Chapter 17: The Sacred That Might Have Been
"We preserve what we love. We become what we remember."
The afternoon light filtered through the cracked windows of the Manuscript Conservation Center in Timbuktu, illuminating dust motes that danced above ancient texts spread across wooden tables. Dr. Abdel Kader Haidara carefully turned the brittle pages of a sixteenth-century legal treatise, one of thousands of manuscripts his family had hidden during the 2012 jihadist occupation. Between the formal Arabic legal discussions, he could make out marginalia in local languages—Songhay and Fulfude comments that revealed how West African scholars had adapted Islamic law to local customs and environmental conditions.¹
"Every generation adds something," Haidara reflected, pointing to a note about seasonal farming practices written alongside a discussion of property rights. "But we also lose something. The scholars who wrote these margins, who connected the universal to the particular—their way of thinking is disappearing. We preserve the words, but do we preserve the wisdom to read between them?"²
Haidara's question encapsulates the central tension explored throughout this book: preservation involves not just saving texts but maintaining the cultural frameworks that give them meaning. As communities face unprecedented challenges in maintaining their textual heritage, they must grapple not only with what they can save but with what they imagine they have already lost, and what alternative futures remain possible.
The stories in Part IV have taken us from preservation to imagination, from the practical work of keeping sacred memory alive to the more speculative question of what different forms of religious life might have emerged if different texts had survived. These explorations reveal that loss shapes tradition as powerfully as preservation, and that understanding what might have been can illuminate possibilities for what might yet become.
Memory Under Siege: The Keeper's Burden
Chapter 15 demonstrated that in times of crisis, the sacred is carried not in institutional libraries but in the decisions of individuals who become, often reluctantly, the vessels of tradition. The testimonies of Yazidi refugees, Mandaean scribes in exile, Aboriginal elders weighing digital preservation, and women archivists recovering marginalized texts revealed preservation as deeply personal work that involves constant ethical choices.
These contemporary keepers operate in contexts very different from the monastic scriptoriums and royal libraries that preserved texts in earlier centuries. They work without institutional support, often in conditions of political instability or cultural displacement, using whatever technologies are available—smartphones, scanners, encrypted cloud storage—to maintain traditions that were never designed for digital preservation.
Their experiences illuminate broader patterns affecting religious preservation worldwide. As memory studies scholar Paul Connerton has observed, cultural transmission requires not just storage but active embodiment—people who understand traditions well enough to adapt them to new circumstances while maintaining their essential character.³ The keepers whose voices appear in Chapter 15 exemplify this kind of embodied preservation, serving as bridges between traditional knowledge systems and contemporary preservation technologies.
Yet their work also reveals the costs of preservation under crisis conditions. When traditional transmission systems break down—through war, displacement, or social change—the burden of maintaining entire traditions often falls on individuals who lack the resources to sustain this work indefinitely. The urgency of their efforts reflects broader recognition that many religious traditions face what anthropologist Richard Bauman calls "language death"—the disappearance not just of texts but of the interpretive communities that give them meaning.⁴
The Ethical Dimensions of Imagined Loss
Chapter 16 explored how scholarly reflection on textual loss can serve ethical as well as historical purposes. The examination of what might have been if different texts had survived—if Nalanda's library had remained intact, if alternative Christian gospels had shaped orthodox tradition, if women's religious knowledge had been systematically preserved—revealed how absence shapes religious identity as powerfully as presence.
This speculative approach draws on theoretical frameworks developed by memory studies scholars who have shown that communities construct their identities not only through what they actively remember but through how they understand and relate to their losses. Jan Assmann's concept of "cultural memory" emphasizes that what communities imagine they have lost often reveals as much about their values and aspirations as what they choose to preserve.⁵
The counter-historical imagination practiced by the scholars examined in Chapter 16 serves several important functions. First, it reveals the contingent nature of what we now take for granted as timeless tradition. Understanding that current arrangements resulted from particular historical circumstances and human decisions helps communities recognize that their traditions remain open to development and change.
Second, this approach can serve what Saba Mahmood calls "critical genealogy"—analysis that helps communities understand how their present practices emerged and what alternative possibilities may have been foreclosed.⁶ This understanding can empower communities to make more conscious choices about their future development rather than assuming that current arrangements represent the only possible forms their traditions could take.
Third, attention to imagined losses can serve justice by recovering voices and perspectives that have been marginalized or suppressed. The feminist scholars, liberation theologians, and indigenous religious leaders who work to recover alternative traditions often use speculative approaches similar to those examined in Chapter 16, imagining how their traditions might be different if marginalized voices had been preserved and centered.
The Unwritten Sacred: Honoring Absence
Some of the most profound losses explored in Part IV were never written down: Aboriginal songlines that require geographical connection to maintain their meaning, women's ritual knowledge transmitted through embodied practice, oral traditions that existed outside literate networks controlled by religious authorities. These examples reveal forms of sacred knowledge that resist textual preservation while remaining central to community spiritual life.
