The MELA Book Award Committee (BAC) is charged by the MELA Executive Board (EB) to choose one or more outstanding work(s) related to Middle East studies librarianship, the history of Middle East libraries/scholarship, or other topics congruent with the mission of MELA. The Committee has considered publications from the last three copyright years (2018-2021). The Committee received eighteen nominations of books published in North America, Europe, and the Middle East.
The MELA Book Award Committee has decided to award the first MELA Book Award to two publications:
Zeina Maasri’s Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) tells the transnational history of Arab modernism through an exploration of Beirut’s vibrant print culture. In this study, Maasri examines a diverse array of materials, including tourism advertising campaigns, art books, literary journals, revolutionary art, and children’s books. Maasri’s book compellingly argues that any history of the Cold War in the Arab world and of the period’s radical politics calls not only for close readings and discursive analysis but also for a renewed focus on how texts’ aesthetics and materiality animated this period.
Samar ʻAlī Ṣāliḥ al-ʻArāsī’s Tajlīd al-kitāb al-makhṭūṭ fī al-Yaman fī al-fatrah min al-qarn al-ḥādī ʻashar ilá al-qarn al-thālith ʻashar al-Hijrī : dirāsah fannīyah atharīyah fī ḍawʼ majmūʻat Dār al-Makhṭūṭāt bi-Ṣanʻāʼ (Dimashq: Nūr Ḥūrān lil-Dirāsāt wa-al-Nashr wa-al-Turāth, 2020) examines the the technical and decorative elements of Islamic bookbinding, using manuscripts from the Sana’a House of Manuscripts in Yemen. The book highlights specimens from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries AH, and covers topics such as materials used, binding techniques, as well as different kinds of geometric, botanical, and calligraphic motifs.
In addition to the winners, the Committee decided to make three honorary mentions:
Iran and the Deccan: Persianate Art, Culture, and Talent in Circulation, 1400–1700, ed. Keelan Overton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020) explores the circulation of art, culture, and talent between Iran and the Deccan over a three-hundred-year period. Its interdisciplinary contributions consider the factors that prompted migration, the physical and intellectual poles of connectivity between the two regions, and processes of adaptation and response. Placing the Deccan at the center of Indo-Persian and early modern global history, Iran and the Deccan reveals how mobility, liminality, and cultural translation nuance the traditional methods and boundaries of the humanities. This edited volume presents a documented and meticulous analysis of materials that traveled between Iran and the Deccan. This kind of analysis is truly rare in Persianate studies, and this book will be a great model for future research in this field.
İsmail E. Erünsal’s A History of Ottoman Libraries (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2022) provides a unique look into the libraries of the Ottoman world. The book is notable for its focus both on the institutional histories of libraries and the endowments that allowed for their foundation, as well as its emphasis on the everyday operations and work of librarians. Drawing on important archival sources, the text is in many ways the first of its kind and is an important resource for scholars and practitioners in the field alike.
Olly Akkerman’s A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books: Arabic Manuscripts among the Alawi Bohras of South Asia (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) is an examination of one khizanat al-kutub, or treasury of books, which journeyed from Fatimid Cairo to Yemen and later to Gujarat over the course of several centuries. Using extensive archival and ethnographic fieldwork, Akkerman not only traces the temporal and geographic distribution of Isma’ili Arabic manuscripts, but also elucidates the social life of the khizana within the Isma’ili Bohra community. The book provides a wonderful new perspective in the field of manuscript studies, and it is available via open access from Edinburgh University Press.
MELA Book Award Committee 2022:
- Rustin Zarkar (University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill)
- Ryan Zohar (Georgetown University)
- Farshad Sonboldel (University of California – Santa Barbara)