The objective of this project was to conduct a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of Islamic manuscript collections throughout the world, and eventually one hundred and six countries were covered, including descriptions of hitherto unknown collections in African countries such as Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Comoro Islands, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali Sierra Leone, South Africa and Togo.
European countries whose collections have been described for the first time include Albania, Cyprus Greece, and some countries of the former Soviet Union, such as Ethiopia, Latvia and Lithuania, whilst information about collections of Islamic manuscripts in Bangladesh, China, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines and Thailand, was also gathered for the first time.
There was no restriction on the language of the manuscripts; any manuscript written in the Arabic script was included in the survey. The largest proportion of the manuscript were in Arabic, followed by Persian and Turkish. Descriptions of collections containing manuscripts written in Urdu, Swahili, Punjabi, Hindi, and Kurdish were also discovered, to name just a few.
The survey included private as well as public collections of Islamic manuscripts, and provides information on the content of the collections, e.g. subjects covered, languages, approximate dates of the manuscripts, the significance of the collections, i.e. where they contain rare and unique manuscripts, or manuscripts of high artistic quality,and the conditons in which they were kept.
The World Survey of Islamic Manuscripts updates previous bibliographies in this field by covering countires and collections not previously investigated, whilst giving details of available and unpublished catalogues, handlists, registers, etc.
The World Survey of Islamic Manuscripts can never claim to be exhaustive, but we believe that it has gone a long way to promote continued research in the field of Islamic manuscripts and in doing so has helped to preserve the Islamic Heritage.
Iraq, the heartland of the ? Abbasid Caliphate, had in former centuries many great libraries of manuscripts assembled by the Caliphs, the educational establishments which they founded, and other patrons and cultivators of knowledge and learning. Unfortunately these libraries were subjected to much loss and damage in the course of subsequent invasions and incursions. - Seljuks, Mongols, etc. - and many of those that survived or were replaced were later acquired and removed by European adventurers and diplomats from the 17th century onwards. In the 19th century, however, a number of leading Iraqi scholars began to safeguard their heritage by collecting MSS and establishing libraries, often attached to colleges or mosques where they could be studied. This activity continued into the early part of this century, alongside the growth of public and endowed libraries.
In recent decades, too, there has been a keen awareness of the importance of manuscripts and their study, and a recognition that they are a national resource which needs to be preserved, protected and gathered together. The Department of Monuments & Heritage has assumed responsibility for tracing, collecting and procuring MSS, as well as registering those which have remained in private, public and state libraries and in the possession of private individuals.
This survey of the major collections in the country has revealed the prevalence of linguistic, legal and theological schools in particular regions. Some MSS contained standard educational texts, and we have found hundreds of copies of certain of these texts in college libraries in particular towns, whereas elsewhere others predominate: this enables us to trace the local distribution of set texts, the scholarly standing of their authors and their role in intellectual movements in different times and places, as reflected in the curricula and textbooks of these colleges. The study of manuscript collections can thus play a significant role in intellectual historiography.
