Traces on the Page

Encountering the Other in Manuscript Studies

I spend a lot of my working hours with digitized Islamicate manuscripts: Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, along with a scattering of other languages, vernacular tongues that began to be written down in earnest during the early modern period. To be sure, a lot of my daily encounters with these works is pretty perfunctory: scouring catalogs, scrolling through thumbnails, looking for particular scripts, hands, layout styles, not necessarily with great attention to the semantic content. I spend a good bit of time any given week transcribing texts, working line by line, lemma by lemma, sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly and painfully, depending on the legibility of the scribe and my familiarity with the script style and the content. I’d like to think that I also spend a decent amount of time actually thinking about the nature of these texts and of the material objects themselves and their rich and complex life histories, but I know I could do a better job of that sort of participation and encounter. This essay—which lies between the scholarly and the subjective, deliberately so—is part of my attempt to do so.

I ran into the above image—for the non-initiate, which I imagine will be most of my readers, I’ll explain what exactly you’re looking at in a moment—this morning, having located a digitized manuscript, Jarring Prov. 358, that contains an Islamic hagiography I would like to read at some point. We’re also always looking to expand our transcription data sets in terms of languages and script styles, so I might work through a couple pages of the manuscript in detail, teasing out its paleographic particularities. The folio comes from a majmū’ah, a ‘collective volume’ of diverse texts, written at some point in the nineteenth century in the Eastern Turki language (which depending on who you ask could also be described as Chaghatai or even a form of Uighur), somewhere in what is now northwestern China.

As I read the catalog description—helpfully detailed, which they are not always—I alighted upon a detail, the inclusion of a depiction of the ‘seal of prophethood’ and so scrolled to the folio in question. The image above is of the scribe’s depiction of the ‘seal,’ a venerable feature in Islamic devotional literature that comes in many iterations, tracing back in some way or another to the concept, articulated in ḥadīth and sīrah literature, of a physical ‘seal’ on Muhammad’s body which in some way verified his possession of prophecy, images of which often appear in early modern devotional literature. The seal in the above manuscript owes much of its particular form to the development of another, related tradition, that of the ḥilye, or description, of Muhammad, which by the seventeenth century had taken on the role of a sort of textual icon for veneration and display.

That’s probably not a satisfactory explanation of the historical roots of the above image, but such an explanation is beside the point really. What is most important is to understand that for the individual who set pen to paper, and for all of the people—there is no way for me to know how many, whether just the scribe who penned the volume, or perhaps many people over the years—this particular image (for that is effectively what it functioned as, a verbal icon) was a source of power and protection, an objection of veneration. The evidence is there on the page: the discoloration and obvious signs of wear and tear that overlay the depiction, rendering the right-hand side roundels (which contain the names of the four rightly-guided caliphs) a bit blurred. The same sort of discoloration occurs at the lower left hand corner of the folio, keying us in on its origin: the marks of fingers (and perhaps lips) touching and rubbing this page, feeling it and smudging the ink, transferring the traces of earth and oil and whatever else to the page, conveying time and place to page. The users of this volume sought to express their veneration of Muhammad, and their desire for the prophylactic power reputed to lie in the image, through this ‘tactile’ engagement.

Which is to say, real humans held this little volume, which I now explore via my screen ‘handling’ it digitally, unable to touch it, in their hands, feeling and pressing against its materials, perhaps smelling the scent that no doubt arose, and still arises, from its paper and its binding materials. When they reached this page—the only such devotional image in the manuscript—I can imagine they stopped, or perhaps they went straight to it at times, skipping all the other material. Did they say a prayer, utter an intention, as they kissed or touched the page? What sorts of dreams, fears, hopes, everyday anxieties, did people carry as they held this volume and left their marks upon the page? Did this volume rest in an alcove until times of need or fear, did it move about some village or town of Eastern Turkistan, perhaps avoiding the periodic bouts and stretches of violence and conflict that have marked the region’s modern history for so long? In 1930 it was purchased by a European collector, and made its way into an archive; most likely it has remained inert, no more traces of devotion left upon its pages, since then. Why was it sold? What stories might this single page tell of its life history, of tears and blood and dust and sun?

‘Manuscript’ literally means ‘written by hand,’ which I suppose applies to most writing (I am typing this by hand, typography was set by hand, and so forth), but of course we understand what is meant: the active encounter of real human hands with physical pages, with pen and ink or whatever the precise materials in question. The traces of hands upon the page are direct, in some cases actually unmediated as above. There is an intimacy, a particular connectivity, to anything done by hand, writing in particular. Writing always, even if it is very faint, carries a trace of the particular person, what we call a scribal ‘hand,’ the signature in the forms and flows of the letters. The tactile traces of the hand are more anonymous, but also in some way more intimate—they often mark places of care and concern, from the finger flutings in clay of Paleolithic cave sanctuaries to the worn traces of tactile care and love on a child’s stuffed animal. And they are often concurrent with kissing, with the tracing of the lips upon others and upon certain substrates, as in devotional images and texts in particular.

To stand before the historical traces of other people’s hands, of their fingers stretched out in an act of devotion, or the page brought up to lips for a gentle kiss—is a small act on our part of encounter, of finding, often serendipitously, the presence of the other, even if now long removed from this mortal sphere. The traces of love and devotion linger on. It is incumbent on us in the present to pay attention to those traces, and to hold in mind and heart that they represent real human persons, dimly reflected in our screens or contained within an archive or a historical site. Such encounters and realizations can, and should, heighten our ability to listen and to be present and attentive here in the present to those we encounter daily; perhaps unexpectedly, scholarly practice can flow into the practice of love, building upon the traces and works of love and care in the past, finding ways to realize similar works in our own mechanical age.