Posted on by N.A. Mansour

Online Archives, Digitized Collections and Resources for Middle East, North Africa, and Islamic(ate) Studies

By N.A. Mansour

We at Hazine love our lists. So hot off the heels of our visual resource guide and our regularly updated blog-list, we have a list of online resources to share with you all: this is where you can find primary sources online or resources to help you get at primary sources. An earlier incarnation of this list is here, written by Zachary Foster. We’re including links to digitized Islamic manuscripts, digitized periodicals, digitized books, oral history repositories, online syllabi and material history archives, all relevant to Middle East, North African, Islamicate world, and Islamic studies.  Note while many of these are open access, some are not. Standard rules apply: this is not a comprehensive list so tweet at us or email us and we’ll add things to our semi-annual updates to this list. 

Caveat #1: Archive.org is an open-access catch-all for digitized materials, be it manuscripts, printed books, periodicals, sound recordings, etc. HOWEVER, often critical editions of texts uploaded do not respect the rights of the publishers and the critical editors. I recommend using it as a discovery tool versus a source for PDFs.

Caveat #2: Access to Middle East and Islamic Resources (AMIR) is a great tool to find open-access material online and is regularly updated by Peter Magierski. Entries highlight one or two particular resources online.

Caveat #3: WorldCat is a union catalog of  the collections of roughly 17,900 libraries It is another great place to start your research project.

Updated April 2020

Periodicals

  • Hathi Trust: open access in some cases, and in others only accessible with an institutional login, Hathi has a treasure trove of periodicals and rare books in multiple languages available for download. 
  • ارشيف المجلات الادبية والثقافية العربية: Searchable by  titles of publications and articles, this online database includes journals from the late 19th and early 20th centuries online from a variety of geographies across the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. Not downloadable and the collections of individual  publications are not complete, this is doubtless a rich resource, either as a starting point for a project or for entire projects in themselves.
  • Jara’id: this is a digital humanities project that provides a bibliography for 19th century and early 20th century Arabic newspapers.
  • Jarayed: this is an online archive, compiled by the National Library of Israel (NLI), of Arabic newspapers of Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine. Available in Arabic, Hebrew and English, it is keyword searchable. We included this source for the sake of comprehensibility but we strongly encourage you to look for sources elsewhere before using NLI as a repository.
  • Translatio: from Univeristat Bonn’s Department of Islamic Studies, this is a growing collection of Arabic, Persian and Ottoman digitized periodicals. Check back regularly: they update it regularly and announce it on their Twitter account.

Syllabi

  • #BlackIslamSyllabus: curated by Dr. Kayla Renee Wheeler and inspired by Professor Najeeba Syeed, #BlackinMSA and Muslim ARC, the syllabus runs through academic publications, primary sources, and journalism on Black Muslims. Suggestions can be sent via Twitter using #BlackIslamSyllabus or via email to kaylar824@gmail.com
  • #SudanSyllabus: inspired by #BlackIslamSyllabus, #SudanSyllabus is also meant to highlight a traditionally sidelined history, that of Sudan. Curated by Razan Idris, a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania and supported by Kayla Renee Wheeler, Rogaia Abusharaf, Marie Grace Brown, Hind Makki and Ola Diab, the syllabus can also be contributed to via Twitter #SudanSyllabus and emailing irazan@sas.upenn.edu. 
  • #IslamophobiaIsRacism Syllabus was built by an all-star team –Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Arshad Ali, Evelyn Alsultany, Sohail Daulatzai, Lara Deeb, Carol Fadda, Zareena Grewal, Juliane Hammer, Nadine Naber, and Junaid Rana–  to “define anti-Muslim racism as an alternative to the concept of Islamophobia {and} strategize ways to challenge anti-Muslim racism and resist white supremacy,” amongst other laudable goals. Contributions can be made by emailing IslamophobiaIsRacism@gmail.com.

