Muna Abubeker guest professor for ‘African Manuscript Cultures’ at CSMC, University of Hamburg; raises international profile of Harari manuscript studies
‘There were about 20 students, and I was the only woman’ : CSMC : University of Hamburg
‘There were about 20 students, and I was the only woman’
In the 2026 summer semester, Muna Abubeker is guest professor for ‘African Manuscript Cultures’ at the CSMC. In our interview, the Ethiopian Arabic and Ajami manuscript specialist talks about her unconventional route into academia and her plans to raise the international profile of her research field.
Your path into academia was unusual: before you encountered manuscript studies, you taught at, and even co-owned, a private school. How did you end up becoming a researcher?
I had been teaching at all levels, from kindergarten to secondary school, before joining the university. Together with some colleagues, I had started a school that was entirely owned by women, and I was deeply involved in both its administration and teaching. In 2005, however, a new opportunity arose: the department of linguistics at Addis Ababa University launched a philology unit and an associated master’s programme. I was intrigued, but I hesitated to apply. At that time, I already had four small children, my youngest only a few months old. Nevertheless, I decided to give it a try, and I discovered that manuscript studies suited me perfectly. I did very well academically and received strong support from my professors. In fact, when the university later advertised a position, I was encouraged to apply and was eventually hired on the condition that I would also pursue a PhD. During that period, my family grew to six children, so balancing motherhood, academic research, and responsibilities related to the school was very demanding. In the end, I stepped back from the day-to-day work at the school when I joined the university.
You must have found a truly exciting topic that made you decide to switch careers.
When I was part of the first philology cohort at Addis Ababa University, there were about 20 students, and I was the only woman. Even then, I decided that I wanted to work on a manuscript produced by a woman, so I began actively searching for such material. This search led me to the private collection of Abdullahi Sharif, a renowned manuscript collector and museum owner who holds more than 1,400 manuscripts, as well as other artefacts.
In his collection, he showed me a manuscript that he attributed to a female Muslim scholar from the 19th century. At first, my department was sceptical when I proposed a thesis on a manuscript by a woman. The prevailing assumption had long been that premodern manuscripts were written by men. I was asked to provide proof, which was difficult, so I started working on a different topic: gender issues in Harari court documents. In the meantime, however, I kept returning to the manuscript I had initially been interested in. With the advice of my professor, I read it carefully again and eventually found the scribe’s name embedded in the same handwriting as the rest of the text. In the end, my master’s thesis combined both: gender issues in a 19th-century court document, and a study of the female scholar’s manuscript. That was the start of my academic journey.
How did this journey continue? What is your research profile today?
My field is Ethiopian Arabic manuscripts, and within that I work on two broad types of material. On the one hand, there are manuscripts written in the Arabic language, especially by Ethiopian Muslims who wrote extensively in Arabic. On the other hand, there are manuscripts in which Arabic script is used to write various Ethiopian languages,known as Ajami manuscripts. In Ethiopia, around ten languages are written in Ajami, and this belongs to a broader African phenomenon in which Arabic script has been widely used to record non-Arabic languages. My work is therefore situated at the intersection of Arabic-language Islamic scholarship, local African languages, and the material and intellectual histories preserved in these manuscripts.
More specifically, my main research interest is Harari manuscripts. Harar is a region in eastern Ethiopia that has long been a central place for Islamic learning and manuscript production. Historically, it functioned as an independent Islamic state, a Muslim sultanate, until the unification of Ethiopia under Emperor Menelik in the 19th century. The manuscripts from Harar that we have today are mainly from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, although the intellectual and scribal tradition itself is older. My work focuses especially on 19th-century materials, including legal documents and texts associated with local scholars. You could say that Harar plays, for Ethiopia, a role comparable to Timbuktu in Mali as a key Islamic manuscript hub.
Your current project here in Hamburg has a historical focus. You are looking at the development of Ethiopian Arabic and Ajami manuscript studies over the past 100 years.
If we compare Ethiopian Arabic manuscript studies with the study of Geʿez manuscripts — which began as early as the 17th century, largely in connection with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and its liturgical and theological corpus — it is a much more recent field. The early stages of Arabic manuscript research were dominated by European scholars such as Enrico Cerulli in the 1930s and, later, Ewald Wagner, while the broader history of Ethiopian manuscript studies is often associated with Hiob Ludolf, after whom the Ludolf Centre in Hamburg is named.
In more recent decades, a decisive change came with the establishment of the philology unit at Addis Ababa University in 2005. Since its inception, the programme has produced fifty-nine master’s theses and six PhD dissertations on Ethiopian Arabic and Ajami manuscripts, many of them based on local, previously undocumented collections.
What can we learn from these works?
Most of them introduce traditional collections that were previously unknown to the international scholarly community and reconstruct the intellectual profiles of Muslim scholars through interviews and manuscript analysis. Yet they often remain unpublished and are therefore invisible outside Ethiopia, even though they are crucial for understanding the Muslim intellectual history of the region.
