NAIMA AFIF - PhD | Digital Humanities | Intercultural Relations

Article: « Jésus est-il mort volontairement selon le Coran? Une lecture historico-critique de Q 4:156-159 »

17/06/2025 Aucun commentaire

My latest article has been published in the new issue of BABELAO – Electronic Journal for Ancient and Oriental Studies. It is now available through UCLouvain’s open-access journal platform:

N. AFIF, “Jésus est-il mort volontairement selon le Coran? Une lecture historico-critique de Q 4:156-159”, BABELAO 14 (2025), pp. 107-130

In this publication, I discuss new findings related to the Quranic passage on the crucifixion by using a method combining paleography, philology, intertextuality and corpus linguistics (quantitative analysis). As a result, I provide alternative readings that support a new hypothesis about the voluntary death of Jesus in the Quran.

Articles and Contributions

Galen: On Simple Drugs in Syriac Translation. Processed images and digital-born critical edition

02/04/2025 Aucun commentaire

The digital outputs of the AHRC-funded project The Syriac Galen Palimpsest based at the University of Manchester from 2015 to 2020 are now available. Our multidisciplinary team used cutting-edge imaging techniques to recover the erased text from a unique manuscript and restore a valuable witness to the scientific heritage of the Syriac Christian world.

The dataset, which is accessible in Open Access, includes a critical edition of Books 6–9 of Galen’s On Simple Drugs, presented in PDF, RTF, and Mellel formats, along with processed images of the manuscript. Further information on our editorial approach will be published in the forthcoming volume The Syriac Galen Palimpsest: A New Paradigm for Cross-Disciplinary Research (Proceedings of the British Academy), stemming from the project’s international British Academy Conference held in 2019. Consult the files on Figshare.

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Open Access Publication : New Light on Old Manuscripts: Recent Advances in Palimpsest Studies

08/11/2023 Aucun commentaire

book-cover, naima afif, article, publication, author, scientific

New publication: Naima Afif, Peter E. Pormann, William I. Sellers, Natalia Smelova, Siam Bhayro, “GalenQt. A New Software Tool for Recovering Lost Text and its Use for the Reconstruction of the Lacuna in Galen’s Simple Drugs, Book 8”, in C. Rapp, J. Gruskova, G. Kessel, G. Rossetto (eds), New Light on Old Manuscripts: Recent Advances in Palimpsest Studies, Veröffentlichungen zur Byzanzforschung, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna, 2023, p. 441–463.

Conferences and talks

International conference ‘Scriptural Readings and Reasonings’, University of Copenhagen

03/10/2023 Aucun commentaire

Syriac Manuscript Vatican Library Garshuni studied by Naima AFIF

Next week, I will deliver a talk at the conference “Scriptural Readings and Reasonings” at the University of Copenhagen. The event is organised in collaboration with the NYUAD Humanities Research Fellowship for the Study of the Arab World and the EuQu ERC Synergy Project. You can join us on site or online. Read the full program :

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The Online Corpus of the GREgORI Project – New Interface

24/05/2022 Aucun commentaire

As part of my collaboration with the GREgORI Project (which provides scholars with lemmatized corpora in many languages!), I have worked with Bastien Kindt on the lemmatisation and morphological analysis of: Books 1 (ch. 1-10), 6, 7, 8 of the Greek text of Galen’s On Simple Drugs and Discourse 13 (S2 version) of Gregory of Nazianzus in Syriac (+than 1000 pages of outputs).

This large amount of data is now accessible through an online, open-access interface that integrates a concordancer, text browser, and editions viewer.

You can now explore how to use this digital tool here and make use of it.

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Online Congress ‘Humanizing Digitalization. Digitalizing Humanities’

15/10/2021 Aucun commentaire

conference, naima afif, digital humanities, scholar, academia, PhD The Congress ‘Humanizing Digitalization. Digitalizing Humanities’ organised by El Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) in Madrid took place online on the 20 and 21th October 2021. In the first session devoted to text analysis, I explained how to create a multilingual corpus (in Latin, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic) by using the textual analysis software Sketch Engine and how to use this corpus to construct a glossary with Lexonomy an open-source, web-based dictionary writing and publishing system.

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Description (TEI XML encoding) of Syriac manuscripts in collaboration with the John Rylands Library

22/09/2021 Aucun commentaire

naima afif, TEI XML, encoding, digital heritage, library, research, syriac I am very happy to present you the result of my online collaboration with the John Rylands Library in 2020. I have compiled TEI XML descriptions of Syriac manuscripts from the John Rylands Research Institute and Library’s collection.

This material was presented in the exhibition Seeing the Invisible (2019-2020) and is now accessible on the Manchester Digital Collections.

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Publication : Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences

05/01/2020 Aucun commentaire

naima afif, research, publication, Syriac, history of sciences, manuscripts New publication: Naima Afif, Peter E. Pormann, William I. Sellers, Natalia Smelova, Siam Bhayro, « The Syriac Text of Book Nine of On Simple Drugs. New Evidence from the Syriac Galen Palimpsest » in Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences (Galen’s Treatise On Simple Drugs: Interpretation and Transmission), 70/184-185, 2020, pp. 130-149. Access through the publisher’s website.

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Exhibition ‘Seeing the invisible’

29/10/2019 Aucun commentaire

Discover how our research team at the University of Manchester is uncovering the lost heritage of Syriac Christians through the exhibition ‘Seeing the Invisible’.

Curated by Professor Peter Pormann and Dr Natalia Smelova, the exhibition will run from October 2019 to March 2020 at the John Rylands Library and will display the Syriac Galen palimpsest for the first time in the UK.

For more information, see here.

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British Academy Conference ‘Exploring the Syriac Galen Palimpsest’

11/10/2019 Aucun commentaire

The Syriac Galen Palimpsest is an exceptional manuscript containing the Syriac translation of a pharmacological treatise by Galen. Our team at the University of Manchester is organising a two-day conference under the auspices of the British Academy. This conference will gather scientists and humanities scholars who will discuss the methods employed to decipher the palimpsest and the contribution of Eastern Christians in the history of medicine.

More details: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/events/exploring-syriac-galen-palimpsest-ancient-drugs-synchrotron-radiation/

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Publication in Le Muséon

28/12/2018 Aucun commentaire

Our latest paper in now published:

A. Afif, S. Bhayro, P. E. Pormann, W. I. Sellers, N. Smelova, « On Digamma and the Armenian Earth », in Le Muséon, 131 (2018), p. 391-414.

Abstract:

The treatise On the Mixture and Power of Simple Drugs (Περὶ κράσεως καὶ δυνάμεως τῶν ἁπλῶν φαρμάκων) by Galen of Pergamum (129-216) is transmitted in a number of Greek manuscripts, and was translated into Syriac and Arabic. One Greek manuscript, Vatican Urbinas gr. 67, contains a passage from book IX about digamma and ‘Armenian earth’, not transmitted in the majority of Greek manuscripts and not included in the standard Greek edition by Kühn (1826). Galen called ‘Armenian earth’ a mineral that probably was orpiment, although the exact identification remains problematic. We now present a critical edition of the Syriac translation of part of this passage on the basis of the Syriac Galen Palimpsest; discuss the historic use of digamma; and explore the importance of Galen’s attestation of Armenian words.