of traditional platforms of publication. Throughout, I focus on the availability of materials online to a user interested in classical and contemporary Ibadism in order to approach the questions of how Ibadism is presented on the internet and where further development is warranted from the perspective of the online user.