Arabic, Near Eastern, and Islamic Studies

This digital collection offers full-text access to more than 1200 publications on Aceh, the province located at the northern end of the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. The books form part of the collection of the Royal Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden which is kept at the Leiden University Library. The titles date from the 17th till the turn of the 21th century and are in a variety of languages such as Indonesian, Acehnese, English and Dutch. Due to copyright issues titles published after 1900 can only be accessed from desktop computers situated in the University Library.

This website provides access to the largest collection of Qur’anic Commentary (tafsir or tafseer), translation, recitation and essential resources in the world.

It was begun in 2001 by the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, Jordan. Today the website is fully operational in Arabic and English and provides the original Arabic texts of 150 or more books of Qur’anic Commentary, Interpretation and Explanation (tafsir or tafseer), recitation (tajwid) tutorials and hadith collections, and other fields, pertaining to the study of Qur’anic exegesis. Translations of the meanings of the Qur’an are currently available in 24 different languages, and in several cases more than one translation is available. The site also includes audio Qur’an recitations; resources on Qur’an syntax; resources on the Contexts of Revelation (asbâb al-nuzûl); resources on the meanings of words found in the Qur’an, and other works on the Qur’anic sciences. It contains over a million pages of Qur’anic Commentary and translation. Some of the texts presented here exist only as manuscripts and have never previously been published in book form despite their historical importance and influence. Altafsir.com is thus a complete website for the study of the Qur’anic Sciences.

In addition to presenting the standard Classical and Modern Commentaries on the Holy Qur’an (tafsir or tafseer) texts of all eight schools of jurisprudence, the site also contains works of various mystical, philosophical, linguistic and theological currents. Moreover, the first time in one place, comparative studies between the Shafi‘i, Hanafi, Maliki, Hanbali, Ja‘fari, Zaydi, Ibadi and Thahiri schools can be carried out complete with multi-screen displays and search programs.

This digitized collection of selected volumes of medical books and manuscripts, dating from 1300 to 1921, is drawn from the Medical Historical Library, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library. This collection reflects the Arabic and Persian intellectual efforts that translated, augmented, and transmitted Greek and Roman medical knowledge to Western societies during the Renaissance. It includes iconic works by authors such as Avicenna and al-Razi.

The open source Archive.org contains a collection of user-uploaded Arabic texts, available here.

The Masnavi is the great masterpiece of Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi, who lived in the 13th century. The Masnavi consists of mainly of sufi teaching stories with profound mystical interpretations. This site also has information about the Whirling Prayer Ceremony (Sema) and the International Mevlana Foundation led by the hereditary leader of all Mevlevi sufis, the 22nd generation direct descendent of Mawlana Rumi and the 33rd Maqâm-i Chelebi. Below is a photo of Mevlana Rumi's tomb in Konya, Turkey.

This archive at MIT provides full-text collections of more than 400 works of classical literature. They are mainly Greco-Roman, but also include Chinese and Persian works.

The Internet Sacred Text Archive is a free internet archive of electronic texts about religion, mythology, legends and folklore, occult, and similar topics. Texts are presented in English translation and, where possible, in original languages.

The University of Michigan, through HathiTrust Digital Library, has generously provided access to more than one thousand volumes for electronic viewing and full download as PDF. Log in is not required to view or download the manuscripts.

The South Asia Collection at Yale began in earnest in the 1840s after Prof. Edward Salisbury began teaching Sanskrit and consequently endowed the Edward E. Salisbury Professorship of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology. Through the Arcadia grant, the South Asia Collection at Yale University is expanding its digital presence. Twenty Persian philology books, some of which were signed by Salisbury himself, were cataloged, preserved, and digitized. These 20 older Persian philology texts range in date from 1726-1900, and either originate from India, are rare European translations, or are reprints. This unusual collection holds important information for any scholar interested in the literary aspects of the Mughal Empire in India or the history of Muslims in India.