Manuscripts

  • We at Hazine do not believe in reinventing the wheel: there already are two excellent resources for online manuscript collections. The first is the excellent Evyn Kropf’s guide, hosted online by the University of Michigan. Second, the Maydan has its own online guide to online manuscript collections.
  • The Manuscripts of the Muslim World is a newer project that might not be on older lists (we have an interview with the Project Cataloguer, Dr Kelly Tuttle, here). It is an attempt to digitize ‘hidden’ Islamicate manuscripts at Columbia University, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania.
  • More of a search tool (especially if you’re UK-based or planning a trip to the UK, Fihrist: it is a centralized database of Islamic manuscripts in the UK.
  • If you’re trying to figure out watermarks in your manuscript, one spot to hit up is the Historical Paper Collections. Keep in mind European papers were used heavily in the Middle East/North Africa/Islamicate world.

Printed Books

  • Shamela/Waqfeya: available as an app, a downloadable searchable program, and online, Shamela allows you to search through a chunk of the published Islamic (although here mainly Muslim) canon. Waqfeya is linked to Shamela and has downloadable PDFs (through Archive.org). This resource does have spelling mistakes and might not always be reliable. Keep in mind that only a fraction of the Muslim canon has been critically edited. Note that PDFs available via Archive.org might not respect the rights of critical editors or publishers; it is likely they are not receiving commission).
  • NoorLib: similar to Shamela but coming to us from Iran, NoorLib is a great resource for Shia sources. As with Shamela, it is not clear whether the publishers and editors are getting their due.
  • Al Mostafa: this is a keyword searchable database of manuscripts and critical editions. The downloadable PDFs differ in quality (dependent on the source itself)  but multiple copies likely exist of extremely popular texts, so one could pick and choose which they prefer (Source: Dzenita Karic gave us this recommendation). coming to us from Iran, NoorLib is a great resource for Shia sources. As with Shamela, it is not clear whether the publishers and editors are getting their due.
  • An open-access project, NYU’s Arabic Collections Online “is a publicly available digital library of public domain Arabic language content. ACO currently provides digital access to 11,566 volumes across 6,820 subjects drawn from rich Arabic collections of distinguished research libraries.” PDFs can be downloaded directly from the site, either in low or high resolution. 
  • Early Arabic Printed Books: featuring the British Library (BL)’s collection, this features early Arabic printed books from across the globe, starting as early as the 16th century. However, this is behind a paywall and is likely only accessible to those affiliated with institutions whose libraries have a subscription; check to see if you have access. I repeat: this is not open-access.
  • The University of Washington’s Sephardic Studies Digital Collection (SSDC): this is a collection of Ladino books available via the University of Washington Libraries’ online open-access portal. This includes 400 printed Ladino books that are currently preserved in the University’s physical library: while there are 400 books in the collection, not all are available online. There are 41 books online. In its entirety, the collection contains plays, novels, musical ballads, poetry, and rabbinical, ethical, and mystical texts, all in Ladino (Source: this suggestion came to us via Makena Mezistrano).

Open-access monographs and articles

  • MENADoc is an open-access database with digitized documents, monographs, and articles with regard to the MENA-region and to Islamic studies. It is based out of the  Universitäts-und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt (University- and State Library Saxony-Anhalt (Halle)).
  • The Kurdish Institute in Paris maintains the open-access Kurdish Library, which in its physical form has 10,000 monographs about the Kurds, in 25 languages, several tens of thousands of published documents, collections of reviews and newspapers, photographs, videos, post cards and posters, as well as audio archives and music recordings. Much of this is digitized and available online.

