Aims and Scope

Aims

Manuscripta Islamica: Journal of Islamic Manuscript Studies is an international peer-reviewed journal devoted to the study of Islamic and Islamicate manuscript cultures.

The journal aims to advance knowledge of manuscripts through original research grounded in identifiable textual, material, visual, historical, or scientific evidence. It approaches manuscripts not merely as containers of texts, but as artefacts produced through particular materials, technologies, intellectual traditions, social relations, institutions, and practices of reading and transmission.

Manuscripta Islamica publishes research that explains how manuscripts were composed, copied, compiled, organised, corrected, annotated, decorated, read, taught, circulated, collected, preserved, catalogued, digitised, and interpreted. It seeks contributions that use manuscript evidence to address wider questions in intellectual history, religious history, book history, art history, social history, cultural history, and the history of knowledge.

The journal’s distinctive concern is with Islamic manuscripts in connected worlds. It encourages research that places local manuscript traditions within wider networks of texts, scholars, scribes, patrons, readers, institutions, materials, technologies, and routes of circulation.

While global in geographical coverage, Manuscripta Islamica gives sustained attention to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean and places these regions in conversation with manuscript cultures in the Middle East, Africa, the Persianate and Ottoman worlds, South and Central Asia, China, the Mediterranean, Europe, and global manuscript collections.

The journal is particularly committed to bringing understudied manuscripts, collections, languages, scripts, regions, and custodial traditions into international scholarly discussion without reducing their local historical specificities.

Definition of Islamic Manuscript Studies

For the purposes of the journal, Islamic manuscript studies encompass handwritten artefacts that were produced, transmitted, read, collected, preserved, or used within Muslim societies or in relation to Islamic intellectual, religious, literary, administrative, artistic, and scientific traditions.

The journal does not restrict the term “Islamic manuscript” to religious texts, Arabic-language works, or codex-form books. Relevant materials may include:

  • complete codices and manuscript fragments;

  • scrolls, notebooks, albums, and composite manuscripts;

  • archival and documentary manuscripts;

  • letters, legal documents, certificates, and scholarly licences;

  • devotional, talismanic, and ritual written objects;

  • manuscript paratexts, marginalia, ownership statements, seals, and endowment records;

  • handwritten materials preserved within printed books or hybrid manuscript-print objects;

  • other written artefacts when they contribute directly to understanding Islamic manuscript cultures.

Studies of inscriptions, coins, textiles, architectural writing, or other non-manuscript objects may be considered when their relationship to manuscript production, scripts, textual transmission, or written culture forms a central part of the argument.

Geographical and Chronological Coverage

Manuscripta Islamica welcomes research on Islamic manuscripts from all geographical regions and historical periods, from the earliest centuries of Islam to contemporary manuscript practices.

The journal covers manuscripts written in Arabic and in the many other languages and scripts used within Muslim societies, including Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Malay and Jawi, Javanese and Pegon, Urdu, African Ajami traditions, Swahili, Chinese, and other regional or transregional written traditions.

Comparative studies involving Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, or other manuscript traditions are welcome when they clarify shared practices, textual exchanges, material technologies, or historical relationships involving Islamic manuscript cultures.

Areas of Scope

Textual Transmission and Philology

The journal publishes research on:

  • the transmission, recension, adaptation, translation, and transformation of texts;

  • relationships among manuscript witnesses;

  • textual variants and scribal interventions;

  • authorship, attribution, dating, and textual authenticity;

  • critical editions and edition methodology;

  • commentary traditions and layered texts;

  • translations, adaptations, abridgements, compilations, and anthologies;

  • paratexts, glosses, marginalia, corrections, and reading marks;

  • colophons, certificates of transmission, audition records, and scholarly licences;

  • stemmatics and other approaches to textual relationships.

Critical editions must offer an original scholarly contribution and explain the manuscripts, editorial principles, textual relationships, and apparatus employed.

Codicology and Palaeography

The journal welcomes studies of:

  • writing supports, including paper, parchment, papyrus, palm leaf, bark, cloth, and other materials;

  • scripts, hands, scribal practices, and palaeographical classification;

  • inks, pigments, ruling, pricking, page construction, and mise-en-page;

  • quires, sewing, binding, covers, and manuscript structure;

  • catchwords, pagination, foliation, and systems of textual organisation;

  • watermarks and paper history;

  • manuscript dating and localisation;

  • scribes, workshops, artisans, and centres of production;

  • relationships between physical structure and textual function.

Descriptive codicology should contribute to a defined historical, textual, comparative, or methodological argument.

