Penn State history professor examines ancient Arabic manuscripts in Tunisia

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Jonathan Brockopp, professor of history, religious studies and philosophy in Penn State's College of the Liberal Arts, has always been open to "happy accidents" and where they can lead. Such was the case when, "while poor and living in Germany,” he said, he decided to further his longtime interest in religion and culture by studying Arabic. The only place he could afford to go to pursue the language, however, was Tunisia, so he took the leap.

That initial experience, followed by other happy accidents, led Brockopp to fall in love with both the language and the culture of Tunisia — where an ancient manuscript collection would pique his interest and become the focus of his scholarship and research for more than 30 years.

“While in Tunisia, I started looking around at different cultural heritage sites and came across the manuscript collection they have in Kairouan — one of the oldest collections of Arabic manuscripts in the world,” Brockopp said. Founded in 670 C.E., Kairouan was a major cultural capital in the ninth, 10th and 11th centuries. The manuscripts there, some of which are more than 1,000 years old, include some 44,000 loose pages from Qur’anic manuscripts and more than 48,000 loose pages from non-Qur’anic manuscripts. The manuscripts are painstakingly conserved at the National Laboratory for the Preservation and Conservation of Parchment and Manuscripts (NLPCPM) in Raqqada, Kairouan, Tunisia.

Despite the age of the manuscripts, Brockopp said there is evidence that the local community continued to use the collection through the centuries.

“Concerned that outsiders would come in and take their cultural heritage, the local authorities would not allow access to the collection until the end of the 19th century, when a Tunisian official wrote the first modern description of this collection and basically told the world about it in a lecture he gave in Cairo," he explained.

Luckily, he was eventually permitted to study the collection, said Brockopp. He focuses his work on the thousands of loose parchment folios that contain important works of jurisprudence, theology, and Qur’an commentary from the early Islamic period.

“The legal manuscripts are in some ways as historically important as the Qur’ans, but they are of less interest to outsiders and less likely to be of interest to other institutions,” Brockopp said. Since first encountering the manuscripts, he has written two books and 14 articles and book chapters related to his research. A third book, tentatively titled “The Writerly Cultures of Kairouan: A Mediterranean Story,” is in the works.

The Kairouan Manuscript Project

In 2018, Brockopp co-founded the Kairouan Manuscript Project (KMP) with Asma Hilali, associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Lille, France, to support conservation efforts at the NLPCM and to initiate new academic research. KMP is a network of scholars and heritage management professionals devoted to facilitating the care and management, study, and promotion of the ancient manuscripts. Penn State has been a major contributor to the KMP, and additional partners include the Tunisia National Institute of Heritage, the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at Universität Hamburg, and the Barakat Trust. 

According to Brockopp, the COVID-19 pandemic derailed much of the KMP’s work.

“Tunisia was hit hard not only by the disease, but also by a loss of national income because it is a country whose economy depends on tourism,” Brockopp said. “We ran a few training courses remotely, but nothing replaces being there in person because you have to be able to touch and examine and to hold the manuscripts up to the light. Our goal has always been to support the conservation and preservation of these manuscripts and to support research on them.”

The summer of 2022 provided an opening, and Brockopp traveled again to Kairouan — this time to help lead a major research project focused on both conservation and study. The project was made possible by the George and Florence Lafferty Endowment in the College of the Liberal Arts, a $3.2 million endowment realized through the estate of Penn State alumnus and Korean War veteran G. Raymond Lafferty, who passed away in 2018. The endowment is designated to provide funding to faculty and graduate students in the Department of History.

“Because of the Lafferty Endowment, I was able to fund my own trip to Tunisia and also bring in an international team of both conservation specialists and experts on the history of early Arabic manuscripts to Kairouan,” Brockopp said. “Over the course of two weeks, we engaged the staff of the conservation laboratory in scripted conversations to better understand both their conservation techniques and their inventory methods. I received extraordinary permission to work directly with boxes of loose parchment folios to search for a specific manuscript, comparing the information there with that in the handlists, computer files, and other metadata.”

“One of the unique aspects of this project is the combination of historical and technical expertise,” Brockopp added. “The staff at the conservation laboratory are deeply interested to know more about the community of scholars that produced this extraordinary collection. In addition to their vital work of preserving these treasures of world heritage, they are also engaging in groundbreaking research on the history of texts, scholars and scribes.”

“The Kairouan Manuscripts Project is the kind of research project one really has to be proud to support. It is working to preserve an utterly unique piece of the world’s Islamic heritage, one whose survival to this day is little short of a miracle,” said Michael Kulikowski, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Classics and head of the Department of History. “Professor Brockopp is one of just a handful of western scholars with the skills needed to work with these fragile and largely uncatalogued documents, and we’re very pleased to underwrite a part of those efforts.”

“The work is vitally important in terms of world heritage,” Brockopp said. “This is an absolutely fundamental collection that tells us about the Islamic tradition — not only in north Africa, but in places as far away as Spain and Syria, where some of the manuscripts come from.

“Thinking about the modern world, this manuscript collection and the work we do gives us a chance for real cultural exchange as we bring our different perspectives on this question of importance and meaning of this cultural heritage.”

According to Brockopp, the most important aspect of the project is the ability to support the work his Tunisian colleagues are doing to preserve and honor their own cultural heritage.

“The laboratory at the heart of this collection right now is led by a terrific young group, and they are hungry for more knowledge," he said. "To be able to support them in this is a real honor.”