I came to Hamburg with the explicit aim of surveying these master’s and PhD works and analysing them in a more systematic way. I am looking at the collections they describe, the kinds of texts they edit, and the methods they use, with particular attention to Ajami, gender questions, and codicology. My aim is to bring together the scattered contributions of these dissertations and to summarise, in a single study, what they collectively reveal about Ethiopian Arabic and Ajami manuscript culture.
Beyond this project, is there something specific you hope to achieve together with colleagues here at the CSMC?
Being here is very inspiring because I am surrounded by researchers who work on a wide range of manuscript cultures. One initiative that particularly caught my attention isDREAMSEA, which focuses on digitising and documenting manuscripts held in private hands. In Ethiopia, a great many Arabic and Ajami manuscripts are still kept within families and passed down from generation to generation. Sometimes they end up with people who neither know their contents nor recognise their broader cultural and historical value. I am therefore exploring the possibility of developing a similar digitisation project for Ethiopian manuscripts and discussing ideas with colleagues here at the centre. The goal would be to design a project that both safeguards these collections and makes them more accessible to research, thereby benefiting Ethiopian manuscript studies and cultural heritage more broadly.
You are also involved in EWNET, the Ethiopian Women Researchers Network. What exactly is your role in it?
Becoming a researcher is not easy for women in Ethiopia, especially when it comes to moving from a bachelor’s degree to a master’s and then on to a PhD. Many women face the expectation that, after completing a BA, they will marry, have children, and concentrate on family life, which makes balancing domestic responsibilities and academic careers particularly challenging. Among other activities, for example, we meet biweekly to write together, share experiences, and support one another in navigating this balance and building academic careers. I think such mutual support is crucial because women understand each other’s constraints and can suggest realistic forms of assistance and encouragement. Given my own path, I have come to see that my life can serve as a model, showing younger colleagues that such a path, while difficult, is possible.
Photo: The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum
Institutions and target groupsEinrichtungenFacultiesFaculty of LawFaculty of Business, Economics and Social SciencesFaculty of MedicineFaculty of EducationFaculty of HumanitiesFaculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Natural SciencesFaculty of Psychology and Human Movement ScienceUniversity of Hamburg Business SchoolServicesStudy Information Net STiNESurfmailExchangeStaff Service PortalLearning PlatformsKatalogplus – Catalogue of Hamburg LibrariesSharePointStudent facilities and servicesCampus CenterCareer CenterPIASTAAStA (student council)University SportsUniversity MusicFamily OfficeUniversity Language CenterGeneral LanguagesOffice of Affairs for Students with Disabilities or Chronic DiseasesDepartmental librariesHealthy CampusFurther facilities and servicesThe Cluster of Excellence CLICCSThe Cluster of Excellence CUIThe Cluster of Excellence Quantum UniverseThe Cluster of Excellence Understanding Written ArtefactsHamburg Research AcademyPier PlusHamburg Center for University Teaching and Learning (HUL)Hub for Crossdisciplinary Learning (HCL)CENMuseums and collectionsUniversity Archives (in German)Regional Computing Center (RRZ)University AdministrationKnowledge Exchange AgencyThe Unikontor Shop (in German)Target groupsProspective studentsStudentsInternational prospective studentsYoung researchersResearchersInstructorsStaffProspective continuing education studentsAlumniJournalistsRefugees (in German only)Close
EinrichtungenFacultiesFaculty of LawFaculty of Business, Economics and Social SciencesFaculty of MedicineFaculty of EducationFaculty of HumanitiesFaculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Natural SciencesFaculty of Psychology and Human Movement ScienceUniversity of Hamburg Business SchoolServicesStudy Information Net STiNESurfmailExchangeStaff Service PortalLearning PlatformsKatalogplus – Catalogue of Hamburg LibrariesSharePointStudent facilities and servicesCampus CenterCareer CenterPIASTAAStA (student council)University SportsUniversity MusicFamily OfficeUniversity Language CenterGeneral LanguagesOffice of Affairs for Students with Disabilities or Chronic DiseasesDepartmental librariesHealthy CampusFurther facilities and servicesThe Cluster of Excellence CLICCSThe Cluster of Excellence CUIThe Cluster of Excellence Quantum UniverseThe Cluster of Excellence Understanding Written ArtefactsHamburg Research AcademyPier PlusHamburg Center for University Teaching and Learning (HUL)Hub for Crossdisciplinary Learning (HCL)CENMuseums and collectionsUniversity Archives (in German)Regional Computing Center (RRZ)University AdministrationKnowledge Exchange AgencyThe Unikontor Shop (in German)
FacultiesFaculty of LawFaculty of Business, Economics and Social SciencesFaculty of MedicineFaculty of EducationFaculty of HumanitiesFaculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Natural SciencesFaculty of Psychology and Human Movement ScienceUniversity of Hamburg Business School
Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences
Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Natural Sciences
Faculty of Psychology and Human Movement Science
University of Hamburg Business School
ServicesStudy Information Net STiNESurfmailExchangeStaff Service PortalLearning PlatformsKatalogplus – Catalogue of