IN MEMORIAM: NORAH M. TITLEY, 1920-2010
Many List-Serve readers will have already read, or heard, that another of our elder colleagues and friends, Norah Titley, passed away quite peacefully, on March 21 of this year, her 90th; this was in Worthing Hospital, near Littlehampton in West Sussex, where she had had retired in 1983.
Norah joined the library of the British Museum in 1950, in which department, as its Persian specialist, many of her professional and personal friends will always remember her. When she left its service, the Library was well on its way to the new, dedicated, but separate building to which we now wend OUR way, deeply missing both Norah's gracious welcome and the Oriental Reading Room on Great Russell Street.
Industrious to the end of her life, her written contributions to the field, as articles announcing new BL acquisitions, handbooks, translations, and more, are numerous. None, however, can have been of more use to so many of us as the pair of catalogues listing the subjects of all the illustrations in the Persian, Indian, and Turkish manuscripts and albums, and the detached paintings or intentionally single pages, in both the British Library and what used to be called the Department of Oriental Antiquities in the British Museum. The thick volume on the Persian manuscripts was published in 1977, and the thinner Turkish volume in 1981. It is a salutary corrective, in this electronic age, to reflect that they had been assembled on hand-written cards, as an index she began to compile "...for the purpose of answering the numerous enquiries received concerning many aspects of the subjects in the collections...". Increasing quantities of cards were kept in shoe-boxes, sometimes stored on the stone steps leading up to her ofice above the
Reading Room; those of us invited up for tea would carefully step over this accumulation of hand-indexing, marvelling at the thoroughness and the marshalled energy for the task she had set herself. The special value of these two volumes resides in her extraordinarily useful indices: authors, titles of works, styles and artists, subjects, and a numerical running-list of manuscripts, in the Persian volume; the Turkish volume also includes additional indices for Ottoman costumes and emblems, ranks and occupations, and musical instruments. Veritable Bibles and endlessly worth consulting, mine bristle with external markers and might well be the volumes I would clutch for safekeeping in the event of a disaster; I can think of little that supercedes them.
A note written little more than a week before she died displays, intact, her twinkling directness of speech and her humor, as well as the firm hand of those many index-cards! In it she laments that she would not be able to continue the translation on which she had been engaged; she also declares her undying preference for illustrated works of the Persian 15th century. We shared this love, and it mitigates somewhat the fact that our communication on this subject will, henceforth, travel in a single direction only.
Eleanor Sims
Michelle Rein
Dear Colleagues,
It is with great sadness that I wish to share with you the news that our colleague and friend,
Rebuilding of Banja Luka’s Ferhadija mosque in Bosnia
Jeb Sharp's report on the rebuilding of Banja Luka's Ferhadija mosque aired on Thursday on the WGBH/BBC radio magazine program "The World". You can find a transcript, hear the program, and see photos and links at:
Please find an updated report on the Iowa floods. The Register reported on the flooding and the state of the mosque yesterday, after both the imam and reporters were allowed free access:
The saddest thing to me is the loss of the oral histories. As a former Iowan, I treasure the state's historic diversity, which gets forgotten when the "archival evidence" is lost.
Also, as a former Iowan, I support the National Guard's reluctance to let the imam (or any resident/business owner) into a building before it has been inspected for safety. I have lived through two major Iowa floods, and have seen many intelligent people behave foolishly when dealing with rising or receding floodwaters.
Cordially,
Andrea Stanton
Visiting Assistant Professor
History & Archeology
American University of Beirut
andrea.stanton@aub.edu.lb
