Book printing in the Age of Imām Yaḥyā Ḥamīd al-Dīn

As part of the politics of modernisation, Imām Yaḥyā’s administration took the first steps to promote the use of print technology, which was gradually supplementing traditional manuscript culture. Technical equipment for printing was very limited in Yemen, as the imamic state disposed of only a few rudimentary printing machines introduced by the Ottomans in the late nineteenth century. Parallel to the emerging small-scale Yemeni publishing, the Imām authorised the printing of Yemeni books in other parts of the Arabic world. At the same time, Western scholars were increasingly accessing Yemeni literature in recently established collections of Yemeni manuscripts across European libraries, as well as while travelling to Yemen, and edited some of the texts they studied. This paper presents a project that attempts to map the prints produced during the first half of the twentieth century (in Yemen under Imām Yaḥyā, other parts of the Arabic world, and by Western scholars) through the development of an interactive visualization tool and the creation of a repository for bibliographical metadata.

Short bio

Jan Thiele is a scholar of Islamicate intellectual history based at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid. He is the author of two books on Muʿtazilī theology among the Zaydī community, Kausalität in her muʿtazilitischen Kosmologie (Brill, 2011) and Theologie in der jemenitischen Zaydiyya (Brill, 2013). In addition to Muʿtazilī theology, his research has focused on Ashʿarī kalām, and more specifically on one of the early school's major figures, Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī, as well as on the dissemination of Ashʿarī doctrines in the Maghreb and al-Andalus. He is the co-editor, along with Ayman Shihadeh, of the volume Philosophical Theology in Islam: Later Ashʿarism East and West (Brill, 2020).