Art, Calligraphy, and Visual Culture

Relevant subjects include:

  • calligraphy and the historical development of scripts;

  • illumination, ornamentation, illustration, diagrams, and maps;

  • visual organisation and hierarchy;

  • relationships between text, image, and material form;

  • artistic workshops and systems of patronage;

  • regional and transregional artistic traditions;

  • aesthetic, devotional, political, and pedagogical functions of manuscript design;

  • reuse, alteration, restoration, and visual transformation.

Formal description alone is insufficient unless it supports a clear analytical contribution.

Book History and the Social Life of Manuscripts

The journal encourages research on:

  • manuscript production and commissioning;

  • copying, teaching, reading, recitation, and performance;

  • scholarly, religious, commercial, and family networks;

  • authors, copyists, patrons, owners, readers, teachers, and students;

  • libraries, madrasas, mosques, courts, pesantren, zawiyas, households, and other manuscript environments;

  • manuscript circulation, exchange, donation, inheritance, sale, and endowment;

  • reading communities and interpretive practices;

  • gender, social status, professional identity, and manuscript culture;

  • manuscript use in ritual, education, administration, healing, devotion, and everyday life;

  • the movement of manuscripts across political, linguistic, and religious boundaries.

Articles should connect social or historical claims to specific manuscript evidence.

Intellectual and Religious Traditions

Manuscripta Islamica welcomes manuscript-based research on texts and traditions relating to:

  • the Qurʾan and the Qurʾanic sciences;

  • hadith and hadith transmission;

  • tafsir;

  • law and legal practice;

  • theology and philosophy;

  • Sufism and devotional traditions;

  • history, biography, and genealogy;

  • literature, poetry, and storytelling;

  • language, grammar, lexicography, and rhetoric;

  • medicine, astronomy, mathematics, geography, and the natural sciences;

  • occult, divinatory, cosmological, and talismanic knowledge;

  • education, administration, diplomacy, and commerce.

Studies in these fields must make manuscripts central to the research. Articles based primarily on modern printed editions, without substantial engagement with manuscript witnesses or manuscript culture, fall outside the journal’s scope.

Collections, Cataloguing, and Provenance

The journal publishes analytical research on:

  • the formation and history of manuscript collections;

  • catalogues and cataloguing practices;

  • provenance, ownership, and chains of custody;

  • waqf and institutional collections;

  • royal, scholarly, religious, family, and private libraries;

  • colonial collecting and the displacement of manuscripts;

  • dealers, auctions, donations, acquisitions, and transfers;

  • dispersed, reconstructed, or reunited collections;

  • unidentified, uncatalogued, or newly located manuscripts;

  • collection metadata, descriptive standards, and authority records;

  • the history and politics of manuscript classification.

Catalogue studies and collection reports must move beyond inventory and provide a clear scholarly argument, methodological contribution, or substantial new finding.

The journal requires responsible treatment of provenance. It will not publish research that conceals doubtful ownership, facilitates unlawful trade, or presents restricted objects without appropriate permission.

Conservation and Heritage Science

Relevant research includes:

  • manuscript conservation and preventive preservation;

  • material deterioration and environmental risks;

  • paper, parchment, ink, pigment, adhesive, fibre, and binding analysis;

  • imaging and non-invasive examination;

  • multispectral and hyperspectral imaging;

  • radiocarbon dating and other scientific dating methods;

  • conservation history and earlier interventions;

  • disaster response and endangered collections;

  • storage, handling, documentation, and risk management;

  • sustainable preservation in different climatic and institutional settings.

Technical studies must identify a scholarly or conservation problem, explain their methods, acknowledge limitations, and demonstrate how their findings contribute to manuscript knowledge or preservation practice.

Routine treatment reports without an analytical or transferable contribution are outside the journal’s scope.

Digital and Computational Manuscript Studies

Manuscripta Islamica welcomes research employing digital and computational methods, including:

  • digital scholarly editions;

  • manuscript databases and digital catalogues;

  • handwriting and script recognition;

  • optical character recognition and handwritten text recognition;

  • computational palaeography and codicology;

  • image analysis and pattern recognition;

  • corpus-based textual comparison;

  • stylometry and authorship analysis;

  • linked data and knowledge graphs;

  • text encoding and semantic annotation;

  • geographical and network analysis;

  • three-dimensional modelling;

  • interoperable image and data infrastructures;

  • digital reconstruction of dispersed manuscripts;

  • computational approaches to manuscript description and classification.

