Research Guides: Middle Eastern and North African Studies: Arabic / Arab Culture

Find materials in our library

In our Catalog Advanced Search, select Subject from the drop down menu and search on terms such as

Arabic language
Arabic literature
Arabic poetry
Arabic fiction
Civilization, Arab
Arab countries

Or use the names of particular countries (or cities) with relevant terms (Intellectual life, Social conditions, Politics and government, History, etc). You may also browse the titles with call numbers DS 1-DS 248 and DT 43-DT 363.3

For titles in Arabic, select Arabic under Language on the Advanced Search page. For literary works, select Arabic under Language and search using terms such as Poems, Short stories, Novel (riwāyah / رواية) etc or search for particular authors or titles. Use ALA-LC Romanization / Transliteration or search in Arabic script (for example Dunyā Mīkhāʾīl or دنيا ميخائيل).. You can also browse the titles with call numbers PJ7501-PJ8517. For studies, specify particular titles or authors or specify particular genres with historical periods / events and / or geographic terms.

Catalog Advanced Search

For a broader search across book and article length literature, try Library Articles Search

Library Articles Search

Assorted Online Bibliographic Resources

Almandumah Databases | قواعد معلومات المنظومة
Series of databases with full-text content for Arabic academic journals, conferences, and dissertations from 1921 to present

Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies This link opens in a new window
(MECAS) An index of research, policy and scholarly discourse on the countries and peoples of the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa
Database of Arabic Literature in Western Research (DAL) This link opens in a new window
Bibliographic database of Arabic literature in western research.

Reference Works

Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics This link opens in a new window
Comprehensively covers all aspects of Arabic languages and linguistics.

Bibliographies and bio-bibliographical surveys
Listing of bio-bibliographical works for Arabic literature etc available in print and online

Brockelmann Online This link opens in a new window
(GAL) Bio-bibliography of Arabic works and their authors, with an emphasis on the Classical Period.

