(28 Feb 2025) The Asian Research Library, The University of Tokyo, welcomes all interested parties to the symposium “Libraries and Archival Practices in the Early Modern Eastern Islamic World,” which it is co-organizing. Pre-registration is required for both on-site and online participation.
Libraries and archival practices played a pivotal role in shaping the intellectual, cultural, and religious landscapes of the pre-modern Islamic world. Since the early 21st century, substantial research on libraries and book culture, based on manuscripts and documentary sources, have emerged, particularly within the fields of Arabic and Turkish historical studies. However, comparable scholarship focusing on other regions of the Islamic world, notably Iran and India, remains relatively underexplored. This symposium aims to address this gap by bringing together scholars from the UK, Iran, Germany, and Japan to examine the complex histories of manuscript provenance, endowments, library cataloguing, and preservation in early modern Iran and India. Through these investigations, the symposium seeks to deepen our understanding of the cultural, intellectual, and religious dynamics of book culture in these regions and its broader significance within the Islamic world.
Venue: Large Conference Room (303), Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (3-11-1 Asahi-cho, Fuchu-shi, Tokyo 183-8534, JAPAN) and online
Date and Time: Thursday, 20 March 2025, 13:00–18:30 JST (in-person and online)
Program details in English can be found here.