Digital tools, databases, or artificial intelligence are not in themselves sufficient grounds for publication. Submissions must address a defined manuscript research question, explain the method and data, evaluate accuracy and limitations, and make a scholarly contribution that extends beyond describing a project or software application.

Machine-generated transcriptions, classifications, reconstructions, or attributions must be verified against manuscript evidence and presented with transparent documentation.

Conservation, Access, and Custodial Knowledge

The journal recognises that manuscript knowledge is produced not only by academic researchers but also by librarians, archivists, conservators, religious institutions, families, collectors, copyists, teachers, and local custodial communities.

It welcomes research concerning:

  • local systems of manuscript care and transmission;

  • community archives and family collections;

  • relationships between researchers and custodians;

  • culturally sensitive, sacred, or restricted materials;

  • access, digitisation, ownership, and intellectual property;

  • collaborative documentation and knowledge production;

  • repatriation, restitution, and digital reunification;

  • the effects of conflict, displacement, climate, and institutional inequality on manuscript survival.

Contributions must respect applicable ethical, legal, religious, institutional, and community requirements.

Manuscript, Lithography, and Print

The journal also welcomes research on the relationship between manuscript and print cultures, including:

  • the transition from scribal production to lithography and typography;

  • manuscripts used as exemplars for printed editions;

  • handwritten additions to printed books;

  • manuscript copying after the introduction of print;

  • the circulation of texts across manuscript, lithographic, printed, and digital forms;

  • changing practices of authorship, editing, reading, and authority;

  • contemporary copying, calligraphy, and manuscript revival.

Research focused solely on printed books is outside the journal’s scope unless it contributes directly to the study of manuscript transmission, materiality, or manuscript-print interaction.

Methodological Orientation

Manuscripta Islamica is methodologically open but evidentially rigorous.

The journal welcomes established and emerging approaches from:

  • philology and textual criticism;

  • codicology and palaeography;

  • book history and intellectual history;

  • art history and visual studies;

  • archival and historical research;

  • religious and literary studies;

  • anthropology and sociology;

  • conservation science and heritage science;

  • library and information science;

  • digital humanities and computational research.

Interdisciplinary work is encouraged when the methods are appropriate to the research question and adequately explained. The use of a new technology or theoretical vocabulary does not substitute for accurate manuscript identification, direct engagement with evidence, and a demonstrable scholarly contribution.

Priority Contributions

The journal gives particular consideration to submissions that:

  • introduce previously unknown or insufficiently studied manuscripts;

  • reassess established conclusions through new manuscript evidence;

  • connect local traditions with transregional histories;

  • compare manuscript cultures without erasing regional distinctions;

  • integrate textual and material analysis;

  • examine collections or languages rarely represented in international scholarship;

  • develop transferable methods for manuscript study, conservation, or digital research;

  • provide ethically documented research on provenance and custodial history;

  • make primary evidence accessible through reliable editions, images, data, or documentation;

  • formulate arguments relevant beyond a single manuscript or collection.

Priority consideration does not imply automatic acceptance. All submissions are evaluated according to the same editorial and peer-review standards.

Submissions Outside the Journal’s Scope

Manuscripta Islamica does not normally consider:

  • general studies of Islam that do not use manuscript evidence;

  • theological, literary, or historical interpretations based only on modern printed texts;

  • articles in which manuscripts are mentioned only incidentally;

  • descriptive inventories without an original analytical contribution;

  • uncritical summaries of catalogue information;

  • reports describing digitisation projects, databases, exhibitions, or conservation activities without a research question or transferable finding;

  • editions or translations that do not explain their manuscript basis and editorial method;

  • claims based on manuscripts whose repositories, shelfmarks, provenance, or conditions of access cannot be reasonably verified;

  • promotional accounts of private collections or manuscripts offered for sale;

  • research using unlawfully obtained images, data, or cultural objects;

  • articles whose principal subject falls outside Islamic or Islamicate manuscript cultures.

Standard for Relevance

A submission falls within the scope of Manuscripta Islamica when it:

  1. makes manuscripts or manuscript culture central to the research;

  2. identifies the relevant corpus, witnesses, collections, or material evidence;

  3. formulates a clear research problem;

  4. uses an appropriate and transparent method;

  5. presents an original finding, interpretation, edition, or methodological contribution;

  6. engages with relevant international and regional scholarship;

  7. addresses provenance, access, permissions, and research ethics where applicable;

  8. explains why its findings matter for the broader study of manuscripts, written culture, or the history of knowledge.

Meeting the scope requirements does not guarantee publication. Manuscripts must also satisfy the journal’s standards of originality, evidence, argumentation, research integrity, and peer review.