Судан и Большой Ближний Восток

296 III. Судан и его соседи for its rich collection of Westernmanuscripts, such as the famous Book of Kells. The Islamic manuscripts in the Trinity College library have attracted less attention, although they certainly deserve it. Most of them were described in Abbott’s catalogue 1 . However, the majority of the manuscripts brought from Sub-Saharan Africa had not yet been acquired by that time and thus remained unknown to the scholars. The situation changed in 1968, thanks to the interest of JanKnappert, who was looking for an early Swahili manuscript. Jan Knappert left a detailed description of his visit to Trinity College in 1968: I had to wait fourteen years before the opportunity came. It was when the then Chairman of the British Association of Orientalists suggested that the Association's annual meeting should be held in Dublin in 1968. On the morning of the 27th of March, I visited Mr William O’Sullivan, Curator of the Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, and requested him to show me every manuscript in Arabic script he could find. There appeared to be at least four manuscripts in Hausa, two of them signed ‘Uthman b. Fodio 2 . Later on, West African manuscripts were also studied by Brad Martin, who specialized in the history of West African Islamic brotherhoods ( turuq ) such as Tijānīya. After Knappert and Martin, short descriptions of these manuscripts were inserted in the library catalogue andmade accessible on-line. Thus, the author of the present article has had more opportunity to study the manuscripts in detail, “standing on the giants’ shoulders”. The history of my own interest in the Dublin manuscripts took as much time as that of Jan Knappert to materialize, starting with a copy of a multilingual Caribbean work in Arabic script (TCDMS 2683) seen in the Africana library of Northwestern University, Evanston, in 1998. 1 Abbott T. K. Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin. Dublin; London: Hodges, Figgis & Co.; Longmans, Green & Co., 1900. 2 Knappert J. The Discovery of a Lost Swahili Manuscript from the Eighteenth Century // African Language Studies. Vol. 10. P. 1. 1969.