Middle Eastern & Islamic Mansucripts (Collections, repositories, etc.)

Jāmiʻ al-Makhṭūṭāt al-Islāmīyah (جامع المخطوطات الاسلامية)is a site that compiles and offers direct links to an extensive rich collection of Arabic and Islamic Manuscripts. One can easily browse the collection either by manuscript title or by location through the name of the institution that houses the manuscript. The interface is only available in Arabic which can be considered an obstacle, yet this project is quite useful and worth a try.   

Arabic and Ajami collections AAL is a collaborative initiative between Boston University and the West African Research Center (WARC) in part funded by the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme.

AUC Rare Books and Special Collections Digital Library The Rare Books and Special Collections Digital Library at the American University in Cairo supports research and teaching in the arts, culture, and society of Egypt and the Middle East by providing online access to unique cultural heritage resources.

Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiative (ISMI)The mission of the Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiative (ISMI) is to make accessible information on all Islamic manuscripts in the exact sciences (astronomy, mathematics, optics, mathematical geography, music, mechanics, and related disciplines), whether in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, or other languages.

Manuscripts | Digital Resources and Projects in Islamic Studies

 The Maydan is proud to introduce a new initiative highlighting digital resources and projects in the field of Islamic Studies. Included in this roundup are manuscripts collections, digitized manuscripts, and manuscripts catalogues from universities and libraries around the world. *This is an ongoing project*

The Omar Ibn Said Collection The Library of Congress has acquired and made available online the Omar Ibn Said Collection, which includes the only known surviving slave narrative written in Arabic in the United States. In 1831, Omar Ibn Said, a wealthy and highly educated man who was captured in West Africa and brought to the United States as a slave, wrote a 15-page autobiography describing his experiences. This manuscript is important not only because it tells the personal story of a slave written by himself, but also because it documents an aspect of the early history of Islam and Muslims in the United States. The Omar Ibn Said Collection consists of 42 original documents in both English and Arabic, including the manuscript in Arabic of “The Life of Omar Ibn Said” – the centerpiece of this unique collection of texts. Other manuscripts include texts in Arabic by another West African slave in Panama and from individuals located in West Africa.

Manuscripts of the Muslim World project Manuscripts of the Muslim World will include digital editions of more than 500 manuscripts and 827 paintings from the Islamicate world broadly construed. Together these holdings represent in great breadth the flourishing intellectual and cultural heritage of Muslim lands from 1000 to 1900, coving mathematics, astrology, history, law, literature, as well as the Qur'an and Hadith. The bulk of the collection consists of manuscripts in Arabic and Persian, along with examples of Coptic, Samaritan, Syriac, Turkish, and Berber.

Collections

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 Bibliotheca Arabica – Towards a New History of Arabic Literature

Bibliotheca Arabica is dedicated to research on Arabic literatures dating from the years 1150 to 1850 CE, and combines literary and manuscript studies. Within this defined period of investigation, Bibliotheca Arabica focusses on literary production, transmission, and reception, and sets these in relation to the political and social transformations that were taking place at that time By reconstructing the transmission and distribution of manuscripts and the mobility of scholars, the transregional perspective will go beyond the famous centres of Arabic literary production—namely Egypt, Syria, and Anatolia—to regions as diverse and far-flung as the Indian subcontinent, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southern Europe. Although the project is dedicated to literatures in Arabic, it also takes into account the embeddedness of Arabic cultural production in the multilingual textual environments of the Islamicate world. Project Period: 2018 – 2035.

Catalogues

QUICK links. Archives * Archival Material

  • Aga Khan Library Digital Collections  The Aga Khan Library, London, a world-class resource for Islamic studies, houses an invaluable collection of rare books, manuscripts, and artefacts produced in different regions of the Muslim realm, part of which we present in digital format for the first time. The Aga Khan Library has digitised its extensive special collections to offer a wide range of research materials on the history, politics, customs, and beliefs that have shaped the contemporary global Muslim community. 
  • AUC Rare Books and Special Collections Digital Library The Rare Books and Special Collections Digital Library at the American University in Cairo supports research and teaching in the arts, culture, and society of Egypt and the Middle East by providing online access to unique cultural heritage resources.
  • "vHMML [HMML is an initiative of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library] offers resources and tools for the study of manuscripts and currently features manuscript cultures from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The site houses high-resolution images of manuscripts, many of them digitized as part of HMML’s global mission to preserve and share important, endangered, and inaccessible manuscript collections through digital photography, archiving, and cataloging. It also contains descriptions of manuscripts from HMML's legacy microfilm collection, with scans of some of these films...

