Department of History and Cultural Studies

For its 100th anniversary, the Deutsche Orientalistentag (DOT) is being held at the Freie Universität Berlin. From 12th to 17th September 2022, researchers and students share their ideas and findings in 24 thematic sections. Beatrice Gruendler, head of Arabic Studies and AnonymClassic PI, is part of the organizing committee at this 34th edition of the DOT. She and her team are hosting two thematic panels to showcase ongoing project work: "The Multiple Journeys of the Book of Kalīla wa-Dimna," and "Digital Workflows at Multiple Levels: Insights from the AnonymClassic Project."

The AnonymClassic Preview Edition is based on the work by the AnonymClassic team of collecting text witnesses, transcribing, translating, and segmenting the Kalīla and Dimna manuscript data. This Preview Edition serves as a prototype for the project’s Digital Edition of Kalīla and Dimna.

The AnonymClassic project first launched its bibliographical database in Zotero in 2019. By now, the directory comprises over 800 bibliographical entries on topics related to Kalīla and Dimna, 142 of which are Arabic manuscripts alone. It is a work in progress, and will grow over time. The database is the most comprehensive reference collection on the subject and is available in open access.

Persian is one of the key languages in the global textual tradition of Kalīla and Dimna. This is true whether we mean Middle Persian (also known as Pahlavi) or New Persian (which we call simply Persian). According to the traditional origin story of Kalīla and Dimna, the book began its life in Sanskrit; was brought to Iran and translated/adapted into Middle Persian in the Sasanian period; and was, from that basis, translated into Syriac and Arabic—the latter at the hands of Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ (d. ca. 757 CE), an ethnic Persian secretary at the Umayyad and Abbasid courts. All subsequent versions derive from the Arabic.

A frame narrative is more than an elegant narrative form. For the act of narrative framing is a means to present and contextualize human oral and written communication. Middle Eastern frame narratives have often served both as models for other literary projects – premodern and modern – and as a point of departure for analytical concepts in literary theory. Through a transdisciplinary reading group, a series of events on the topic together with the EXC 2020 Temporal Communities at FU Berlin and international colleagues, AnonymClassic researchers recontextualize The Book of Kalīla wa-Dimna within the traditions of frame narratives and world literature.

The research colloquium of the "Kalīla and Dimna – AnonymClassic" project is part of the module "Research Perspectives" of "Interdisciplinary Studies of the Middle East", a two-year, full-time master’s program taught in English.

In medieval worlds • no. 11 • 2020, Beatrice Gruendler, Jan J. van Ginkel, Rima Redwan, Khouloud Khalfallah, Isabel Toral, Johannes Stephan, Matthew L. Keegan, Theodore S. Beers, Mahmoud Kozae, and Marwa M. Ahmed discuss various aspects of their work on the textual tradition Kalīla and Dimna. The paper is based, in large part, on a joint presentation given by the AnonymClassic team at the conference Berlin ediert!, held at the Freie Universität Berlin on April 26-28, 2019.

The AnonymClassic project under direction of Prof. Dr. Beatrice Gruendler discusses the project’s findings in an online series in July 2020, hosted by Columbia Global Centers Amman.

AnonymClassic takes scholarly communication and disemmination of research progress seriously. Therefore, one of our fellows has taken on the task to maintain the Twitter account and website of the project in order to give a clear and up-to-date idea of our research activities not only to fellow researchers but also to the interested public.

Medieval Arabic literature (adab) is full of animals. The most famous example is Kalila wa-Dimna, a collection of stories about talking animals and humans. This text is usually described as "fables" or as a Mirror for Princes (Fürstenspiegel). However, the rich diversity of animal stories beyond Kalila wa-Dimna and the role these animal stories play in the broader adab tradition are not well understood.

The graphic of the project logo "AnonymClassic" is set in type "B Esfehan Bold", a modern adaptation of the Arabic Kufi script. It combines the Arabic initials of "Kalila and Dimna" (Kāf and Dāl). Both symbols, in the style of Arabic calligraphy, are combined to form a compact shape that is simultaneously open at the top and left.

Who was the author or the authors of Kalila and Dimna? The question of authorship is indeed an intriguing one. Kalīla and Dimna, it is true, belongs to a broad group of translations from Sanskrit (via Middle Persian) to Arabic of works that had been transmitted orally over centuries and have no known authors.

When he adapted the Middle Persian version of Kalīla and Dimna, at a time when the book was a newly introduced data carrier in Arabic-Islamic culture, Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. 757) found it necessary to accompany this with a preface to explain what a book was for, and this book in particular. According to Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, reading was a serious endeavor, and to be done mindfully, even though he envisaged different ways of reading by different audiences.

The manuscript Rabat MM 3655 is one of many treasures of the Royal Library of Morocco. It has been dated by Bernard O'Kane (Early Persian Painting, London 2013) to the second part of the thirteenth century (between 1265 and 1280), which makes it one of the oldest codices of Kalīla and Dimna.

Illustrations are an essential element in the textual history of Kalīla and Dimna; they do not only increase the material value of manuscripts, but also provide an important source of information for their date and place of production and their relation to other manuscripts.

Kalīla and Dimna was not only widely copied in the pre-modern period. It was also adapted and reconceived by dozens of other authors. The rich and diverse tradition of writing about talking animals beyond Kalīla and Dimna is not well known, but these adaptations informed how readers and copyists thought about Kalīla and Dimna. The May 2019 workshop, entitled "Animals, Adab, and the Abbasid Fictive Tradition," seeks to bring together leading scholars of animal writing in the Adab tradition to further explore this tradition of writing.

When Kalila wa Dimna was read, copied, translated and rewritten in more than 40 languages, the structure and content underwent significant transformations, since it had to be transferred into very diverse linguistic, cultural and religious contexts. To approach these complexities adequately, AnonymClassic views translation as an active process of acculturation and adaptation, i.e. as cultural translation.

AnonymClassic understands the variations in Kalīla and Dimna as being part of its textual history. Its multiple and diverse versions make Kalīla and Dimna an oscillating text that calls for a redefinition of the notion of “copyist” in Arabic literary culture.

Marginal notes, a common ingredient of Arabic manuscripts, are not frequent in the circa 100 manuscripts of Kalila wa-Dimna so far identified.

Short citations of Kalīla and Dimna have been identified in thirty classical works. The 9th-century century History (Ta’rikh) by Ya’qubi (d. 897), even provides an entire table of contents with a brief summary and the didactic purpose of each chapter and constitutes an early witness for the shape of the book as a whole.

AnonymClassic will challenge the prevalent Western theoretical lens on world literature conceived ‘from above’ confronting it with the view ‘from below,’ based on the attested cross-cultural network constituted by the many versions of this text that circulated beyond religious, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. AnonymClassic will thus introduce a new paradigm of an East-Western literary continuum with Arabic as a cultural bridge.

Using LERA, instances of chapters from multiple manuscripts can be collated for close reading and comparison. Furthermore, selectable filters can be used for automatic detection of text variations some of which can be adjusted as in the shown example from the chapter “The Ascetic and His Guest,” in which words receive unique colorings if exclusively shared between exactly two manuscripts.

We know of a Syriac-Aramaic translation/redaction of the lost Middle Persian copy, and there is a Syriac-Aramaic version of a rather early Arabic text variant. Comparative analysis will lead to an insight into tradition and early stages of the book.

Kalīla and Dimna was a paradigmatic work of Classical Arabic belles-lettres. To understand this text's reception, we must understand how readers theorized fictive writing and how they situated this text vis-à-vis other kinds of fictive writing.