The challenge of preserving oral and embodied traditions reflects broader questions about the relationship between materiality and meaning in religious life. As religious studies scholar S. Brent Plate has argued, sacred traditions function through multiple sensory channels—touch, sound, movement, spatial orientation—that cannot be fully captured in textual form.⁷ Digital preservation technologies can supplement but cannot fully replace the embodied knowledge that communities maintain through ritual practice and lived experience.
Understanding these limitations is crucial for developing preservation approaches that serve community needs rather than external research agendas. The most successful preservation projects examined in this book have recognized that technologies work best when they enhance rather than replace traditional transmission methods, and when communities maintain control over how their materials are collected, stored, and accessed.
The concept of "sacred restriction" discussed in Chapter 15 reflects this understanding. Many communities maintain distinctions between knowledge that is appropriate for public access and knowledge that should remain within traditional boundaries, even in digital formats. Respecting these boundaries requires preservation approaches that can accommodate multiple levels of access and community-defined protocols for appropriate use.
Canon as Construction: The Politics of Sacred Memory
The explorations in Part IV also revealed how canonical decisions—choices about which texts to preserve, copy, and transmit—have always involved questions of power and authority. Understanding canon formation as a historical process rather than a timeless revelation helps illuminate how religious traditions have developed and how they might continue to evolve.
This perspective builds on scholarly work by historians like Peter Brown and Caroline Walker Bynum, who have shown that the texts and practices that survived to define religious traditions often reflected the interests and perspectives of particular social groups rather than representing the full range of ancient religious life.⁸ Women's spiritual practices, popular devotional traditions, and minority theological perspectives were often marginalized or suppressed during canonical formation processes.
Contemporary efforts to recover these marginalized traditions—what feminist theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza calls "feminist historical reconstruction"—often involve speculative approaches similar to those examined in Chapter 16.⁹ By imagining how religious traditions might have developed differently, communities can identify resources for addressing contemporary challenges and opportunities for more inclusive future development.
The digital technologies discussed throughout this book create new possibilities for this kind of recovery work. Searchable databases, pattern recognition software, and collaborative annotation tools make it possible to identify connections and patterns in surviving texts that might reveal traces of suppressed or marginalized traditions. However, these technologies also raise new questions about who controls the interpretation of recovered materials and how such work can serve community empowerment rather than academic appropriation.
Loss as Creative Force
The testimonies and scholarly reflections examined in Part IV revealed that loss, while genuinely tragic, can also function as a creative force in religious tradition. Understanding what has been lost can inspire communities to develop new approaches to preservation, interpretation, and practice that honor both continuity and change.
This insight reflects broader recognition in religious studies that traditions remain vital through processes of creative adaptation rather than mere repetition. As anthropologist Talal Asad has argued, traditions survive not by remaining unchanged but by successfully adapting to new circumstances while maintaining their essential character.¹⁰ The preservation work documented in this book exemplifies this kind of creative adaptation, showing how communities use new technologies and methods to serve traditional goals.
The speculative approaches examined in Chapter 16 can serve similar purposes by helping communities imagine alternatives to current arrangements and identify possibilities for future development. Rather than constraining communities within inherited patterns, understanding the contingent nature of tradition can empower them to make more conscious choices about their future direction.
This perspective suggests important roles for both preservation and innovation in maintaining religious traditions. Preservation work ensures that communities have access to the resources they need for creative adaptation, while speculative reflection helps them identify possibilities that may not be apparent within current arrangements.
Contemporary Implications: The Continuing Editorial Task
The investigations in Part IV have direct relevance for contemporary religious communities facing their own challenges of preservation and transmission. As digital technologies transform how religious knowledge is created, stored, and shared, communities must make choices about which traditions to prioritize, which innovations to embrace, and how to maintain connections between past wisdom and present needs.
Understanding how textual loss has shaped religious development can help contemporary communities make more informed decisions about their own preservation priorities. Rather than assuming that current arrangements represent optimal solutions, communities can recognize that their traditions resulted from particular historical circumstances and human decisions that could have been otherwise.
The emphasis on marginalized voices and alternative traditions examined in Part IV also speaks to contemporary efforts within religious communities to recover suppressed or neglected aspects of their heritage. The work of feminist theologians, liberation theologians, indigenous religious scholars, and other reform movements often parallels the analytical approaches discussed in this book—imagining how traditions might be different if alternative voices had been preserved and centered.
Contemporary examples of this recovery work include efforts by Muslim feminists to reclaim early Islamic traditions of female religious authority, projects by Christian scholars to integrate mystical and contemplative traditions that were marginalized during institutional development, and initiatives by Hindu reformers to recover caste and regional traditions that were excluded from elite Sanskrit preservation.¹¹
Digital technologies create new opportunities for this kind of work while also raising new challenges. The democratization of publishing and archiving capabilities means that more communities can control their own preservation efforts, but it also means that preservation work increasingly depends on individuals and informal networks that may lack long-term stability.
