islamic africa 9 (2018) 107-111 © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/21540993-00901006 brill.com/iafr Islamic Africa Sources and Commentary ∵ Working with African Arabic Script Manuscripts: A Workshop Report Erin Pettigrew New York University, Abu Dhabi erin.pettigrew@nyu.edu The workshop, Working with African Arabic Script Manuscripts, gathered 45 re- searchers, curators, librarians, calligraphers, and linguists together in Evanston, Illinois (usa) for a three-day workshop organized by the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa at Northwestern University, the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at the University of Hamburg, Germany. The coordinating committee was made up of organizers from the U of I ( Mauro Nobili, Laila Hussein Moustafa, and Maimouna Barro), Northwestern ( Rebecca Shereikis and Charles Stewart), and the csms (Dmitry Bondarev). The core meetings took place over August 13–16, 2017 with participants split- ting their days between topical morning lectures, presentations of curator collections mid-day, and hands-on sessions in the late afternoon. Select par- ticipants elected to practice their Arabic calligraphy in the evenings, with a final public lecture on calligraphy coordinated with the American Islamic College of Chicago, il on August 16. Curators then engaged in post-workshop field curation seminar on August 17–18. The morning sessions engaged broad questions of context, categorization, script, and materiality through lectures by experts on these topics. Graziano Krätli (Yale) asked participants to consider “What makes a manu scriptus a manuscript?” by posing questions about whether the category “manuscript” itself is really only defined by having been written by hand. This first lecture reflected openly on whether the content of the manuscript defines its status or if it is rather the importance of context that defines how researchers classify