Popular Levantine Literature. Archive, analyze and tell the Sirat Baybars in the 21st century – LiPoL

The LiPoL research program aims to exploit the potentialities of the edition of the Tale of Baybars (Presses de l'Ifpo, 2000-2020, 18 volumes) in order to give a new impetus to research about popular Levantine literature and about Middle Arabic, its dominant linguistic register.
By relying on "popular culture and its linguistic, artistic and literary expressions" as a structuring theme, LiPoL brings together four French institutional partners, including an Institute for Research Abroad. It aims to create a new dynamic capable of accompanying the disciplinary evolution that Arab and Islamic studies will experience following the deep socio-political changes experienced by the countries of the Middle East since the beginning of 2010.
Organized along four axes, Digital, Language, Society and Aesthetics, it brings together researchers in the different fields of Humanities, so as to study altogether the linguistic, literary, historical and cultural dimensions of the text. The program includes a major digital component: both the critical edition of the Tale and the handwritten notebooks of storytellers on which it relies (about 60 000 folios digitalized up to now) will be made available to the scientific community online in open access. Composed of over ten million characters, the Tell of Baybars is from far the largest Middle Arabic corpus ever published, so that it constitutes a unique object of research in the field of Arabic studies.

By contributing to the safeguarding of an endangered heritage, this digital collection of manuscripts should serve as a basis for a Digital Library of Popular Levantine Literature which will be fed when new handwritten notebooks from the Near East are revealed.
A collaborative work tool - which will be experimented during the first 24 months of the project - will allow researchers to submit translations or comments online, while participating in the editing of these manuscripts.