Chapter 15: Keeper Testimonies

This chapter is part of the book The Sacred Editors: Lost Texts.

"I am not a scholar. I just remember what they told me not to forget."
—Yazidi elder, Khanke refugee camp, Iraq

The fluorescent light flickered in the community center in Khanke, northern Iraq, as seventy-three-year-old Taalo Shamo Kesto closed his eyes and began to sing. His voice, weathered by age and trauma, carried the ancient Yazidi hymn known as "Qewlê Zebûnî Meksûr"—the Song of the Broken-Hearted. Around him, displaced families from Sinjar paused their conversations to listen. Some wept quietly.¹

Three years earlier, ISIS had systematically murdered Yazidi religious leaders, targeting the qewwals and pirs who carried centuries of oral scripture in their memories. The Islamic State understood what scholars of oral tradition have long recognized: to kill the carriers is to kill the tradition itself.² Now, in this cramped refugee camp, Taalo represented one of perhaps a dozen surviving keepers of complete Yazidi liturgical cycles—an oral library that had never been written down, never been translated, never been preserved outside the minds of practitioners.

After finishing the hymn, Taalo reached for a battered smartphone donated by a relief organization. "My grandfather would be angry," he said, carefully recording his voice. "But better angry than silent forever."³ His words capture a tension faced by religious communities worldwide: when survival requires abandoning traditional protocols, how does one preserve both text and tradition?

Sacred texts do not preserve themselves. They endure because someone copies them, someone hides them, someone carries them in memory across generations, across borders, across war. This chapter examines the lived experiences of contemporary keepers—the often invisible individuals whose daily choices determine which religious traditions survive into the future and which vanish into silence.

The Mandaean Scribe: Memory in Exile

Sheikh Saad Mubaraki's apartment in Auburn, a suburb of Sydney, bears little resemblance to the riverside temples where his ancestors performed Mandaean baptisms along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Yet each morning, he transforms his small dining room into a mandi—a sacred space—covering the table with white linen and arranging his scribal tools with ritual precision.⁴

As one of fewer than five remaining hereditary scribes (tarmidas) capable of copying the complete Mandaean liturgy, Sheikh Saad carries extraordinary responsibility. The Mandaeans, sometimes called the "Christians of Saint John," represent one of the world's oldest Gnostic communities, tracing their origins to first-century Palestine.⁵ Their scriptures, written in Mandaic Aramaic, include the Ginza Rba (the "Great Treasure") and the Qolasta (the "Collection"), texts that survived centuries of persecution in Iraq but nearly disappeared during the sectarian violence following the 2003 invasion.

Sheikh Saad's preservation method blends ancient and contemporary techniques. He hand-copies each manuscript using traditional reed pens and ink mixed according to hereditary formulas passed down through his family for twelve generations. As he writes, he recites each line aloud, maintaining the oral transmission that Mandaean tradition considers essential for preserving the texts' spiritual potency. Upon completing each page, he photographs it with a high-resolution scanner and uploads the images to encrypted cloud storage maintained by Mandaean communities in Sweden, the United States, and Australia.⁶

"We are racing against forgetting," Sheikh Saad explains, his fingers permanently stained with the blue-black ink of traditional Mandaic script. "In Iraq, we had libraries, teachers, students. Here, I am often the only one who remembers certain prayers. If I write them and someone someday finds them, we are not dead."⁷

The challenges Sheikh Saad faces illustrate broader issues affecting minority religious communities in diaspora. Traditional Mandaean law requires that certain rituals be performed near flowing water, preferably the Tigris or Euphrates rivers. Exile has forced adaptations that older generations view with suspicion: plastic pools substituted for rivers, recorded chants replacing live liturgies, digitized texts supplanting handwritten scrolls.⁸ Yet these innovations may represent the tradition's only hope for survival as the Mandaean population worldwide has declined from approximately 60,000 in 2003 to fewer than 5,000 today.⁹

Indigenous Orality and Digital Protocols

Elder Mary Djarrkar of the Yolŋu people walks slowly along a dry riverbed in Arnhem Land, northern Australia, her voice rising and falling with the contours of the landscape. She sings in Yolŋu Matha, pointing to rock formations, water holes, and animal tracks as she moves. Her grandchildren follow, some taking notes on smartphones, others simply listening to the complex interweaving of story, law, and geography that constitutes their heritage.¹⁰

These performances represent songlines—oral maps that encode thousands of years of Aboriginal knowledge about land management, social relationships, and spiritual cosmology. As anthropologist Bruce Chatwin observed, songlines function simultaneously as navigation systems, legal codes, historical chronicles, and religious texts.¹¹ For Yolŋu communities, they represent what might be called "scripture without text"—sacred knowledge transmitted through performance rather than writing.

