Metadata For More Than 500 Islamic And Arabic Script Manuscripts From Universität Tübingen Added To Reading Room

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The story of ʻUmar al-Nuʻmān from the Thousand and one nights, probably copied in the 15th century, from Ma VI 32 (microfilm 42227)

Metadata for more than 500 Islamic and Arabic-script manuscripts from Universität Tübingen added to Reading Room

Posted: 2022-05-18

Cataloging has been completed for the Islamic and Arabic-script manuscripts that HMML microfilmed at the Universitätsbibliothek of the University of Tübingen in the 1980s. This includes well over 300 Arabic manuscripts, over 100 manuscripts each in Persian and Ottoman Turkish, 2 in Kurdish, 1 in Pashto, and portions of manuscripts in Javanese and Malay. One of the Arabic manuscripts is in Garshuni (Syriac script). Most of the manuscripts were produced by Muslims, but a significant number are by Christians, and others are Druze.

Interesting trends include many Persian texts from the Deccan in southern India, especially the court of the Qutb Shahs in Hyderabad, and a large collection of Ismā'īlī Muslim texts in Arabic, mostly copied in Gujarat around 1900. The collection also includes some of the world's oldest Qurʼan manuscripts on parchment, especially Ma VI 165 (42340), which has been carbon dated to the 7th century CE. The contents of the library were brought to Tübingen by numerous Orientalist scholars and other collectors over the centuries, including a group of well over 100 primarily Arabic manuscripts that were collected by Johann Wetzstein in Damascus and purchased by the library in the 1860s. Existing cataloging on this collection is very limited, especially for non-Arabic manuscripts, and not many are digitized. The Universitätsbibliothek is planning to integrate HMML's new catalog information into their online catalog. View now

Image caption: The story of ʻUmar al-Nuʻmān from the Thousand and one nights, probably copied in the 15th century, from Ma VI 32 (microfilm 42227)

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