Contemporary Sudanese religious specialists keep loose-leaf extract books similar to Morisco miscellanies

Evidence

Most fugaraa [i.e., ´alfaqu´ıes] keep a small library which consists of a few printed books and an umbatri (“that which mentions everything”). Umbatri is a collection of handwritten papers which form a loose-leaf book held together by a string, and carried around wrapped in a piece of cloth. The writings contain extracts which the fakii copied from printed books, from the handwritten books of other fugaraa, and which he has inherited from his father or some other close kinsman who was a fakii himself. The extracts contain descriptions of religious rituals, different methods of divination, descriptions of the precise content and form of various amulets, the use of Koranic formulae for curing diseases, protecting crops from birds and locusts, bringing on rain and for numerous other benevolent as well as malevolent purposes. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 712

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Sudanese umbatri manuscript genre by its contents and loose-leaf, inherited, string-bound form.
• XREF: Connects to the pattern of sacred text compilation and inheritance seen in other clandestine or peripheral Islamic communities; also echoes the file-card/loose-leaf knowledge practices discussed elsewhere in this reader’s bibliographic work.
• SEED: An essay angle: the umbatri as living evidence that the codex is not the natural form of transmitted sacred knowledge — string-bound loose pages wrapped in cloth persist across centuries and continents, a compelling counter-example to print-era assumptions about books.