Prosopography is a tool used by historians of many premodern contexts to analyze collective biographical information of well-defined groups of individuals. In a number of sites in Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, prosopography can refer to a genre of collective biographical writings called ṭabaqāt, which consist of compilations of the lives of generations of (usually) Muslim scholars and other religious figures such as Sufi saints. These African prosopographies are among the earliest locally written textual sources for the history of many places, including Walata, Timbuktu, Sokoto, and the Nilotic Sudan. They can be difficult to work with, however, if they are approached as sources for specific biographical details about individuals because of the pietistic and formulaic ways in which scholars are often described. If, on the contrary, they are understood as prosopography — as texts about communities — they can reveal much more about the structure and changing nature of the groups that are their subject.

Focusing on five major works of siyar (compilations of texts gathering together anecdotes and biographies of individuals) produced by Ibadi Muslim scholars in late medieval North Africa (eleventh to fifteenth centuries), Paul M. Love Jr. shows what a prosopographical approach can reveal about the history of Ibadism in North Africa. The Ibadi tradition in North Africa does not include a genre of chronicle-style history (ta'rīkh); instead the siyar played this role, ‘telling the story of the community's past by bringing together anecdotes and biographies of its members from across time and space . . . Through the inclusion or exclusion of individuals, these prosopographies drew the boundaries of the community and constructed an Ibadi tradition in Northern Africa’ (xx). The prosopographical quality of the texts, Love argues, generated conceptions of networked community among readers that supported and sustained a particular sectarian identity down to the present.

The Ibadis today constitute only a small minority in North Africa, concentrated in remote enclaves such as the Mzab Valley in the Algerian Sahara, Jerba Island in southern Tunisia, and the Nafusa Mountains in western Libya. They are Berber speakers who belong to a branch of Islam that is distinct from both the Sunni majority in North Africa and from Shiism. The Idabis’ origins are usually traced to disputes over authority in early Islam and to a sect called the Kharajites that rejected the different dynastic criteria for leadership of the Muslim community that were insisted upon by those who would later be called Shiia and Sunni. Over time, Ibadis developed a distinct theology and a separate jurisprudential tradition from other Muslims, which sometimes led to charges of heresy, although Ibadis claim to be fully within the house of Islam. The North Africa Ibadis (the other main branches of Ibadis are in Oman and along the East African coast) draw a direct connection to the Berber Rustamid Dynasty with its capital at Tahert in central Algeria (749–909). Often identified as among the first Muslims to cross the Sahara to West Africa, the Ibadis were traders and presumably proselytizers of Islam. Yet there is very little trace of their presence or impact in the southern Saharan and West African literary record, which tends to reflect the later influence of Sunni Islam and the Maliki madhhab in Morocco and Egypt. The Ibadis have managed to survive as a relatively small but coherent community, despite repeated episodes of hostility from non-Ibadi political forces and neighboring groups. Survival, Love argues, depended on the ability to constitute a network of scholars who embodied and transmitted Ibadi practices of learning and scholarship through the writing and copying of manuscripts. The prosopographical texts reveal both how that process of survival as a community occurred in the late medieval period and the role that prosopography played in its reproduction.

The book is organized around an analysis of a genre of Ibadi siyar writing that emerged in the eleventh century and ended in the sixteenth century. Separate chapters discuss each of following five texts: Abū Zakarīyāʾ Yaḥyā al-Warjalānī (d. 1078), Kitāb al-sīra wa-akhbār al-aʾimma; unknown compiler (twelfth century), Kitāb siyar al-Wisyānī; Abū ʾl-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. Saʿīd al-Darjīnī (fl. thirteenth century), Kitāb ṭabaqāt mashāyikh al-maghrib; Abū ʾl-Qāsim al-Barrādī (fl. fourteenth century), Kitāb al-jawāhir al-muntaqāt; and Abū ʾl-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. Saʿīd al-Shammākhī (d. 1522), Kitāb al-siyar.

Love undertook the task of extracting data for each scholar mentioned in these texts and using network analysis to map the nodes of connection between them. At least for the earlier texts, there is no chronological organization of entries, so Love's analysis acts to order the data. The nodes of scholarly community that are revealed by Love's method show the density of relationships between figures in the texts, and according to Love, this allows us to see how different authors/compilers defined the post-Rustamid Ibadi community spatially. Because each of these texts build on previous ones within the genre, Love argues that they should be understood as a ‘cumulative and interconnected textual tradition rather than as separate and disparate sources for telling the history of the community’ (11).

Over the course of his analysis of these five texts, Love shows how their purpose changed. The early texts are concerned with defending Ibadi communities from hostile outsiders and with defining boundaries to exclude dissident Ibadi scholars and the Sunni Muslim majority in the region. As Ibadi teachers and scholars (the ʿazzāba) emerged as a discreet group with prescribed status and behavioral codes, the siyar texts reflect a process by which Ibadism became a more institutionalized, well-defined, madhhab-like Islamic school of rules and doctrine. By the fourteenth century, the wider availability of paper — from Italy in particular — increased the number of manuscript books in circulation across Northern Africa. Ibadi scholars participated in this larger circulation of texts, developing new styles and intertextual claims made in later Ibadi prosopographical texts. The later works in the tradition begin to present Ibadism not only to Ibadi readers, but to interested outsiders as well. By the final two texts in the tradition, both al-Barrādī and al-Shammākhī claim the broader early history of Islam for the Ibadis, now represented as an authentically Islamic tradition rooted in Northern Africa. No new works followed in the siyar tradition because by the end of the late medieval period, these Ibadi compilers had succeeded in defining a distinct Ibadi past and connecting it to existing Ibadi communities, embodied in particular practice and doctrine.

Ibadi prosopography shows how historical consciousness can be bound up with the development of a written textual tradition. For sub-Saharan African history, this book provides a method for working with the sorts of textual traditions that we see elsewhere in historically Muslim parts of the continent. Writing about al-Warjalānī's eleventh-century Kitāb al-sīra, the first Ibadi siyar work, Love writes:

Historians can see how tracing the development of a genre of texts over time allows us to approach bigger questions of identity formation. In what is perhaps a final lesson for scholars of sub-Saharan African Muslim literature, Love shows that every extant work of the Ibadi prosopographcial tradition exists only in copies made more recently than the period when these works were composed. The copying of manuscripts is the key practice that reproduces a textual tradition and keeps it alive. While there were a number of hubs for the copying of Ibadi manuscripts, Love focuses on an Ibadi center in Cairo called the Wikālat al-Jāmūs, which was founded in the early seventeenth century to support Ibadi merchants, students, and scholars, and which came to house an important manuscript library. This center was important in the reproduction of the Ibadi prosopographes, and it played a key role in the development of private manuscript libraries in Northern African Ibadi communities such as the Mzab. Before the Egyptian government dissolved the endowments that supported the center and confiscated its property in the 1950s, many of the library's manuscripts were sent to private collections in the Mzab and Jebel Nafusa, where they still reside. Our understanding of manuscript libraries across West Africa would benefit greatly from more focus on the copying and reproduction of manuscripts and the composite tradition of scholarship that constitutes the contents of most private libraries in that region. Love helpfully reminds us that when we neglect to consider reproduction and affiliated processes, we risk misunderstanding what West African Muslim textual traditions really have been.