Dr. Jean Druel O.P. has an excess of energy. He bounds up the stairs, he hums along to the Arabic pop music playing as he works, and then, without notice, he springs into someone else’s office to check up on them. He is confident, but with him it comes across as pride in other people and their work. He won’t talk about his own research on the history of Arabic grammar unless you prompt him. Dr. Jean Druel O.P. is the Dominican Catholic friar who runs the Islamic Studies research center, Dominican Institute for Oriental Studies (IDEO), up the street from Cairo’s famed center of religious learning, al-Azhar University.1
Welcome to the Dominican Institute for Oriental Studies (IDEO). A cat may greet you upon arrival.
The Dominican order came to Cairo to study Islam and have been there since the 1930s. Over time IDEO came to house, in my opinion, the best library in the world to study Islam; the Dominican brothers selected the books they needed to do their research on the Muslim world and have kept it up to date. What makes it so special to me–as someone who studies book history–is that in the 1950s and 1960s, the Dominicans collected rare printed books in Arabic, particularly Muslim devotional works. These books are slim and ephemeral; they’re prayer books in a sense, but they’re not used in the daily obligatory ṣalat.2 They’re used to cultivate a relationship with God, but also function as a way of teaching Muslim theology and cosmology. Most other repositories of rare books in the Muslim world don’t think they’re worth collecting. The modern-day equivalents of these books, available at book stands on the side of the street, are only worth pennies. After all, as soon as they begin to fall apart, you can get another. But the Dominicans, thankfully, thought they were worth collecting.
The IDEO stacks.
Many of IDEO’s projects were built to suit the needs of the Muslim intellectual tradition, like their catalogue; Muslim discourse largely takes the form of commentaries, forming a chain in time. Thinkers offer their own ideas by directly responding to pre-existing work in almost every genre of Muslim thought, be it Islamic law, philosophy, literature, grammar, medicine, or theology. The IDEO catalogue reflects this and links data in a tree-like form. The Dominicans also thought of other ways to benefit the Muslims around them. They took the time to study Islam, to reach out to Muslims, and thought about what they could achieve together. This approach is why their library–which is accessible to the public–is open late on Fridays, a day off in the Muslim calendar, so Muslim scholars can work. It’s no surprise then that some of the brothers are involved in interfaith initiatives all across Cairo.
The IDEO’s rare books collection is currently in the process of being digitized for online open access, in collaboration with France’s national library Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). This is where I come in. My work examines the history of the transition between manuscript and print in Arabic in the 19th century; thus, I have plenty of experience using this particular collection. I almost cried the first time I pulled out one of their prayer books from the 1880s. I dropped everything and ran into Jean’s office to show it to him. “That’s crazy” he said, indulging that excitement of finding exactly what you want in a library or an archive. He smiled knowingly at me, then returned to his work. Over time, he began to clue me into the digitization process and asked me, since I was always pulling rare books out of the collection, if I wanted to pick the books IDEO digitized.
The texture of my visits to the Dominicans changed as soon as I began working on the project. Instead of going to sit in the library itself, I head downstairs to the collections, which are closed stacks. Amir Samir, who is one of the staff members responsible for the stacks, goes over the set-up and his meticulous standards for how I am to behave in the stacks. Finally, he hands me bright yellow cards: these will function as “ghosts,” that I will put in the place of the books I have taken off the shelves to consider for digitization. The cards have a place for the title of the book, their classmark, their inventory number, and the date I removed it from the shelf.
A page from an 1880s lithographed Qur’an from Cairo.
My work begins with the IDEO online catalog itself. I review the catalog’s classifications, which correspond to different subjects. I gravitate towards the subject of tasawwuf.3 I take my yellow cards, which I fill out as I go along, and enter the stacks, retrieving what copies of tasawwuf works I’ve identified from the catalogue. But my eyes find much more. I begin pulling the slim volumes off the shelf based on the binding, which hints that the books are older. I open them, and flip to the front page to confirm.