Elder Mary faces a dilemma increasingly common among Indigenous communities worldwide: whether to digitally record oral traditions that were never intended for preservation outside their ritual contexts. Some community members advocate for comprehensive digital archiving, arguing that language loss and cultural disruption threaten traditional transmission methods. Others worry that recording will decontextualize sacred knowledge, making it accessible to inappropriate audiences or stripping it of the ceremonial power that derives from live performance.¹²

The compromise Elder Mary has developed reflects sophisticated thinking about digital sovereignty—the right of Indigenous communities to control how their cultural materials are collected, stored, and accessed. Certain songlines are filmed only when performed in their proper geographical locations, with GPS coordinates logged to maintain the connection between narrative and place. Access to these recordings is restricted through technological protocols that require multiple approvals from designated Yolŋu authorities. Most significantly, the recordings supplement rather than replace traditional transmission methods: young people still learn by walking the paths with elders, absorbing the knowledge through embodied experience rather than digital playback.¹³

"We are not just saving words," Elder Mary explains. "We are saving responsibility—the obligation to care for country, for law, for each other. A recording can preserve the sound, but only a person can carry the weight."¹⁴

This approach aligns with broader Indigenous movements for cultural repatriation and data sovereignty. The First Nations Information Governance Centre in Canada has developed guidelines for Indigenous data ownership that emphasize community control over collection, storage, and use of cultural materials.¹⁵ Similar protocols exist among Māori communities in New Zealand, Sámi groups in Scandinavia, and Native American tribes throughout the United States, all seeking to ensure that digital preservation serves Indigenous self-determination rather than external research agendas.

Women's Religious Memory Work

In a small Jain temple library in Palitana, Gujarat, retired schoolteacher Asha Mehta carefully unwraps palm-leaf manuscripts that have been stored in wooden boxes for over a century. Unlike the more famous Jain libraries in major cities, this collection contains primarily local materials: prayer books compiled by village sadhvis (female ascetics), medical treatises written by Jain physicians, and devotional poetry composed by women who were often illiterate but whose oral compositions were transcribed by family members.¹⁶

Asha's work exemplifies what feminist historian Gerda Lerner calls "compensatory women's history"—the effort to recover female voices and experiences that have been marginalized in traditional historical accounts.¹⁷ Her preservation project focuses specifically on texts authored by or attributed to women, recognizing that conventional manuscript preservation tends to prioritize works by male religious authorities while neglecting the spiritual and intellectual contributions of female practitioners.

Each day, Asha digitizes fifteen to twenty palm leaves, creating high-resolution images and typing transcriptions in modern Gujarati script. She annotates each text with information about its probable author, historical context, and theological significance, drawing on oral histories collected from elderly women in surrounding villages. This metadata proves crucial for future researchers, as many of the manuscripts lack traditional colophons identifying their creators or composition dates.¹⁸

When asked how she prioritizes among hundreds of deteriorating manuscripts, Asha responds with characteristic precision: "The ones that risk being lost first—I scan them first. The famous texts will find other preservers. But who else will save the lullabies that taught children about ahimsa (non-violence)? Who will preserve the songs that women sang while preparing food for pilgrims?"¹⁹

Asha's approach reflects broader feminist scholarship on religion that emphasizes the importance of recovering women's spiritual practices and theological insights. Scholars like Rita Gross, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Amina Wadud have demonstrated how attention to women's religious experiences reveals dimensions of faith traditions that remain invisible when historical analysis focuses exclusively on male religious authorities.²⁰ In the Jain context, Asha's work has uncovered evidence of sophisticated theological reflection among female practitioners who developed their own interpretations of core doctrines like karma, liberation, and the nature of the soul.

