ICESCO trains manuscript specialists from 54 countries in critical text editing

ICESCO, working with the Tahqiq scholarly platform, ran a three-day training session titled 'The Islamic Manuscript: From Paleography to Critical Text Editing', reaching hundreds of researchers and specialists across 54 countries. Five lectures covered manuscript geography, codicology, paleography and cataloguing, then the fundamentals of critical editing, the auxiliary sciences it depends on, and the technologies that now support it. The teaching roster was deliberately senior: Idham Hanash and Ahmed Abdelbaset of ICESCO's Calligraphy and Manuscripts Centre, Mustapha Toubi of Mohammed V University in Morocco, the Bahraini editor Nizam Yaquby, and the Iraqi heritage scholar Bashar Awad Marouf. Director-General Salim M. AlMalik framed the work as continuous analysis, sound scholarly publication and preservation, in that order. The reason this matters more than another digitisation announcement is that scanning a manuscript produces an image, not an edition. Turning that image into a usable text requires people who can read the hand, date the paper, collate the witnesses and defend an editorial decision, and those people are made only by training of exactly this kind. Capacity is the binding constraint on the whole manuscript heritage project, and it is the part almost nobody funds.

This is a QeRN summary by Ahmed Qerni. Read the original at ICESCO: https://icesco.org/en/2026/07/30/icesco-holds-training-session-on-islamic-manuscripts-with-specialists-from-54-countries/.