Clément Salah

College affiliation: The Queen’s College

Email address: clement.salah@queens.ox.ac.uk

Research interests: Islamic manuscript culture; Arabic codicology and palaeography; Social, legal and material history of the Islamic world; Premodern North Africa (esp. Tunisia/Kairouan)

Biography: I am Junior Research Fellow in Manuscript and Text Cultures at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford. Originally form France, I studied Arabic and History at the Sorbonne before completing a joint PhD between Sorbonne University and the University of Lausanne in 2025. My doctoral research examined Islamic law in medieval Tunisia (Ifrīqiya), focusing on how Mālikī legal thought developed through early manuscript traditions in Kairouan. More broadly, I am interested in Islamic manuscript culture and intellectual history, especially the social, legal, and material history of premodern North Africa. 

Research Project: My current project, The Manuscripts of Kairouan: Material Culture of Early Muslim Scholars, investigates the book culture of premodern North Africa (9th-11th centuries). I approach manuscripts not only as textual witnesses but also as historical artefacts, combining codicology, palaeography, and comparative manuscript studies. I aim to reassess the place of North African book culture within broader Mediterranean manuscript traditions, with a particular focus on scribal practices, materiality, and the scholarly use of books. By integrating the study of physical features, scripts, and paratexts, I seek to reconstruct the ways in which texts were produced, circulated, and transmitted. My broader goal is to show how the material foundations of scholarship shaped the development of Islamic intellectual traditions in the medieval Maghreb.