Ibadi Manuscripts in a European Collection

Abstract

Abstract Within the framework of studies concerning the importance of European manuscript collections for Ibadi history, this article aims at retracing the history of an archive put together by the French scholar Auguste Bossoutrot (1856–1937). This archive gathered a quantity of materials on the Arabic and Berber languages collected during his life. In particular, some of the manuscripts contain parts of a long religious work in Berber (Kitāb al-Barbariyya), discovered in the island of Djerba (Tunisia) among the Ibadi community of the island towards the end of the nineteenth century. This text was firstly discovered and reported to the scientific community by another French scholar, A. De Calassanti-Motylinski (1854–1907), but his untimely death prevented him from publishing it and the whereabouts of the manuscripts that contained it remained unknown until the discovery of Bossoutrot’s papers, which contained the longest extant copy of the work (about 900 pages).