Near East: Topics

Open access public repository of aggregated Ajami texts from Muslim Africa

A huge collection of resources.

A comprehensive site on the Arab Spring.

The Archive contains information about many of the groups that were later highly active in the 2011/12 political unrest

French archives for materials relevant to its former areas of influence

Moroccan archival materials starting with the French Protectorate period. Later archives can be found under the "archvies" tab

Moroccan national archives

Downloaded exhibit catalog from the Chicago Oriental Institute Museum on Islamic bindings and books.

A union list of microforms in Middle Eastern languages held in the United States. A very high percentage are journals.

Union list of serials from or about the Middle East with holdings of member libraries.

Blog by Ellis Goldberg, professor in the Political Science Dept., University of Washington.

A website assembling and distributing information on open access material relating to the Middle East and Islamic Studies.

Free and open access to the rich cultural legacy of the Middle East and North Africa

Full text papers on the early Islamic Empire, hosted by the Universitat Hamburg.

Digital copies of over 280 manuscripts, 275 printed texts, and 50 maps from collections of Harvard University.

Look under Ressources en ligne; under Bibliotheque for DIGIMOM; under Recherches MOM then Chantiers for guides on various topics.

Corpus of digital texts, many Islamic, with weak organization.

Full text of Francophone journals published in Egypt since 1798 (in process)

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 contextualized explanatory notes and links, in both English and Arabic.

The Quran and tafsirs.

A shared library in many languages, many scripts, with written, image and audio resources. Resources drawn from 84 institutions in France, Spain, North Africa and the Levant.

See Middle East, Africa and Central and South Asia Sections for digital copies of manuscripts, journals and images.

Includes numerous articles and other substantial information on hand woven carpets.

Hundreds of Islamic manuscripts, maps & published texts dating from the 13th to 20th centuries

Open access data platform for ’Medieval’ Arabic humanities research

Digital Humanities techniques applied to Islamic history and culture.

Database of archived websites on human rights.

Arabic and English versions. See Publications and Activities in the toolbar, also al-Muntada newspaper in the right column.

An association which promotes research, preservation and education in the heritage, arts and culture of the communities of the Levant region encompassed by the former Ottoman Empire between the 17th and 20th centuries

Appears to be older but useful resources not easily found on the Levantine Heritage Foundation page

A blog with links to many projects digitizing Islamic manuscripts.

British Union Catalogue of Manuscripts from the Islamicate World,

Collection of Frank Kamarcik, including European and Islamic manuscripts.

Virtual library of digital documents, including manuscripts, free of copyright, resulting from libraries, archives and museums, public or private collections relative to the Mediterranean countries.

This project is dedicated to manuscript hunting and, in particular, to the agents behind this enterprise: the great Manuscript Hunters. We try to understand what purpose the Manuscript Hunters’ travels served, which networks and modes of patronage they could rely on. Above all, however, we are interested in the first-hand stories, the scandals, as well as the forgotten archive material that can help us reconstruct their biographies and the impact their finds have had on scholarship.

Images of manuscripts held in the University of Edinburgh library,

Digitizing and housing the Zaydi manuscript culture in its entirety in a single repository and providing comprehensive and systematic open access for scholars worldwide. Zaydi doctrinal, legal, and historical literature, including the literary legacy of the Muʿtazila

A selection of world films available for viewing for free.

At the request of the holders of audiovisual archives in the Mediterranean region, “Sharing our Mediterranean Audiovisual Heritage (Med-Mem)” offers the general public some 4000 audiovisual documents, as of Mar. 2013, from the countries in the Mediterranean area. The TV and radio archives, set into their historic and cultural context, are accompanied by a trilingual documentary note (in French, English and Arabic).

Dar al Athar al Islamiyyah (DAI) is a cultural organisation based around the private art collection owned by Sheikh Nasser Sabah al Ahmad al Sabah, founder of The al Sabah Collection and his wife, DAI director general and co-founder Sheikha Hussa Sabah al Salem al Sabah.

Includes blogs, videos, specials, a discussion board, etc.

The Islamic Department contains over 70,000 coins and other objects. It includes all coins and paper money from North Africa and the Middle East, as far as Afghanistan and Central Asia, from the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries to the present day.

The Islamic collection contains c. 10,000 coins from across the Islamic world, with strong representation from the early caliphates (Umayyad and Abbasid) particularly in the region of Iraq and Iran.

1084 Ottoman Period Coins in Kırklareli Museum

Searchable database of images of the coins held by the Dar al-Kutub in Cairo.

Over 71,000 Islamic coins illustrated and comments on almost 100,000 coins organized by dynasty

Provides information from diverse sources for educational purposes.

Over 4600 posters about Palestine from more than 50 countries.

Full text of Averroes works, a bibliographical database and additional links.

This site intends to create the infrastructure that is needed for a systematic investigation of the vast but severely understudied corpus of Islamic philosophical texts dating from 1100-1900CE

This growing archive covers modern history and culture of the Gulf and wider region.

Linguistic resource for the style of Arabic used in the Quran.

Guide to how to access and use archives, manuscript libraries, and collections in the greater Islamic world, both large and small.

Includes Syriac electronic corpus and Syriac Studies.

By the Center for the Study of Christianity of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

A geographical reference work of Syriaca.org for places relevant to Syriac studies

A digital archive that focuses on Western interactions with the Middle East, particularly travels to Egypt during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. TIMEA offers electronic texts such as travel guides, museum catalogs, and travel narratives, photographic and hand-drawn images of Egypt, historical maps, and interactive GIS (Geographic Information Systems) maps of Egypt and Cyprus, plus educational modules.

This website provides access to roughly 9000 items on political, socio-economic, demographic, and legal issues of water in the Middle East.

Accessible in English and Persian.