Brockelmann in English: The History of the Arabic Written Tradition Online
English translation of Brockelmann's famous Geschichte der Arabischen Litteratur (GAL). Brockelmann's work offers bio-bibliographic information about works written in Arabic and their authors, with an emphasis on the classical period
Arabic Literature of Africa Online
Bio-bibliography on the Arabic manuscript tradition in the African continent, which continued well into the 20th century CE. It offers authoritative information about African authors, the texts they wrote in Arabic, the manuscripts in which these texts are found, and the locations of these manuscripts, together with bibliographical references to the literature
Arab women writers a critical reference guide, 1873-1999
edited by Radwa Ashour, Ferial J. Ghazoul, Hasna Reda-Mekdashi ; translated by Mandy McClure
Arab Women Writers (Diane d'Almeida, Boston University Libraries)
"Women writers whose works have been translated into English are included in this bibliography."
Arab Womens Writing Project
"The Arab Womens Writing Project develops a living dataset of major figures and published works associated with Arab Womens Writing and unifies and promotes this body of work to a global readership. The project is a collaboration between Dr. Maria Assif and the UTSC Library, with support from Library Emerging Professionals and the Jackman Humanities Institute’s Scholars-in-Residence program."
Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature (Refqa Abu-Remaileh)
"...a digital-born project that retraces and remaps the global story of Palestinian literature in the twentieth century, starting from the Arab world and going through Europe, North America, and Latin America. Sitting at the intersection of literary history, periodical studies, and digital humanities, Country of Words creates a digitally networked and multilocational literary history—a literary atlas enhanced. The virtual realm acts as the meeting place for the data and narrative fragments of this literature-in-motion, bringing together porous, interrupted, disconnected, and discontinuous fragments into an elastic, interconnected, and entangled literary history."
ArabLit : Arabic Literature and Translation (ed Marcia Lynx Qualey)
Blog platform with features of particular writers / works, reading lists, podcast (with Ursula Lindsey) and more
Cairo BookStop (Nancy Linthicum & Michele Henjum)
Extensive reference site intended to help anyone curious about how bookselling and publishing operate in Cairo. Includes lists of publishers and booksellers as well as a map providing their locations
Arabic Comic Books
A starting point for finding information on comic books and graphic novels in the Arab world
The Cambridge Companion to Modern Arab Culture (2015)
#SudanSyllabus (curated by Razan Idris, who was advised by Kayla Wheeler, Rogaia Abusharaf, Marie Grace Brown, Hind Makki, and Ola Diab)
"Directly inspired by the #BlackIslamSyllabus (curated by Kayla Wheeler), Sudan Syllabus seeks to provide English-language resources about Sudanese history to academics, journalists, and Sudanese diaspora interested in learning more about Sudan. Sudan Syllabus focuses on Sudan as seen by Sudanese, emphasizing visual, material, gendered, oral, educational, and “sidelined” history, and directing readers towards contemporary Sudanese communities who are living history beyond false dichotomies."
In Search of African Arabic (Vaughn Rasberry)
Reflection essay asking "The majority of the world’s Arabic speakers inhabit Africa and its diasporas. So why is much of continental Africa absent in Arabic language curricula?"
Arab Hyphen : Arab Arts and Literature
blog about Arab art, diaspora, identity and culture from Tasnim Qutait
Arab-American Studies Research Guide (Chuck Ransom)
Bibliography of the Egyptian Uprisings (Mark Allen Peterson)
Growing bibliography from Mark Allen Peterson hosted on his blog Connected in Cairo
Arab Spring: A Research & Study Guide (Ali Houissa)
Arab Uprisings Research Guide (Nabila Shehabeddine)
Druze Studies Reference Portal (Rami Zeedan et al)
Aims to support study Druze culture, literature, and history with A to Z of the Druze (documenting places, persons, prophets and sages, authors, and literature) Systematic Literature Reviews on the Druze, and other projects.
The Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question
From the Institute for Palestine Studies & The Palestinian Museum, an open acess Arabic–English platform entirely devoted to the history of modern Palestine, from the end of the Ottoman era to the present. Includes Overall Chronology, Thematic Chronologies, Highlights, Biographies, Places, and Documents (consisting of hundreds of primary texts, photographs, maps, and charts)
The Palestine Chronology (Institute for Palestine Studies)
"Since the beginning of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, the Institute for Palestine Studies has chronicled daily political and military events surrounding the Palestine Question. These day-to-day summaries are based on Palestinian, Arab, Israeli and international sources. Prior to August 2018, the chronology was published quarterly in the Journal of Palestine Studies. It is now updated monthly on this platform."
Palestine Directory
"A directory of links and free-to-access resources from and about Palestine. Our mission is to center Palestinian voices and their experiences." Compiled by "two Palestinians who want to help celebrate our culture with Palestinians around the world. We work in archive/library/museum spaces and are concerned with allowing any Palestinian free access to their heritage."
References (Insaniyyat: Society of Palestinian Anthropologists)
Bibliography of the academic publications of contemporary Palestinian anthropologists and anthropologists of Palestine. Requests for additions or updates welcome.

