College visit to Cairo Genizah Collections at Cambridge University Library

Students from both the Diploma in Contextual Islamic Studies and Leadership and BA in Islamic Studies programmes shared the unique opportunity to visit the Cairo Genizah Collections held at Cambridge University Library. The visit was organised by Senior Research Fellow at the College, Professor Claire Gallien, in collaboration with Dr Ben Outhwaite, head curator of the Geniza Collection at Cambridge.

Dr Outhwaite took the students on a fascinating tour of the collection, selecting manuscripts related to Islamic knowledge and interfaith relations between Jews and Muslims. Students learned about the amazing story behind the establishment of the collection itself, in Victorian England, its rediscovery in the 1960s, and its current digitising and cataloguing projects. They leaned about Medieval Fatimid Cairo and what it meant to live in interfaith spaces.

 

Dr Outhwaite also kindly accepted Professor Claire Gallien’s request that the students view MS Add 1125: Fragments of a Hijazi Qurʼān written in the second century A.H. /eighth century A.D., containing verses from the Sura al-Anfal, alongside the only extant copy of al-Māturīdī’s Kitāb al-tawḥīd in the world held at Cambridge Library.

For more information on the Cairo Geniza collection, visit the Cambridge University Library webpage.