A weekly list introducing two online resources of Islamic law, ranging from e-archives to e-libraries, from digitized personal collections to online depositories of first and secondary sources on Islamic law
The Raja Fahrul Collection of Islamic Manuscripts contains 19 digitized manuscripts in Arabic, Dutch, Indonesian, and Malay from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including prayers, siyar, legal texts, poetry, and other documents.
Al-Azhar University provides free access to issues of Majallat al-Azhar as downloadable PDFs. The collection currently spans issues published between 1349 and 1435 AH (1931 and 2013 CE).
The University of Utah’s digitized, open-access “Arabic Papyrus, Parchment & Paper Collection is the largest of its kind in the United States, containing 770 Arabic papyrus documents, 1300 Arabic paper documents, and several pieces on parchment. . . . A large number of pieces date to the period between 700 and 850 CE. The collection… CONTINUE READING
The African Online Digital Library “provides free universal access to cultural heritage materials from and about African countries and communities. It brings together tens of thousands of digitized photographs, videos, archival documents, maps, interviews and oral histories in numerous African languages, many of which are contained in curated thematic galleries and teaching resources.” Its collections… CONTINUE READING
Dīwān, an association for French doctoral students working on the medieval and modern Islamic world, hosts a list of digitized manuscript catalogues. The collection currently includes libraries in the Czech Republic, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Serbia, and Spain.
“Specialised Information Service (FID) Middle East-, North Africa- and Islamic Studies provides highly specialised research materials from the countries of the MENA region…. The Virtual Library MENALIB provides central access to our holdings, offers and services which are available to you via the discovery system MENAsearch.” MENALIB’s holdings include digitized full-text materials from the Middle… CONTINUE READING
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) offers images and descriptions of more than 1,300 manuscripts within its Islamic Art collection. The corpus includes works from the 1st/7th to 13th/20th centuries in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu, and other languages.
The Library of Congress hosts “Islamic Manuscripts from Mali,” an online collection of “over 30 digitized manuscripts from the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library and the Library of Cheick Zayni Baye of Boujbeha, both located in Timbuktu, Mali.” The collection “showcases the wide variety of subjects covered by the written traditions of Timbuktu, Mali, and West… CONTINUE READING
The Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC), directed and developed by Frédérick Madore, is a collaborative, open-access digital database supported by the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) and funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Science, Health and Care. Building on the success of the award-winning Islam Burkina Faso Collection launched in 2021, this repository features over… CONTINUE READING
St. Cyril and Methodius National Library’s digital repository contains Arabic, Turkish and Persian manuscripts, including a “collection of Defters and Sijills.”