Dictionaries / Wordlists / Language Tools

Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon Online
Originally published in London: Williams & Norgate, 1863. Via the Tyndale Archive of Biblical Studies.
Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon (Fons Vitae)
Searchable online version of Lane's Lexicon
المعجم المعاصر | صخر
Lexical tool incorporating Arabic-English dictionary, Arabic-Arabic heritage dictionaries and more. From Sakhr Software Company
الباحث العربي : قاموس عربي عربي
لسان العرب، مقاييس اللغة، الصحاح في اللغة، القاموس المحيط، العباب الزاخر
Levantine Dictionary
English-Levantine dictionary for Lebanese, Syrian, Palestinian and Jordanian
معجم الدوحة التاريخي للغة العربية | The Doha Historical Dictionary of Arabic
Historical lexicon for Arabic
المعجم التاريخي للغة العربية بالشارقة
Arabic Ontology الأنطولوجيا العربية
Cross-searchable lexical tool from Mustafa Jarrar of Birzeit University with dictionary and thesaurus functionality
Qabas Lexicon | معجم قبس الحاسوبي (Birzeit University)
"Qabas stands out by linking its lexical entries (lemmas) with lemmas from 110 different lexicons and numerous morphologically annotated corpora (around 2 million tokens), creating an extensive lexicographic graph"
Arabic Almanac
View, Browse, and Search Hans Wehr's Dictionary, Lane's Lexicon and Supplement, and Hava's Dictionary
Arabic Almanac iPhone App (Hans Wehr)
Digital version of the famous Hans Wehr dictionary, searchable in Arabic by root. Also available for Android.
Broken Plurals (Khaled Elghamry)
Three comprehensive lists of broken plurals in Arabic extracted from three Arabic Dictionaries
khallina | خلينا
Khallina is an open source tool that helps teachers and independent learners of Arabic explore Arab culture.
OERabic (Open Educational Arabic Resources) Project
"ambitious initiative that aims to enhance the mastering of Arabic by creating bespoke creative learning (and teaching) resources"
OERabic Routes & Roots
Open access project for simplifying the learning & teaching of Arabic vocabulary through rootwords

Digital Libraries / Text Collections / Corpora

al-hakawati | الحكواتي
A digital public library of Arab and Islamic culture, available in Arabic and English
Qatar Digital Library
Qatar Digital Library is free to use and reuse.This growing archive covers modern history and culture of the Gulf and wider region, available online for the first time. The QDL provides access to Archival files, Letters, Maps, Manuscripts, Photographs.
Digital Assets Repository (Bibliotheca Alexandrina)
"Digital Assets Repository (DAR) is a system developed at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the Library of Alexandria, to create and maintain the Library's digital collections. Explore our large collection of Arabic digital books, photo albums and more."
Arabic and Middle Eastern Electronic Library = AMEEL
Web-based portal and a digital collection of information for the study of the Middle East, including its history, culture, development, and contemporary face. Currently [2018.06], AMEEL holds approximately 350,000 pages of full text, indexed and searchable in the language of publication including Arabic and Western scripts. The full text in AMEEL has been extracted using Optical Character Recognition software (OCR) rather than re-keying all works.

Arabic Collections Online This link opens in a new window
Arabic Collections Online (ACO) is a publicly available digital library of public domain Arabic language content.
Classic Arabic Texts Online This link opens in a new window
Fully searchable editions of al-Balādhūrī's Futūḥ al-buldān and Ibn al-Faqīh's Mukhtaṣar Kitāb al-Buldān.