As a result of generous support from the David A. Gardner '69 Magic Project, the Princeton University Library created Voyager cataloging records for most of the approximately 9,500 Islamic manuscripts in the Manuscripts Division, which are from Robert Garrett (Class of 1897) and other sources. This is the premier collection of Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and other Islamic manuscripts in the Western Hemisphere. Initially, more than 200 of these manuscripts were digitized as the core of the Princeton Digital Library of Islamic Manuscripts. Separate support from the the Virginia and Richard Stewart Memorial Fund, through the Princeton University Council of the Humanities, has supported digitization of an additional 1,400 other Islamic manuscripts from existing black-and-white microfilm, produced in the 1970s with funding from the U.S. Department of Education, Title II-C. The manuscripts digitized from microfilm include all texts (chiefly New Series) on Shia law and theology; texts related to other non-Sunni sects, such as the Druze and Kharijites; and more than 750 other manuscripts (Garrett Yahuda Series) on a variety of subjects. Also added are PDFs of Islamic manuscripts digitized in response to photoduplication requests. In all, approximately a sixth of the Library's Islamic manuscripts have now been digitized and put online for the benefit of scholars worldwide.

South and Southeast Asian Literature is a searchable collection of fiction and poetry written in English by authors from South and Southeast Asia and their Diasporas. Focusing on works composed during the late-colonial and postcolonial eras, the collection will also feature author interviews and manuscript materials that will shed additional light on the rich literary heritage and emerging traditions of this region. New content is uploaded on a biweekly basis, giving users immediate access to a steadily growing treasury of classic, rare, and contemporary literature. The database currently has over 99,890 pages.

The digitization project is still ongoing, but is already a most valuable resource, with over 3000 titles available. They started with the holdings of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft in Halle, which includes much 19th-century material, both European publications and Middle Eastern ones. At Halle they have also digitized Jacob Landau's important Turkish research library which contains many Ottoman publications.

This is a specialized collection of Oriental Christian texts, including 226 in Arabic. It comprises both European and Middle Eastern editions, most of them fully digitized and available online. This is a valuable resource, in view of the important part played by Christian Arabic books, produced both by missionaries and by Arab Christians, in the early development of Arabic printing.

The private manuscript libraries of Yemen, estimated at 50,000 codices, constitutes the largest and most important set of unexamined Arabic manuscripts in the world today. The Yemeni Manuscript Digitization Initiative presents, for the first time, access to manuscripts from three private libraries in Sanaa, Yemen, and virtually conjoins them to additional Yemeni manuscripts held by the Princeton University Library and Staatsbibliothek, Berlin. The texts in this archive were composed, copied, studied, and preserved by Zaydi scholars from the tenth century to the present. Zaydism is a leading school of Islam in Northern Yemen known for forms of rationalist theology that were abandoned in other regions. The Yemeni Manuscript Digitization Initiative is made possible by a Enriching Digital Collections Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The grant is administered by Princeton University Library and the Free University, Berlin in conjunction with a Yemeni NGO. Information on this grant and related projects to preserve and disseminate the manuscripts of Yemen can be found at ymdi.uoregon.edu.

The Islamic Studies Centre in Üsküdar offers three online collections of Ottoman printed materials in facsimile images:1) Salnâmeler: the official yearbooks, important sources of statistical and other information on all the Ottoman provinces. Over 520 are available here; 2) Osmanlıca Risaleler: over 2400 pamphlets or “treatises” in Ottoman Turkish, mainly on political, religious and educational subjects; 3) Osmanlıca Makaleler: articles from 20 Ottoman Turkish periodicals. The facsimiles are provided as PDF files.

Arabic Collections Online (ACO) is a publicly available digital library of public domain Arabic language content. ACO currently provides digital access to 7,908 volumes across 5,043 subjects drawn from rich Arabic collections of distinguished research libraries. Supported by New York University in Abu Dhabi, this mass digitization project aims to feature up to 23,000 volumes from the library collections of NYU and partner institutions. These institutions are contributing published books in all fields—literature, business, science, and more—from their Arabic language collections.

The Moroccan Digital Library, created by the Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume du Maroc (BNRM), has a special section devoted to lithographed books, containing digital images of over 30 of them. Almost all printing in Morocco was lithographic until well into the 20C, so these are of particular historic importance. Users can choose between Arabic and French interfaces.