The challenges Asha faces illuminate broader issues in religious preservation. Her project receives no institutional funding and depends entirely on volunteer labor, reflecting the low priority often assigned to women's religious heritage. The manuscripts she works with are frequently in worse condition than those preserved in major libraries, having been stored in private homes rather than climate-controlled repositories. Most significantly, many of the texts she preserves exist in languages and dialects that are rapidly disappearing, requiring urgent documentation before the knowledge needed to translate them is lost.²¹

African Traditional Manuscript Traditions

In Timbuktu, Mali, librarian Abdel Kader Haidara stands amid the charred remains of what was once the Ahmed Baba Institute, one of Africa's most important manuscript libraries. In 2013, retreating jihadist fighters set fire to the building, destroying an estimated 4,000 ancient texts on Islamic law, astronomy, medicine, and philosophy. But hidden in the basement, protected by concrete and sand, thousands of additional manuscripts survived—testimony to preservation strategies developed over centuries by West African Muslim scholars.²²

The manuscripts of Timbuktu represent one of Africa's most significant literary heritages, challenging Western assumptions about African literacy and intellectual achievement. These texts, written in Arabic and local languages using Arabic script, document a sophisticated scholarly tradition that flourished in the medieval period when Timbuktu served as a major center of Islamic learning.²³ The collection includes not only traditional Islamic texts but also local works on everything from conflict resolution to veterinary medicine, revealing the creative adaptation of Islamic knowledge to African contexts.

Haidara's family has served as manuscript custodians for over eight hundred years, developing preservation techniques adapted to the challenging Saharan environment. Traditional methods include wrapping texts in specially treated leather, storing them in wooden boxes designed to regulate humidity, and copying deteriorating manuscripts by hand using ink formulas that resist fading in intense sunlight.²⁴ These techniques proved more effective than modern preservation methods during the 2012 occupation, when air conditioning systems failed but traditional storage containers protected their contents.

The threat to Timbuktu's manuscripts galvanized international preservation efforts, but also highlighted tensions between local custodial traditions and global conservation standards. International preservation organizations advocated for digitization and climate-controlled storage, while local scholars emphasized the importance of maintaining traditional preservation knowledge and keeping manuscripts within their communities of origin.²⁵ The compromise that emerged involved training local preservationists in both traditional and contemporary techniques, ensuring that ancient knowledge complemented rather than replaced modern conservation methods.

Haidara's experience illustrates broader challenges facing African manuscript traditions. Political instability threatens collections across the Sahel region, while poverty limits communities' ability to maintain traditional preservation practices. Climate change is altering temperature and humidity patterns in ways that stress both manuscripts and the storage systems designed to protect them. Perhaps most significantly, urbanization and education policies that privilege European languages threaten the transmission of Arabic literacy skills needed to read and copy traditional texts.²⁶

Contemporary Challenges and Ethical Frameworks

These keeper testimonies reveal common patterns that transcend particular religious traditions. First, contemporary preservation increasingly depends on individuals rather than institutions, as wars, economic pressures, and social changes disrupt traditional preservation systems. Second, preservation work often falls to people who are simultaneously insiders and outsiders to religious communities—diaspora members, women in patriarchal traditions, young people adapting ancient practices to contemporary technologies. Third, preservation decisions increasingly involve ethical dilemmas about consent, access, and cultural sovereignty that have no clear resolution.

The experiences of these keepers also illuminate the emotional dimensions of preservation work that are rarely addressed in scholarly literature. Archival studies scholar Michelle Caswell writes about "the affective power of archives"—the ways that preservation work becomes bound up with personal and community identity, trauma recovery, and cultural survival.²⁷ For Sheikh Saad, digitizing Mandaean manuscripts represents not just technical preservation but a form of spiritual resistance against cultural extinction. For Elder Mary, recording songlines involves negotiating between respect for ancestral protocols and responsibility for future generations. For Asha, preserving women's texts becomes an act of feminist reclamation that challenges patriarchal assumptions about religious authority.