These prayer books have been rebound by a professional, keeping the original book covers, a thin cardboard-paper hybrid. Jean told me to focus on texts produced before 1950: these are the metrics he and the BnF have decided on. These books are the bulk of what I am recommending for digitization. I bring a stack of ghost cards to slip into the stacks and take the books away with me to enter into the spreadsheet Jean gave me: it functions as a replica of the metadata available in the IDEO catalogue.
The IDEO catalogue, named AlKindi after the 10th century Muslim polymath, is nothing without its cataloguers. There is a team of six and headed by Mohamed Malchouch, a kind and smiling Moroccan man who used to work at the King Aziz Abd al-Saud Foundation in Casablanca before joining IDEO last year. He and his team are now responsible for every text that makes it into the database, which the programmers, René-Vincent du Grandlaunay, who heads the library and Magdy Yackoub, an Egyptian engineer, hope will one day be the standard in Islamic Studies.4
When he arrived at IDEO, Malchouch had high expectations for his new staff. Watching the cataloging team work, it is apparent his guidance whipped the team into great shape. He even quizzed me on my criteria for choosing books and the assistant director for periodicals, Magdy Azab, chimed in as well. Malchouch makes Magdy and I Moroccan mint tea every day and he wordlessly refills our cups as we make our way through the large kettle of tea. During an afternoon tea break, I sigh and tell them that the pamphlets are often not preserved in other library collections, both in the Muslim-majority world and abroad. It’s why my job is taking longer than anticipated. I am supposed to suggest 47,000 pages of material to digitize. The Dominicans have budgeted 10,000 euros to do so (approximately $10,898.20). It’s a good reminder that digitization takes money and a multi-talented team of experts on the subject matter, the software, and the digitization process. To make this happen, there’s the cataloguing team, the digitizers themselves, the admin processing the paperwork, the web designers, and me.
IDEO study carrels ready for researchers
My part in the process is much smaller than I think, so I swallow what I was about to say to Mohamed and Magdy about how each pamphlet is only about 20-40 pages. They and their predecessors put them in the catalogue; that took labor in itself. I’m sure they were also frustrated by the pile of dozens of small pamphlets, some just barely bigger than my palm. Inputting each one into my spreadsheet barely puts a dent in the ultimate goal of 47,000 pages.
One of the Dominican brothers, Sunil Tirkey, sometimes brings me chai when I come in in the morning and I sit with him and another brother, Réginald Baconin. They’re both beginning academic careers through a program IDEO runs to give Dominican brothers from across the globe enough Arabic to complete a master’s degree in Islamic Studies at a nearby university. We often brainstorm together or go to museums, sometimes we see movies and indulge in fast food from time to time. The three of us sit in IDEO’s garden and I tell them why it is vital these books survive. They nod politely; they’ve heard me say this all before. That Islam has its internal tensions and that I am afraid–not only as an academic but as a Muslim–that tasawwuf and our knowledge of its history will die.
IDEO’s courtyard. A great place to sit, and drink your tea.
There’s the ethics of it, too. The books IDEO digitizes will continue to live in Cairo, but they will also go online, for anyone to download. And my profession–the academic study of Islam and the Middle East–will exploit them for personal gain. People who don’t know many Muslims or our cultures will use them. At least when academics came to use them in person they were coming to Egypt; digitization will eliminate that need. What scares me the most, however, is that Muslims will never pray from these devotional texts again. The texts themselves might be reproduced somewhere else but these material objects were created for prayer. And if the prayers aren’t reproduced somewhere else, they will disappear forever. I do not care if an academic ever uses these books but I want other Muslims to know they exist. But then the conversation ends as my friends and I are interrupted by one of the cats in the garden who wants to be held. Talk then veers to whether or not we’re watching a Marvel movie that upcoming Sunday afternoon. We’ll ask Jean if he wants to come, too.
The digitized collection from IDEO is being uploaded here; the online collection will grow over time.
- The acronym IDEO comes from the library’s French name, Institut dominicain d’études orientales.
- Daily ritual prayers, performed five times a day.
- The Encyclopedia of Islam defines tasawwuf, which is also known as Sufism, as the phenonmenon of mysticism in Islam.
- René-Vincent du Grandlaunay wears many hats as he is a Dominican friar, a researcher, a programmer, and a former French League fencer.