A collection of contemporary Arabic books on European culture, and Arabic translations of European books.

The Afghanistan Digital Library retrieves and restores works published in Afghanistan between 1870 and 1930. The long-term objective is to collect, catalogue, digitize, and provide access to as many of this period's publications as possible.

In response to the tragic displacement of people and losses of life in conflict zones, and to ongoing threats to the cultural heritage of the Middle East through destruction, looting, and illegal trade, the Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME) proposes to federate Middle Eastern collections from around the world, creating a publicly accessible, seamlessly interoperable digital library of cultural material.

The DLME is a worldwide effort to federate all types of cultural heritage material, including archives, manuscripts, museum objects, media, and archaeological and intangible heritage collections. The core principle of our collaboration is that of service to partners and peoples across the Middle East and North Africa—to help reveal, share, honor, and protect collections of cultural materials and the living and historical cultures they represent.

From IRCICA, Farabi includes several collections such as: Ottoman Yearbooks, Voyages in Middle East, Korans, and much more.

The Iranian Oral History Project (IOHP) is a unique resource for the study of modern Iranian history. The collection consists of the personal accounts of 134 individuals who played major roles in or were eyewitnesses to important political events in Iran from the 1920s to the 1980s. Of these, 118 narratives have been digitized and are available to researchers through this database. The collection provides scholars and practitioners the opportunity to listen to and read the personal accounts of many of Iran's former political leaders as they recall the times and events that shaped their lives and the life of their country.

The Indian Ocean Basin is becoming an important topic in middle and high school world history and geography courses, but one for which there are few instructional resources. This web-based resource helps teachers incorporate the Indian Ocean into world history studies by illustrating a variety of interactions that took place in the Indian Ocean during each era. The material has been assembled into an integrated and user-friendly teaching tool for students in upper elementary, middle and high school. It offers students the chance to investigate primary sources that illustrate historical interactions, helping them to become more adept at the analytical historical thinking skills that are required by virtually all state history standards today.

Over 2,700 books and tens of thousands of documents were discovered in the flooded basement of the Iraqi intelligence headquarters by a US Army team. The remarkable survival of this written record of Iraqi Jewish life provides an unexpected opportunity to better understand this 2,500-year-old Jewish community. Ceated by NARA and partners.

The Islamic Heritage Project (IHP) at Harvard University has cataloged, conserved, and digitized hundreds of Islamic manuscripts, maps, and published texts from Harvard's libraries and museum collections. These rare and unique materials are now freely available to Internet users worldwide. This online archive has digital copies of more than 280 manuscripts, 275 printed texts, and 50 maps, totaling more than 156,000 pages.

Since its inception in 2001, the Malcolm X Project at Columbia University has been concerned primarily with gathering and illuminating new research about El Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X) through two major initiatives. First, the construction of a robust, web-based, multimedia version of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. And, second, the research and development of a biography of Malcolm X written by Dr. Manning Marable, the project's director.

Princeton University Library’s Arabic Movie Posters and Lobby Cards Collection was acquired in 2008 from a Lebanese collector, Abdelmassih Abou-Jaoudeh of al-Furat Publishing and is comprised of 1,748 posters and 768 lobby cards. Egyptian posters predominate with 1,474, reflecting the unchallenged prominence of Egypt in the production of Arabic feature films. Some 150 posters are for Lebanese films, 113 Syrian and 11 Iraqi. The purpose of the posters was to advertize coming attractions, and they represent films produced from 1935 to 2007. Most of the posters are on standard Arab single-sheet size paper. However, many are on non-standard sheets. Similarly, there are posters that are composed on multiple sheets, including some on twenty-four sheets meant for display on the side of multi-story buildings. The lobbies cards, also for coming attractions and meant for display in theater lobbies, are composed of multiple still shots taken on movie sets and affixed to standard–sized cardboard. They represent 172 films produced in Egypt (145), Lebanon (13) and Syria (14) from 1964 to 2007.