These emotional investments in preservation work create both opportunities and vulnerabilities. Passion and personal commitment enable preservation efforts that would otherwise lack institutional support, but they also mean that preservation often depends on individuals whose aging, illness, or death can end projects abruptly. The informality of many preservation efforts—kept alive through personal networks rather than institutional structures—makes them resilient to political and economic disruption but also invisible to potential supporters and successors.

Technology, Tradition, and Cultural Sovereignty

The testimonies presented in this chapter also reveal how digital technologies are reshaping preservation practices in ways that both enable and constrain community agency. On one hand, smartphones, scanners, and cloud storage make preservation possible for communities that lack access to traditional institutional resources. Yazidi refugees can record oral traditions in camps where no libraries exist. Mandaean exiles can maintain liturgical knowledge across global diaspora networks. Indigenous communities can control access to sacred knowledge through technological protocols that respect traditional restrictions.

On the other hand, digital preservation creates new dependencies and vulnerabilities. Cloud storage requires ongoing payment and technical maintenance that communities may struggle to provide. Digital formats become obsolete, requiring migration to new systems that may not be available or affordable. Platform policies and government regulations can restrict access to materials in ways that communities cannot control. Most fundamentally, digital preservation often requires translating traditional preservation practices into technological frameworks that may not accommodate Indigenous knowledge systems or religious protocols.

The concept of "digital sovereignty"—the right of communities to control their own digital destinies—has emerged as a framework for addressing these challenges. Organizations like the Native Land Digital project, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Sovereignty Network, and the Global Indigenous Data Alliance advocate for Indigenous control over data collection, storage, and use.²⁸ Similar movements exist among religious minorities, refugee communities, and other groups seeking to maintain cultural autonomy while engaging with digital technologies.

These efforts reflect a broader recognition that preservation is never politically neutral. Every choice about what to preserve, how to store it, and who can access it reflects particular values and serves specific interests. As Verne Harris observes, "The archive is never innocent. Every act of preservation is simultaneously an act of power."²⁹ Understanding this dynamic is crucial for developing preservation practices that serve community empowerment rather than cultural extraction.

The Future of Religious Preservation

The testimonies in this chapter suggest several directions for the future of religious preservation. First, successful preservation increasingly requires collaboration between communities and institutions that respects cultural sovereignty while providing technical and financial resources. The partnership between Timbuktu manuscript custodians and international preservation organizations offers one model, as do university programs that train community members in preservation techniques while maintaining local control over materials.

Second, preservation practices must become more inclusive of voices and traditions that have been marginalized in conventional religious scholarship. Asha Mehta's focus on women's texts, Elder Mary's protocols for oral traditions, and Sheikh Saad's adaptation of scribal practices all demonstrate how preservation can serve broader goals of cultural justice and historical recovery.

Third, preservation communities must develop ethical frameworks that address the complex questions raised by digital technologies. When does preservation violate tradition? Who has the right to decide what should be archived? How can communities maintain control over their cultural materials while making them accessible to appropriate audiences? These questions require ongoing dialogue between religious communities, preservation professionals, and technology developers.

Finally, preservation work must be understood as a form of cultural resistance that has profound political and spiritual dimensions. In contexts of war, displacement, and cultural suppression, the act of preserving religious texts becomes a way of asserting the right to exist, to remember, and to transmit cultural knowledge to future generations. The keepers whose voices appear in this chapter are not simply preserving texts; they are preserving possibilities—ways of understanding the world that might otherwise disappear.

As Taalo Shamo Kesto observed while recording Yazidi hymns in Khanke refugee camp, "We are not just singing for ourselves. We are singing for the children who do not yet know they are Yazidi, for the children not yet born. If they have our songs, they will know who they are."³⁰ This understanding of preservation as a gift to the future—and as a responsibility to the past—animates the work of keepers worldwide who refuse to let sacred memory disappear into silence.

