April 27th 2017 - The Barakat Trust, a UK Registered Charity that supports the study and preservation of Islamic heritage, architecture, archaeology, art and culture by funding students, academic research, publications, digitisation, conservation, conferences and other projects, has made a generous grant of £8,000 towards the costs of digitising the Arabic documents of Norman and Hohenstaufen Sicily.
The island of Sicily was captured by Arab and Berber troops from North Africa during the mid 9th century and remained under Muslim rule until it was conquered by the Norman De Hauteville brothers in 1060–1092. No administrative and legal documents survive from the period of Islamic rule, but approximately 125 Arabic documents are preserved, almost entirely in ecclesiastical archives, from the period of Christian rule, 1060-1266, and many hundreds of other documents, written in Greek and Latin, record aspects of the everyday life of the Arabic-speaking Muslim community.
The Arabic documents comprise about 10% of all the documents — including Arabic, Greek and Latin, and bilingual documents in Arabic and Greek or Latin; original documents, copies, translations and deperdita (detailed notices of missing documents) — to survive from the 11th to 13th centuries, when Christian rulers governed the island of Sicily, and the majority of the population were Arabic-speaking Muslims and Jews.
The preparatory stage of the Documenting Multiculturalism Project, to be completed before the main project formally begins in October 2018, is to acquire new digtised images of all of the documents from Norman and Hohenstaufen Sicily, so that they may be linked to the DocuMult Database — the basic research tool for the whole project, which will be populated by the new critical editions of the documents.
The project team has already acquired digitised images of the vast majority of the documents. The most important institutions (e.g. Archivio di Stato, Biblioteca Regionale, Archivio Diocesano di Palermo) have already digitised their documents and have generously made them available to the project. But this leaves most of the documents in the ecclesiastical archives of Sicily yet to be digitised.
The grant of £8,000 from the Barakat Trust will enable the project to complete the digitisation of the ecclesiastical archives of Agrigento, Catania, Cefalù, Monreale, Patti and the Cappella Palatina in Palermo. For the first time, all these documents, Arabic, Greek, Judaeo-Arabic and Latin, will then be edited according to modern, scientific criteria and standards, translated into English and Italian, and made freely and fully accessible online, without linguistic or other barriers, to specialist and non-specialists alike.
Over the next six years, they will be used to generate a series of fundamental research tools, which not only will enable Documenting Multiculturalism to achieve its particular objectives, but also will amount to a new and powerful research resource, which will radically transform the future study of all aspects of the history of the Arabic-speaking and Muslim communities of Norman and Hohenstaufen Sicily.
