Arabo-Swahili Manuscripts in Practice: Rituals, Ceremonies, Liturgies and Healing (C07)

• Subject Area: African, American and Oceania Studies
• Term: from 2011 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 181924784

The aim of this project is to investigate the manuscriptological aspects of Swahili cultural practices, exemplified by a study of the qasida Hamziyya, a panegyric poem translated from an Arabic original into Swahili in the 18th century, which forms a central part of the Swahili Islamic literary canon. A corpus of Arabo-Swahili Hamziyya manuscripts which were accessed by fieldwork in the first phase of C07 will be subjected to a multi-facetted functional analysis in order to understand their widely divergent properties in design and language arrangement and the way they are shaped by production for and usage in a variety of contexts such as rites de passage (birth, marriage, delivery, burial), healing and in religious ceremonies performed during Ramadhan and at Maulidi festivals.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 950: Collaborative Research Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures
• Applicant Institution: Universität Hamburg
• Project Head: Professor Dr. Roland Kießling