  • British Library - Digital Access to Persian Manuscripts  List of digitised Persian manuscripts "Below we have listed the Persian manuscripts in the British Library which have been digitised up to the present time.  Click on the manuscript number at the head of each description to go directly to the relevant entry on the British Library's digitised manuscripts site. Once there, click on the thumbnail image of the manuscript to get to the full digitised version which will open in a new window (please note that all subsequent digitised manuscripts that you view will appear in this same window). You can choose to view one page at a time or two together in book format (i.e. as if you were reading it). Make sure, however, that you select 'Right to Left' in the 'Direction' box..."

  • Digital Palestinian Archive "The Birzeit University Digital Palestinian Archive (BZUDPA) is dedicated to documenting the life of Palestinians and their institutions over the past century, from Ottoman times to the present.The project, launched in 2011, aims to preserve a large variety of documents, written and audio-visual, relating to the history of the Palestinian people over the past century, and donated by individuals, families and popular organizations. Birzeit, as a national university, is fully committed to placing its technical and academic resources at the service of this project, which continually digitizes, places online and makes available a wide variety of documents. "

  • Sources for Historical Photographs of the Middle ... - Library of Congress
  • Archives & Special Collections - American University of Beirut
  • Archive Lebanon
  • The Fouad Debbas Collection - Endangered Archives Programme

 

Online * Middle Eastern & Islamic Manuscripts

Aga Khan Library Digital Collections  The Aga Khan Library, London, a world-class resource for Islamic studies, houses an invaluable collection of rare books, manuscripts, and artefacts produced in different regions of the Muslim realm, part of which we present in digital format for the first time. The Aga Khan Library has digitised its extensive special collections to offer a wide range of research materials on the history, politics, customs, and beliefs that have shaped the contemporary global Muslim community. 

Alquds Manuscripts: The Arabic Manuscripts Digital Library of Jerusalem. Partner Libraries: Khalidi Library, Budeiri Library, Al-Aqsa Library and Islamic Museum, Ansari Library and the Waqf Restoration Center.

 

AUC Rare Books and Special Collections Digital Library The Rare Books and Special Collections Digital Library at the American University in Cairo supports research and teaching in the arts, culture, and society of Egypt and the Middle East by providing online access to unique cultural heritage resources.

British Library's Persian Manuscripts: A selection of 15,000 manusripts from the British Museum and the India Office Library. These manuscripts originate from the whole of the Persianate world, in particular Iran, Central Asia and India and range in time from the 12th century to recent years, representing most of the traditional fields of humanities and religious studies. Many of the Persian manuscripts are copies of rare texts, with examples of some of the finest illustrated Mughal, Timurid and Safavid paintings. - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/persian.html#fragment_name

Digital Muṣḥaf "The Digital Muṣḥaf Project aims to create a database of images of early Qurʾānic fragments from dispersed muṣḥafs or codices of the Qurʾanic text and, as far as possible, virtually re-create the original codices so that they are available for scholars and the public in one place together with descriptions and metadata.Islamic Heritage Project at Harvard University: Hundreds of Islamic manuscripts, maps, and published texts from Harvard’s library and museum collections.

Islamic manuscripts at Michigan

Islamic Manuscripts listing

The Minassian Collection of Qur'anic Manuscripts: A collection of 200 Qur'anic manuscript folios dating from the 9th to the 16th centuries. A project of Brown Digital Repository (BDR).

Jāmiʻ al-Makhṭūṭāt al-Islāmīyah (جامع المخطوطات الاسلامية)is a site that compiles and offers direct links to an extensive rich collection of Arabic and Islamic Manuscripts. One can easily browse the collection either by manuscript title or by location through the name of the institution that houses the manuscript. The interface is only available in Arabic which can be considered an obstacle, yet this project is quite useful and worth a try. 

Poetry and Prayer: Islamic Manuscripts from the Walters Art Museum:Illuminated and illustrated manuscripts produced in Islamic lands from the 9-19 centuries (Exhibit).

