Sources
Kairawan is built from the catalogues of libraries and manuscript projects around the world. Every record links back to its source, and we follow each collection's licence and attribution terms. These are the collections indexed so far.
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Hill Museum & Manuscript Library
The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, based at Saint John's University in Minnesota, has spent decades photographing and preserving manuscripts from endangered and under-resourced collections: monasteries, churches, and private libraries across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Its vHMML platform is one of the largest manuscript archives in the world.
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West African Arabic Manuscript Database
The West African Arabic Manuscript Database documents the rich and often-overlooked manuscript traditions of the Sahel: the scholarly libraries of Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal. Built over decades of fieldwork, it records the Arabic manuscripts held in family and institutional collections across West Africa.
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Princeton Geniza Lab
The Princeton Geniza Lab studies the documents of the Cairo Geniza, the vast cache of medieval texts, many in Judaeo-Arabic, preserved for centuries in a Cairo synagogue. Its database draws together Geniza fragments now scattered among libraries worldwide, with transcriptions built by generations of scholars.
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Fihrist
Fihrist is the United Kingdom's union catalogue of manuscripts from the Islamic world, pooling the holdings of major British libraries, among them the Bodleian, Cambridge, the John Rylands Library, and SOAS. Its name is the Arabic word for a catalogue or index.
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BnF Gallica
Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, whose collection of Arabic and Islamic manuscripts is among the most important in the world. Kairawan indexes the BnF's Arabic-script manuscripts made available through Gallica.
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Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, the Bavarian State Library, is one of Europe's great research libraries, with a distinguished collection of Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman manuscripts. Much of it has been digitised and opened to the public through its Munich Digitisation Centre.
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Princeton University Library
Princeton University Library holds one of the largest collections of Islamic manuscripts in the Western hemisphere, including the celebrated Garrett collection. A substantial part has been digitised and opened for study.
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Bodleian Library
The Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, one of the oldest research libraries in Europe, holds a major collection of Islamic manuscripts with particular depth in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish material. Bodleian records reach Kairawan via the FIHRIST union catalogue, which the Bodleian co-edits.
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The John Rylands Research Institute and Library
The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, part of The University of Manchester, holds an internationally important collection of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscripts assembled in the nineteenth century, including the renowned Bland and Lindesiana collections. Catalogue records reach Kairawan via the FIHRIST union catalogue.
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Cambridge University Library
Cambridge University Library, founded in the fourteenth century, holds a major collection of Islamic manuscripts, with significant strength in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish material curated by its Near and Middle Eastern Department. Digital surrogates are published on Cambridge Digital Library; cataloguing records reach Kairawan via the FIHRIST union catalogue, which Cambridge UL co-edits.
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Jarring Collection
Held at Lund University Library, the Jarring Collection preserves the manuscripts gathered by the Swedish diplomat and orientalist Gunnar Jarring, with a particular strength in the Islamic written culture of Central Asia. Lund has digitised the collection and released it under an open licence.
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Vatican Library
The Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, founded in the fifteenth century, is among the oldest libraries in the world and holds a significant collection of Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman manuscripts. Many have been digitised through its DigiVatLib platform.
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Licence information is shown to the best of our current understanding. Canonical terms live at each institution’s official terms-of-use page (linked above). Please consult the source for definitive licensing before any reuse.