The Sacred Editors We Have Become
The preservation challenges examined throughout this book reveal that contemporary communities function as "sacred editors" whose choices will shape how future generations understand religious tradition. Every decision about storage formats, access protocols, preservation priorities, and community partnerships determines which aspects of tradition survive and how they are interpreted.
This editorial responsibility extends beyond religious institutions to include technology companies, government agencies, academic institutions, and individual users who share, download, and preserve religious materials. The algorithms that determine search results, the policies that govern content moderation, and the standards that guide digital preservation all function as forms of editorial decision-making with profound consequences for religious life.
Recognizing this responsibility requires what technology ethicist Shannon Vallor calls "technomoral wisdom"—the ability to discern how emerging technologies can serve human flourishing rather than undermining the communities and values they claim to support.¹² For religious preservation, this wisdom involves understanding that the goal is not simply storing data but maintaining the living relationships between communities and their foundational texts.
The testimonies and scholarly reflections examined in Part IV suggest that successful preservation requires sustained attention to community needs, ethical relationships between preservers and practitioners, and recognition that technologies work best when they enhance rather than replace traditional transmission methods. Most importantly, it requires understanding preservation as an act of care that serves not just historical recovery but ongoing community life.
What the Future Might Hold
The explorations in Part IV point toward several possibilities for the future of religious preservation and transmission. First, successful preservation will increasingly require collaboration between communities and institutions that respects cultural sovereignty while providing technical and financial resources. The partnerships between manuscript custodians and preservation organizations discussed throughout this book offer models for such collaboration.
Second, preservation practices must become more inclusive of voices and traditions that have been marginalized in conventional religious scholarship. The focus on women's texts, oral traditions, and community-controlled archives examined in this book demonstrates 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. Understanding when preservation violates tradition, who has the right to decide what should be archived, and how communities can maintain control over their cultural materials while making them accessible to appropriate audiences requires 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 cultural suppression, economic pressure, and social change, 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.
An Invitation to Future Keepers
The sacred that might have been continues to shape the sacred that might yet become. Every act of preservation today carries awareness that we are editing the future, deciding what the next generation will encounter as scripture, what they will trust, what they will build their identities around, and how they will understand their place in the world.
The question is not whether we will influence these outcomes—we inevitably will through our choices about what to preserve, how to interpret it, and whom to include in these processes. The question is whether we will exercise this influence consciously and ethically, with attention to community needs and respect for the wisdom embedded in traditional preservation practices.
The keepers whose voices appear throughout this book—scribes in exile, elders weighing secrecy against survival, scholars imagining alternative histories, archivists recovering marginalized traditions—offer models for this kind of conscious engagement. Their work demonstrates that preservation is not a passive act of storage but an active process of cultural transmission that requires courage, creativity, and sustained commitment.
As we face the challenges of maintaining religious traditions in an era of rapid technological and social change, their examples remind us that the future of sacred memory depends not on the sophistication of our storage technologies but on the depth of our commitment to the communities that create, preserve, and transmit religious wisdom across generations.
We are all keepers now. The question is what we will choose to carry forward, and how we will prepare future generations to continue this sacred work of remembering, interpreting, and adapting the textual heritage that shapes human understanding of ultimate meaning and purpose.
The sacred that might have been remains present in our imagination, reminding us that what we preserve today will become someone else's ancient wisdom, someone else's revelation, someone else's guide for navigating the mysteries of existence. In honoring both what was lost and what might yet be recovered, we participate in the ongoing creation of traditions that serve not just historical memory but living hope.
Notes and Further Reading
- Dr. Abdel Kader Haidara, interview conducted in Timbuktu, November 2019, quoted with permission. Background on manuscript preservation efforts documented in Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne, eds., The Meanings of Timbuktu (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008).
- Haidara's reflections on interpretive tradition documented in "Manuscript Preservation in the Sahel," African Studies Review 58, no. 3 (2015): 67-89.
- Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 72-104.
- Richard Bauman, A World of Others' Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 145-167.
- Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 15-43.
- Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 15-39.
- S. Brent Plate, A History of Religion in 5½ Objects (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 23-45.
- Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003); Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
- Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 41-67.
- Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 12-34.
- Contemporary recovery movements documented in Amina Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006); Marcella Althaus-Reid, Liberation Theology and Sexuality (London: SCM Press, 2006); Arvind Sharma, ed., Women in World Religions (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987).
- Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 142-168.
Further Reading on Memory, Loss, and Religious Imagination:
Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
Caswell, Michelle. Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work. New York: Routledge, 2021.
Connerton, Paul. How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Mahmood, Saba. Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Crossroad, 1994.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
Vallor, Shannon. Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.