Building Maktaba: A Digital Collection of African Arabic Manuscripts in Translation

FAIN: PW-285185-22

Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois (Champaign, IL 61801-3620)
Mauro Nobili (Project Director: July 2021 to present)

A pilot project to create a digital collection of 20 African Arabic manuscripts from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern University with images, translations, and brief essays.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and Northwestern University (NU) in Evanston propose a two-year Foundations grant to pilot an open-access digital collection that joins the rich West African Arabic manuscript holdings of our universities’ libraries. The digital collection, called Maktaba (meaning “library” in Arabic), will display images of a sample set of 20 manuscripts from the UIUC and NU collections. To make the manuscripts legible and teachable for non-specialists, each manuscript will be paired with its English translation and a brief essay providing historical and cultural context. The planning period (6/1/2022-5/31/2024) will allow the project team to establish processes and test concepts that will inform expansion of the collection after the planning period. The Maktaba project contributes to ongoing efforts to decolonize the production of knowledge about African societies at large.