The Rev. Claude L. Pickens, Jr. Collection on Muslims in China makes available online over 1000 photos of Muslims and Christian missionaries working among them in Western China in the 1920s and 1930s. These images form the core of the collection, which is supplemented by several hundred books, pamphlets, broadsides, etc., in several languages.

The Qatar Digital Library (QDL) is making a vast archive featuring the cultural and historical heritage of the Gulf and wider region freely available online for the first time. It includes archives, maps, manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs and much more, complete with contextualised explanatory notes and links, in both English and Arabic.

This sub collection is actually a jukebox filled with Indonesian pop music. The original analogue vinyl records have been digitized. Thousands of records are now online available with a single click. They include recordings from the nostalgic Keroncong songs of the Dutch East Indies, like 'Bengawan Solo' sung by Rudi van Dalm, to the old-fashioned folk music modernized by adding electric guitars, keyboards and drums as in the so-called 'Pop Keroncong' sung by Koes Plus.

Imagine your computer as a new gramophone to enjoy in your home parlor. We invite you to listen to the songs.
New recordings are added to the Jukebox periodically.

The Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs in Oman recently published this collection of Ibadi manuscripts, newspapers, and other sources from Oman, Zanzibar, and the Mzab.

Available in Arabic, French, and English.

A part of daily life in contemporary Iran, propaganda murals appear throughout Tehran on both public and private buildings and contain powerful iconographic imagery. This selection of over 130 propaganda murals photographed in the capital city during the summer of 2006 is among the first “born digital” special collections to come to the library and represents one of the first efforts to systematically document such public murals.

Explore the lives of women during the Qajar era (1796-1925) through a wide array of materials from private family holdings and participating institutions. Women's Worlds in Qajar Iran provides bilingual access to thousands of personal papers, manuscripts, photographs, publications, everyday objects, works of art and audio materials, making it a unique online resource for social and cultural histories of the Qajar world.

The Arab Image Foundation is a non-profit organization established in Beirut in 1997. Its mission is to collect, preserve and study photographs from the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora.

The AIF’s expanding collection is generated through artist and scholar-led projects. The Foundation makes its collection accessible to the public through a wide spectrum of activities, including exhibitions, publications, videos, a website and an online image database.

The ongoing research and acquisition of photographs include so far Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Iraq, Iran, Mexico, Argentina and Senegal. To date, the collection holds more than 600,000 photographs.

Historical photographs and illustrations from Lebanon and the Levant.

The Middle East Photograph Archive consists of over 400 photographic prints dating primarily to the second half of the nineteenth century. At this time, the spread of the art of photography and the influx of Europeans into the lands of the Middle East led to the creation of a large number of photographs produced by professional photographers. During these decades, the versatility of photography was enhanced through the development of a variety of chemical techniques, enabling photographers to produce images in relatively large numbers, intended chiefly to satisfy the tourism trade burgeoning in the Middle East and the European thirst for images of the Orient. The archive is particularly strong in photographs of nineteenth-century Cairo. Europeans were attracted to Egypt by its Pharaonic monuments, but once there, visitors came to appreciate Cairo as the largest and best-preserved medieval metropolis in the world. The scores of Islamic monuments built between the ninth and fifteenth centuries in and around Cairo provided a huge number of subjects for photography.

Dr. Jack G. Shaheen (1935-2017) was a professor, author, and consultant who dedicated his career to identifying and contesting stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims in American media. The Jack G. Shaheen Papers date from 1943 to 2012 and document Shaheen’s scholarly and popular writing and research in media analysis; his media accountability activism through the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC); and his consultation work on legal cases as well as the entertainment industry. The collection includes printed and born-digital draft and revised writings, speeches, notes, research and subject files, reports, correspondence, and sound and video recordings of Shaheen’s speeches. The collection also contains material collected by Shaheen, including comic books; editorial cartoons; recordings of movies, television shows, and cartoons; magazines; posters; advertisements; toys; games; and other ephemera, which depict Arabs and Muslims in American popular culture and mass media from the late 19th to the 21st centuries.