The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies will sponsor the first academic conference of the Doha Historical Dictionary of Arabic. This first meeting will set out the most significant Arabic works produced over three centuries of the language's early development. To be held at the Regency Hotel in the Tunisian capital, Tunis, the meeting, is titled “Towards a Comprehensive Bibliography of Arabic Epistemology from the Third to the Six Hijri Centuries”, and takes place on November 5 and 6. Participants aim to compile an extensive bibliography of the most important Arabic texts covering those three hundred years. Such a bibliography will form the first plank of the Doha Historical Dictionary’s corpus, which, once completed, will cover the entire span of the Arabic, beginning with the Third Century AD (430 years prior to the Hijra) and up until the present day. Ultimately, an agreed corpus of the Arabic language will allow the project to fulfill its aims of having a thorough, all-inclusive general purpose dictionary for the Arabic language, alongside a series of specialist lexicons for technical terms.

Invited speakers will take part through a series of in-depth seminars and workshops, devoted to compiling bibliographies for select discipline areas: jurisprudence texts; literary, poetic and linguistic texts; and historical, scientific and philosophical texts. The strength of the Doha Historical Dictionary comes from its resident scholars’ breadth of expertise, and the diversity of their backgrounds within the Arab region, a fact which will be reflected at this first meeting.

You can read more about the Doha Historical Dictionary here.