Curated Selections & Collaborative Efforts at PUL
Manuscripts of the Islamic World offers a curated selection of extraordinary manuscripts hosted or held by Princeton University Library. The manuscripts are predominantly in Arabic, but there are also many in Persian and Ottoman Turkish. The Collections owe their beginnings to the remarkable manuscripts collected and donated by Robert Garrett (class of 1897) from 1900-1942. The Collections continued to grow under the tenure of Enno Littmann, librarian of what was then called the Oriental Collections, and through the bequests of the personal libraries of Rudolf-Ernest Brunnow and David Paton. By 1965, the Collections had become the best in North America, thanks to the efforts made by Rudolph Mach, curator of the Near East Collections from 1955-1977. Today, the Manuscripts of the Islamic World collections are the largest of their kind in North America.
The manuscript digitizations here are a fraction of the full Manuscripts of the Islamic World collections, housed in Special Collections in Princeton's Firestone Library. Efforts are ongoing to make the manuscripts of these collections more accessible through conservation, catalog record updates, and digitization.
For more information on the collections and how to access them, please visit the Manuscripts of the Islamic World at Princeton University Library research guide.
