Historical Primary Sources: Middle East & North Africa: Manuscripts

Ongoing project to digitize medieval Jewish manuscripts held at the Cambridge University Library. Over 18,000 manuscripts are available online, including letters and legal deeds and liturgical texts.

Ongoing project of UCLA to digitize a collection of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscripts, primarily in the fields of medicine, literature, philology, theology, law, and history, and ranging from the 11th through the 19th centuries.

Manuscripts selected from the Monastery that were microfilmed in 1949 and later digitized by the Library of Congress.

A curated selection of manuscripts hosted or held by Princeton University Library. The manuscripts are predominantly in Arabic, but there are also many in Persian and Ottoman Turkish.

A growing collection of digital editions of manuscripts and paintings from the "Islamicate world broadly construed."

A database of approximately 2500 Arab manuscripts from Mauritania together with corresponding bibliographic metadata.

Most manuscripts are in Arabic or Persian, though there are also some Hindustani and Turkish works.

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. Texts in this archive were composed, copied, studied, and preserved by Zaydi scholars from the tenth century to the present.