المكتبة الشاملة | Shamela
Thousands of Arabic books (including various editions of important classical texts) available for browsing, download, search
المكتبة الشاملة الحديثة
مشروع تقني يهدف لتوفير خدمات بحث وتصفح متقدمة لمحتوى المكتبة الشاملة
المكتبة الوقفية
Platform for searching thousands of digitized Arabic books, many with scans accessible on Archive.org
nusus | corpus of digitized Arabic texts
"Nuṣūṣ is a corpus of digitized Arabic texts designed to fill gaps in extant digital corpora. Originally a collection of early Sufi and Sufi-adjacent texts, nuṣūṣ has since expanded to include early works on kalām, falsafa, and Christian theology."
أرشيف الشارخ للمجلات الأدبية والثقافية العربية | صخر
Digitized Arabic literary and cultural periodicals. Search or browse by country, publication title, article title. From Sakhr Software Company.
Arabic Online Periodicals (Translatio Project)
اتحاد مكتبات الجامعات المصرية
Egyptian Universities Libraries Consortium Research portal. Union catalogue for collections of Egyptian university libraries
الموسوعة الشعرية | Encyclopaedia of Arabic Poetry
Database of more than 3 million verses in 143,000 odes in 3,080 diwans as well as reference works on language and literature
Adab.com | الموسوعة العالمية للشعر العربي
Modern and classical Arabic poetry online. Search / browse the works of authors by name, title, country, etc
Cultural and Political Texts from Iraq | نصوص ثقافية وسياسية من العراق
Site includes different political and cultural texts from Iraq published by the Iraqi government in the 1970s and 1980s. Michael Degerald gathered these texts while doing dissertation research on the period of Ba'thist rule in Iraq
Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions (DASI)
"DASI seeks to gather all known pre-Islamic Arabian epigraphic material into a comprehensive online database, with the aim to make available to specialists and to the broader public a wide array of documents often underestimated because of their difficulty of access." Current projects include Corpus of South Arabian Inscriptions, Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA), Corpus of Aramaic Inscriptions, and Corpus of Nabataean Inscriptions.
Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA)
Aims to compile digital corpus of all known pre-Islamic inscriptions in North and Central Arabia. Entries include: reading of each text both in roman transliteration and in fonts reproducing the ancient letters, translation in English, references to earlier readings, commentary where necessary, bibliography, and all known information about the inscription (provenance, carving technique, relationship to other texts or to rock drawings, structures, etc.) as well as photographs (where available) and facsimiles of each text that can be downloaded free at publishable resolutions. Fully searchable for names, words, grammatical features and subjects
Quranic Arabic Corpus
Annotated linguistic resource which shows the Arabic grammar, syntax and morphology for each word in the Holy Quran. The corpus provides three levels of analysis: morphological annotation, a syntactic treebank and a semantic ontology
arabiCorpus (Dil Parkinson, BYU)
Free, untagged, 30-million-word corpus with a user-friendly interface. Maintained by Dil Parkinson, professor of Arabic, this corpus allows users to find larger structures and grammatical patterns through frequency analysis, regular expression searching, and other advanced interface features.
The ArabiCorpus is a highly regarded tool for both researchers and advanced Arabic students
Masader Project : Online Catalogue for Arabic NLP Datasets
MADAR Corpus (Multi-Arabic Dialect Applications and Resources)
"Collection of parallel sentences covering the dialects of 25 cities from the Arab World, in addition to English, French, and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)" From the MADAR مدار Project --- large-scale project that aimed to improve dialectal Arabic processing
Gumar Corpus = Gulf Arabic Corpus (CAMeL lab NYUAD)
Drawn chiefly from a unique genre of written material that is specifically known to GA: online anonymous publicly published long conversational novels.
Classical Arabic Dictionary dataset
"Classical Arabic Dictionary consists of approximately one hundred million words of Arabic collected from texts dating between 431 and 1104 CE, principally books and essays, along with word occurrences, source documents and related metadata." Accessed via the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC)
Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC)
Repository and distribution point for corpora and other resources for research on human language, including the Classical Arabic Dictionary dataset. U-M affiliates may use corpora purchased through the U-M institutional membership. To download corpora, (and to see which corpora are available for download,) register as a guest user or log in with your previously created account. New users will then be contacted by the Library's administrator to arrange access.
Digital Corpus for Graeco-Arabic Studies
The corpus assembles a wide range of Greek texts and their Arabic counterparts. It also includes a number of Arabic commentaries and important secondary sources. The texts in the corpus can be consulted individually or side by side with their translation. The majority of texts can also be downloaded for further analysis.
Glossarium Græco-Arabicum
Makes available the files of a lexical project, intended to open up the lexicon of the mediæval Arabic translations from the Greek. It contains images of the filecards (ca. 80,000) which have not yet been published in the analytical reference dictionary A Greek and Arabic Lexicon (Leiden: Brill, 1992ff.), and comprises Arabic roots from the letter jîm to the end of the Arabic alphabet. The database provides search facilities for Greek words, Arabic words and roots, as well as the authors and titles of the source texts.
OpenArabic Project (Maxim Romanov)
Aims to build a machine-actionable corpus of premodern texts in Arabic to encourage computational analysis of the Arabic literary tradition. Soon to be relocated to Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI)
Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI)
"Multi-institutional effort to construct the first machine-actionable scholarly corpus of premodern Islamicate texts"
An Egyptian Sheikh’s Literary World
"...reconstructs one large Arabic book collection of 480 print and manuscript titles from the inheritance inventory of Sheikh Mustafa Salamah al-Najjari (d. 1286/1870), an important intellectual in late Ottoman Egypt. We then use these titles to build an enhanced data set, which allows us to analyze and visualize bibliographic, economic, geographic, and network data."