Kadi registries (1557-1911)

Princepton Digital Library of Islamic Manuscripts. The Princeton University Library has some 9,500 Islamic manuscripts, chiefly bound paper codices, containing a total of more than 20,000 texts. The manuscripts are located in the Manuscripts Division of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, at the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library. Robert Garrett (Princeton Class of 1897) collected approximately two-thirds of these manuscripts and donated them to the Library in 1942. Since then, the Library has continued to acquire manuscripts by gift and purchase. The manuscripts are chiefly in Arabic but also include Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and other languages of the Islamic world. They date from the early centuries of Islam through the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Most of the manuscripts originated in Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and other main centers of Islamic civilization. But there are examples from Moorish Spain and the Maghreb in the West, to the Indian sub-continent and the Indonesian archipelago in the East, and even sub-Sahara Africa.

Wunder der erschaffenen Dinge – Osmanische Manuskripte in Hamburger Sammlungen"  -- “Wonders of Creation” – Ottoman Manuscripts in Hamburg Collections

"Sabancı University Sakıp Sabancı Museum's Arts of Book and Calligraphy Collection includes copies of the Koran, prayer books, calligraphic compositions in the kıt'a form, calligraphic albums, calligraphic panels, hilyes, imperial firmans and berats bearing the royal tuğra (imperial cipher) by renowned calligraphers dating from the late 14th to 20th centuries, and calligraphy tools and equipment."

 Manuscripts in the Libraries of the Greek and Armenian Patriarchates in Jerusalem 
1009 manuscripts digitized by Library of Congress from the set of microfilms.  "As Jerusalem, the location of Christ’s Passion, has been central to the Christian religion since its inception, all the early churches sought a presence in that storied and holy city. The Greek Orthodox Church and the Armenian Apostolic Church, for example, both maintain ancient patriarchates in Jerusalem and both have created renowned libraries in them..." 

West African Arabic Manuscript Project AMMS is a bi-lingual database that was developed at the University of Illinois in the late 1980s to describe a collection of Arabic manuscripts in southern Mauritania (Boutilimit). It subsequently has been used to catalogue seven other West African collections including the manuscript libraries at the Institut Mauritanien de Recherche Scientifique, Northwestern University, and the Centre Ahmad Baba in Timbuctu.  Currently (during 2011-2) print catalogues from West Africa published by al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation are being added to it. For more information on the activities and publications of the Foundation and these catalogues visit http://www.al-furqan.com  The database has a search engine designed to identify manuscripts and authors when only fragmentary information is available, in Arabic or Roman script, for records now in excess of 23,000. Experimental linkage of digital images of manuscript texts to the records is currently underway.. The database and the AMMS cataloguing tool are publicly available at no cost to users. The AMMS software for cataloging is free and can be downloaded for local use. Thirty-odd fields in Arabic and English cover all the descriptors normally employed in manuscript work and users may customize the input fields for the needs of particular collections. We encourage the inclusion of newly-catalogued material into the main data base; please contact the editors.

The Maydan digital resources in the field of Islamic Studies. Manuscripts | Digital Resources and Projects in Islamic Studies

 The Maydan is proud to introduce a new initiative highlighting digital resources and projects in the field of Islamic Studies. Included in this roundup are manuscripts collections, digitized manuscripts, and manuscripts catalogues from universities and libraries around the world. *This is an ongoing project*

The Omar Ibn Said Collection The Library of Congress has acquired and made available online the Omar Ibn Said Collection, which includes the only known surviving slave narrative written in Arabic in the United States. In 1831, Omar Ibn Said, a wealthy and highly educated man who was captured in West Africa and brought to the United States as a slave, wrote a 15-page autobiography describing his experiences. This manuscript is important not only because it tells the personal story of a slave written by himself, but also because it documents an aspect of the early history of Islam and Muslims in the United States. The Omar Ibn Said Collection consists of 42 original documents in both English and Arabic, including the manuscript in Arabic of “The Life of Omar Ibn Said” – the centerpiece of this unique collection of texts. Other manuscripts include texts in Arabic by another West African slave in Panama and from individuals located in West Africa.

Manuscripts of the Muslim World project Manuscripts of the Muslim World will include digital editions of more than 500 manuscripts and 827 paintings from the Islamicate world broadly construed. Together these holdings represent in great breadth the flourishing intellectual and cultural heritage of Muslim lands from 1000 to 1900, coving mathematics, astrology, history, law, literature, as well as the Qur'an and Hadith. The bulk of the collection consists of manuscripts in Arabic and Persian, along with examples of Coptic, Samaritan, Syriac, Turkish, and Berber.

Collections

 

Catalogues