Ibadi Muslims of North Africa

The Ibadi Muslims a little-known minority community have lived in North Africa for over a thousand years. Combining an analysis of Arabic manuscripts with digital tools used in network analysis Paul M. Love Jr takes readers on a journey across the Maghrib and beyond as he traces the paths of a group of manuscripts and the Ibadi scholars who used them. Ibadi scholars of the Middle Period (eleventhsixteenth century) wrote a series of collective biographies (prosopographies) which together constructed a cumulative tradition that connected Ibadi Muslims from across time and space bringing them together into a ''written network''. From the Mzab valley in Algeria to the island of Jerba in Tunisia from the Jebel Nafusa in Libya to the bustling metropolis of early-modern Cairo this book shows how people and books worked in tandem to construct and maintain an Ibadi Muslim tradition in the Maghrib.