Archival Collections

Islamic Manuscripts Collection (U-M)
1,103 volumes (codices and rolls) and a small number of single leaves, dating from the 8th to the 20th century CE and carrying roughly 1,800 titles. Includes 800+ volumes carrying nearly 1400 texts in Arabic
Sinai Manuscripts Digital Library
"The Sinai Manuscripts Digital Library is a publication of St. Catherine’s Monastery of the Sinai, Egypt, in collaboration with the UCLA Library and Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (EMEL). It hosts online the results of the Sinai Library Digitization Project, a ten-year collaborative effort to digitize the unparalleled manuscript library of St. Catherine’s Monastery."
Cairo Genizah Collection (Cambridge University Library)
Manuscripts from across the Taylor-Schechter, CUL Or. and Jacques Mosseri Collections available online, including a substantial number of documents (letters and legal deeds) and liturgical texts

Middle Eastern Manuscripts Online 1: Pioneer Orientalists This link opens in a new window
Collection of 303 digital Arabic manuscript volumes from Leiden University Library.
Middle Eastern Manuscripts Online 2: The Ottoman Legacy of Levinus Warner This link opens in a new window
Collection of 140 volumes of Arabic, Persian, and Turskish manuscripts totaling 45,809 pages from the Leiden University Library.

Middle Eastern Manuscripts Online 3 : Arabic Manuscripts from the Hungarian Academy
Collection consists of 200 manuscripts with just over 300 works

Early Arabic Printed Books from the British Library 1475-1900 (Module 2) This link opens in a new window
Full-text searchable early printed books in Arabic script on sciences, history, geography from the holdings of the British Library.

