OpenITI Spring 2026 Reading Groups
Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish!
Part of our mission with the Open Islamicate Text Initiative is to help build communities of readers and users of the digitized texts whose infrastructure we are helping to build, and towards this end for the last couple of years (actually, I think it’s a bit longer than that—time flies!) we have been hosting weekly reading and discussion groups on different topics and with different aims. We have steadily added to our lineup, and for the first time will be hosting not one, not two, but three reading groups this semester, each focused on manuscript texts, covering Ottoman Turkish (Mondays), Arabic (Wednesdays), and Persian (Fridays). The time slot is the same: 10 am to 12 pm, Eastern US time. Each has a slightly different structure in terms of content and schedule, though all three are ideal for anyone who is a learner of one (or all!) of the three languages, is interested in Islamicate manuscript culture, wants to try a very straightforward and low-enry-barrier digital humanities project, or would just like to meet other people interested in Islamicate texts from across time and space.
I’ve described our Ottoman Turkish reading group previously, and we will be continuing from last semester, reading and editing and annotating our anonymous Ottoman traveler’s diary as he makes his way gradually back north to Istanbul.
For the new Arabic reading group, this semester we will be working through a selection of manāqib texts—hagiography, though that translation does not precisely capture the full complex valence of manāqib as a term. Starting with a manāqib of Nafīsa bint al-Ḥasan, we will explore each text’s particularities, narratives, and strategies in depicting holy people, while also thinking about the nature of the manuscript setting, and examining textual transformations where possible. After the manāqib of Nafīsa we will be examining a very curious manāqib that is about—and not about, though I don’t want to give away more!—ʿAdī ibn Musāfir. I imagine we’ll have time for a third text, to be determined however.
Finally, our Persian reading group will be doing soundings—after the fashion of fāl, selecting texts at random (or via Divine providence, rather!) from the massive mostly Persian compilatory text we’ve been exploring for the last year or so, SBzB Ms. or. fol. 248, the Safīnat Baḥr al-muḥīt. For more on it see: An Introduction and Invitation to the Safīnat al-baḥr al-muḥīṭ Manuscript Reading Group. Our soundings promise to cover many genres, periods, and styles, giving us a better cross-section of one of the most fascinating texts any of us have come across yet I think it’s fair to say!
If you are interested in joining any of the above, send me an email: jallen22@umd.edu, and I’ll get you signed up and plugged in!