Online Archives: documents, music and oral histories

  • Ocean of Paper: a product of the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center and specifically the work of Dr. Thomas McDow and Dr. Fahad Bishara, Ocean of Paper focuses on publishing deeds produced by Omanis in South Arabia and East Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It allows you to search by document title, debtor, creditor, transaction amount, transaction currency, date, type of transaction, location, or property exchanged. Records may be downloaded directly from the site.
  • Qatar Digital Library, available in both Arabic and English, is an online archive featuring material from the Gulf, including manuscripts, documents, images, sound recordings, and more. It was developed as “part of a 10-year Memorandum of Understanding on Partnerships between the Qatar Foundation, the Qatar National Library and The British Library.”
  • Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA): POHA is a “project to digitize, index, catalog, preserve, and provide access (through a searchable digital platform) to an archival collection of around 1,000 hours of testimonies with first generation Palestinians and other Palestinian communities in Lebanon”. It is searchable by interactive map and the project includes summaries of key facts of interest to the researcher. 
  • Arabian Gulf Digital Archive: a collaboration of the Emirati National Archives and the UK’s National Archives, this is a key-word searchable tool, open to all, with access to primary source documents about the Arabian Gulf. We still advise visiting the National Archives at Kew in the UK.
  • Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution: this online database aims to archive the artistic expression of the Syrian people during the Revolution. This includes graffiti, calligraphy, books, music and more. It also includes other projects, like the Idlib Walls project and various mapping tools.
  • Muslims of the Midwest is a digital archive containing video interviews with Muslims living in the American Midwest: it aims to shed light on the long history of Muslims living in the US and their contributions to its society.
  • The Afghanistan Digital Library is a NYU project  aiming to retrieve and restore the first sixty years of Afghanistan’s published cultural heritage and includes thousands of documents and published materials. 

Music

  • Gharamophone is an online archive run by Chris Silver (McGill) dedicated to “preserving North Africa’s Jewish musical past.” It is styled as a blog and each entry is on individual records, including a description and a link to a Soundcloud page featuring that record. 
  • Canary Records: curated by Ian Nagoski, this Bandcamp site has an archive of music in languages that are not English and is home to a number of recordings from the Mediterranean and beyond.
  • Moroccan Tapes is a searchable collection of digitized cassette tapes available for listening, downloading, and sharing. It is the project of Amino Belyamani,  a composer and multi-instrumentalist from Casablanca, Morocco.

Material History

  • Wooden Objects Index of Historic Cairo: created by Cairo’s Nadim Foundation, this tool is a database of wood in Cairo and is searchable via monument name, period, object patron, monument type and more. 
  • Ottoman Turkish Garment Database: we are not quite sure where this came from (email us if you know) but it is a fun, although in-comprehensive tool. It includes images of Ottoman clothing as well as illustrations of clothing, with various degrees of description attached to each image.

Bibliographic Tools

  • Mandumah: only available in certain countries in the Middle East and North Africa, this is essentially the JStore of Arabic-language content and can help you find Arabic articles, theses and books written in Arabic.
  • The Dominican Institute for Oriental Studies (IDEO) has an online list of resources (including Hazine!) that includes an excellent transliteration guide that should demystify the process of typing out transliterations on your computer.
  • IDEO also has a tremendous catalogue –alKindi– which can function as a bibliography to users who cannot access the physical library at IDEO in Cairo , especially because IDEO catalogues books they don’t even currently own. The catalogue is not built using one-to-one entries for books, but rather links critical editions by one author to one another and even does the same for secondary sources. It also is great for looking for Arabic-language academic research because the Dominicans collect so thoroughly.
  • Not all critical editions were created equal. Here is a list that might help you pick through the best ones.

Cultural Heritage

  • Culture in Crisis is a database run by the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) that catalogues cultural heritage preservation projects. You can run key-word searches to look for projects, along with details concerning their funding and key personnel.

Encyclopedias

  • The TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, produced by ISAM in collaboration with the Turkish Diyanet, is a multi-volume resource containing thousands of articles in Turkish.

Networking

  • Women of Islamic Studies: this tool is a crowdsourced database of women scholars who work on Muslims and Islam. Curated by Kristian Petersen, the tool is intended to promote the work of women, along with gender non-conforming or non-binary individuals. Use it to find panelists for talks, collaborators or to find something new to read. Also, feel free to add yourself or other scholars!