Abstract
The paper seeks to address the historical logics of circum/grand-Saharan textual practices and the values attributed to amassing collections of manuscripts. If, as Judith Scheele (2012) has argued, Saharan commercial capital was invested in nodal points of exchange, both in creating irrigated gardens and sites of Islamic religious authority, then we should expect to find libraries at these points of Saharan interaction and integration, and they should tell us something about this larger history. The paper seeks to identify and analyze Saharan centers of scholarly production and networks of textual exchange across the region since the16th century, as part of a wider history of human and capital circulation in the desert. It uses both the accounts of Saharan scholars and the contents of libraries as evidence of the overarching history of this intellectual world, but also as a way of distinguishing temporal and regional differences.
