{"id":477,"date":"2025-07-14T09:03:54","date_gmt":"2025-07-14T09:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/inplainsight\/?page_id=477"},"modified":"2025-07-14T10:09:24","modified_gmt":"2025-07-14T10:09:24","slug":"non-european-religious-texts-transformed-in-use","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/inplainsight\/non-european-religious-texts-transformed-in-use\/","title":{"rendered":"Non-European Religious Texts Transformed in Use"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Ornament for a horse with Islamic amuletic texts (MAA acc. no. Z 25823), collected from the Hausa in northern Nigeria in the early 20th<\/sup> century. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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This complicated ornament exhibits one strategy for making and shaping religious texts that are not necessarily intended for reading or viewing but rather \u2013 in this example \u2013 for protecting a horse and its owner by wearing it on the body. Collected in northern Nigerian in the early twentieth century, it has three bundles of text, hand-written in ink on paper and covered in goat leather with a small metal repouss\u00e9 case and locally dyed cotton cords and tassels. The texts themselves are a combination of words, diagrams and names created by different scribes or marabouts<\/em>, itinerant Islamic ritual specialists still found in West Africa. As part of the HiPS project, the complex materiality, function, ciruclation and dynamic significance of non-European textual objects like this are being investigated in both the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and amongst the lived experiences of practitioners and their descendants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more about West African leather and its relationship to the production or circulation of texts, see the UL Special Collections blog, Finding \u2018niger morocco\u2019 on a map: A conservation study day on West African leather in Cambridge<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Tibetan text on khata<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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This complicated ornament exhibits one strategy for making and shaping religious texts that are not necessarily intended for reading or viewing but rather \u2013 in this example \u2013 for protecting a horse and its owner by wearing it on the body. Collected in northern Nigerian in the early twentieth century, it has three bundles of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":340,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-477","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/inplainsight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/inplainsight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/inplainsight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/inplainsight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/340"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/inplainsight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/inplainsight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":487,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/inplainsight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/477\/revisions\/487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/inplainsight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}