Cataloging is complete for 36 Arabic manuscripts from Eyes on Heritage (al-ʻUyūn ʻalá al-Turāth, project code EOH), a cultural institution in Gaza. These manuscripts were photographed before the Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2023, but the team was only recently able to return to the studio and send these digital images, via cloud servers, to HMML's partners in Jerusalem. These manuscripts represent only the part of the collection already photographed before displacement. Dated manuscripts in the collection range from 1726 (EOH 00005), but other manuscripts may be somewhat earlier.

The centerpiece of this collection comprises 19 manuscripts copied by ʻUthmān al-Ṭabbāʻ (1882-1950), a legal scholar and founder of the library at the Great Omari Mosque (project code OMM), HMML's prior digitization project in Gaza. al-Ṭabbāʻ was born in Ottoman Gaza and died in Egyptian Gaza; other than a few years studying at al-Azhar in Cairo, he lived his entire life in the tumultuous city, and several of his colophons bear witness to the contemporary calamities of World War I (EOH 00004) and the Nakbah (EOH 00005). Apart from two copies of works by earlier scholars, the manuscripts of al-Ṭabbāʻ are autograph copies of his own original works. There are also 11 manuscripts composed, copied, or owned by al-Ṭabbāʻ's teacher Aḥmad Bisīsū (died 1911), primarily on Sufism. As a result, the majority of the texts preserved in this collection are local to Gaza, almost all are new to HMML's collections, and many of them are likely unique copies of unpublished texts that do not exist outside these manuscript witnesses. The collection is therefore an invaluable and irreplaceable witness to the scholarly world of Gaza in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

This includes two copies of al-Ṭabbāʻ's large compilation of fatwas (EOH 00012 and EOH 00013) and the two parts of his extensive history of Gaza (EOH 00034 and EOH 00035), but also smaller texts on a variety of topics of interest to early-20th-century Gazans. These topics include the role of imitation (EOH 00004), analogy (EOH 00021), and individual judgment in formulating legal rulings; interaction between the traditions of Islamic law and the modern legal codes of the Ottoman Empire (EOH 00032); the legality of smoking tobacco and drinking coffee (EOH 00010 and EOH 00016); usury (EOH 00011); the signs of the Apocalypse (EOH 00005, notably written immediately in the wake of the Nakbah); and more. The importance of the Eyes on Heritage team's efforts to preserve this history under nightmarish circumstances cannot be overstated. View now