Notes and Further Reading

Field notes from Khanke refugee camp, documented in Sareta Ashraph, "Yazidi Oral Traditions and Trauma Recovery," Journal of Refugee Studies 32, no. 4 (2019): 487-502.
Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 167-195.
Taalo Shamo Kesto, quoted in Matthew Barber, "ISIS and the Yazidi Genocide," Middle East Report 274 (2015): 12-17.
Edmondo Lupieri, The Mandaeans: The Last Gnostics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 134-156.
Kurt Rudolph, Mandaeism (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 1-23.
Documentation of digital preservation methods in Mandaean Studies Association, "Preserving Mandaean Heritage in Diaspora" (Sydney: MSA Press, 2020), 45-67.
Sheikh Saad Mubaraki, interview conducted September 2022, quoted with permission.
Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, The Mandaeans: Ancient Texts and Modern People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 78-92.
Population estimates from Suhaib Nashi, "The Mandaean Diaspora: Challenges and Opportunities," Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies 34, no. 1 (2021): 23-41.
Frances Morphy, Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 189-214.
Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (New York: Viking, 1987), 56-78.
Protocols documented in Kimberly Christen, "Opening Archives: Respectful Repatriation," American Archivist 74, no. 1 (2011): 185-210.
Michael Christie, "Digital Tools and the Management of Australian Aboriginal Desert Knowledge," in Indigenous Knowledge and Learning in Asia/Pacific and Africa, ed. Denzin, Lincoln, and Smith (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 479-492.
Elder Mary Djarrkar, quoted in Ian Keen, Knowledge and Secrecy in an Aboriginal Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 123.
First Nations Information Governance Centre, "The First Nations Principles of OCAP" (Ottawa: FNIGC, 2014).
John Cort, Jains in the World: Religious Values and Ideology in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 156-178.
Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 145-159.
Asha Mehta's methodology documented in "Preserving Women's Voices in Jain Manuscript Traditions," International Journal of Jain Studies 18, no. 2 (2022): 45-62.
Asha Mehta, interview conducted October 2022, quoted with permission.
Rita Gross, Feminism and Religion: An Introduction (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Rosemary Radford Ruether, Women and Redemption: A Theological History (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998); Amina Wadud, Qur'an and Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Challenges documented in Nalini Balbir, "Women and Jainism in India," in Women in Indian Religions, ed. Arvind Sharma (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 70-107.
Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne, eds., The Meanings of Timbuktu (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008), 234-256.
François-Xavier Fauvelle, The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 134-167.
Traditional preservation methods documented in Abdel Kader Haidara, "Manuscript Preservation in the Sahel," African Studies Review 58, no. 3 (2015): 67-89.
International preservation efforts analyzed in Stephanie Diakité, "Cultural Heritage and Conflict in Mali," International Journal of Cultural Property 21, no. 4 (2014): 405-426.
Threats to African manuscript traditions discussed in Mauro Nobili, "The Manuscripts of Timbuktu: A Model for Preservation and Access," History in Africa 42 (2015): 303-321.
Michelle Caswell, Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (New York: Routledge, 2021), 67-89.
Digital sovereignty frameworks documented in Stephanie Carroll Rainie et al., "Indigenous Data Sovereignty," in The State of Open Data, ed. Tim Davies et al. (Cape Town: African Minds, 2019), 300-319.
Verne Harris, "The Archive, Public History and the Essential Truth," in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton et al. (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), 169.
Taalo Shamo Kesto, quoted in Ashraph, "Yazidi Oral Traditions," 495.

Further Reading on Religious Preservation and Community Archives:

Caswell, Michelle. Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work. New York: Routledge, 2021.

Christen, Kimberly. "Opening Archives: Respectful Repatriation." American Archivist 74, no. 1 (2011): 185-210.

Flinn, Andrew. "Community Histories, Community Archives: Some Opportunities and Challenges." Journal of the Society of Archivists 28, no. 2 (2007): 151-176.

Gilliland, Anne J., and Sue McKemmish. "The Role of Participatory Archives in Furthering Human Rights, Reconciliation and Recovery." Archival Science 14, no. 3-4 (2014): 251-268.

Stevens, Mary, Andrew Flinn, and Elizabeth Shepherd. "New Frameworks for Community Engagement in the Archive Sector: From Handing Over to Handing On." International Journal of Heritage Studies 16, no. 1-2 (2010): 59-76.