Islamic Lithographs Digital Collection (Islamic Studies Library, McGill University)
Browse by language and place of publication
Sudan Open Archive | أرشيف السودان المفتوح
Digital access to knowledge about Sudan
Iraqi Knowledge Portal | البوابة العراقية للمعرفة
Portal covering a wide range of mainly Iraqi collection material including articles, newspapers, manuscripts, photographs, coins, stamps, etc. Open search. Submit form to request scans of materials, limited by number on a weekly basis.
Khazaaen | خزائن
"Khazaeen is a voluntary independent assosication, centered in Jerusalem, where it first started as an initiative in October of 2016 as a result of the collective effort of our Arab youth from different parts of the world. And that effort had this unified aim of establishing a societal archive that documents the daily life of the Arab world combined with people’s stories through gathering ephemera material" Growing digital archive
Digital Palestinian Archive (Birzeit University)
"The Birzeit University Palestinian Archive Project (BZUPAP) is dedicated to documenting the life of Palestinians (persons, families and organizations) over the past century. Documents collected include the most diverse types of written and audiovisual materials (texts, photographs, videos, recordings). This growing, largely open archive is being preserved at the university"
الأرشيف الرقمي للمتحف الفلسطيني | The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive
"With archival records nearing about two hundred thousand digitized items dealing with a variety of historical and social axes, the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive illuminates over 200 years of the Palestinian narrative through photographs, artworks, audio recordings and documents..."
ذاكرة فلسطين Palestine Memory
"مشروع أطلقه المركز العربي للأبحاث ودراسة السياسات، وغايته الإسهام في تاريخ فلسطين وتوثيق حركتها الوطنية، من خلال تأسيس قاعدة بيانات رقمية، تحفظ أراشيف كيانات وهيئات سياسية، وجمعيات محلية، ومجموعات شخصية، وأوراقًا عائلية."
Planet Bethlehem Archive
"The Planet Bethlehem Archive brings Bethlehem's history of global connections to life through photos, audio and video recordings, forgotten treasures and exquisite works of art, all made available in digital form here on the site. Every Bethlehem family has a story to tell. We invite you to discover their fascinating world. The archive currently consists of 8 collections and 34 sub-collections. For a quick view of all collections and sub-collections you can use the "Collection Index" or...browse all collections."
Open Jerusalem Catalog
Search or browse archival sources from collections around the world.
May Seikaly Palestinian oral history collection, circa 1990s - 2000s
"This collection consists primarily of recordings of oral histories of Palestinians conducted by May Seikaly. The recordings include audio cassettes and digital files. There are also summaries, transcripts, releases, photographs, and ephemera. The ephemera includes maps, pamphlets, newspaper clippings, articles and other materials. The audio cassettes are arranged chronologically by year, and arranged alphabetically within each year."
Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA)
"The Palestinian Oral History Archive is a project to digitize, index, catalog, preserve, and provide access (through a searchable digital platform) to an archival collection of around 1,000 hours of testimonies with first generation Palestinians and other Palestinian communities in Lebanon." Hosted by AUB Libraries
Al-Nakba: 1948 Palestinian Exodus (American University of Beirut)
"The guide was created in support of The Palestinian Oral History Archives Project at AUB Libraries. The guide focuses on the various aspects of historiography of 1948 Palestinian Nakba and highlights selective library resources, projects and websites."
Nakba Archive
"The Nakba Archive is a grassroots oral history collective founded in 2002 to record and commemorate the experiences of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon who lived through the 1948 Nakba, ‘catastrophe.’ Over the course of 1947-48, during the creation of the Israeli state, close to one million Palestinians were forcibly expelled and dispossessed of their homes and lands by European Jewish settlers, and around 530 Palestinian villages were destroyed. This collection of over 500 video interviews, with first-generation Palestinian refugees from more than 150 Palestinian villages and towns, documents this violent history of mass displacement in vivid detail."
Project 48
"Project48 provides educational material, eyewitness testimonies, images, videos and artifacts that bring to life the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe” in Arabic), its generational impact, and the struggle for return of Palestinian refugees....Project48 was created to center Palestinians in the telling of their own history..." Includes curriculum, galleries, testimonies
Palestine Open Maps
Platform which seeks to provide open-source and make searchable, for the first time, a uniquely detailed set of historic maps from the period of the British Mandate of Palestine and curate layered visual stories that bring to life absent and hidden geographies, in collaboration with data journalists, academic researchers, and civil society groups
Palestine Film Index
"Palestine Film Index is a growing list of films from and about Palestine and the Palestinian
struggle for liberation, made by Palestinians and those in solidarity with them."
Arabian Gulf Digital Archive | الأرشيف الرقمي للخليج العربي
"Primary source documents about the Arabian Gulf Open to all"
Filāḥa Texts Project
The purpose of the Filāḥa Texts Project is to publish, translate and elucidate the written works collectively known as the Kutub al-Filāḥa or ‘Books of Husbandry’ compiled by Arab, especially Andalusi, agronomists mainly between the 10th and 14th centuries
ذاكرة مصر المعاصرة (Bibliotheca Alexandrina)
إن مشروع ذاكرة مصر المعاصرة هو محاولة لإنشاء أكبر مكتبة رقمية للمواد ذات القيمة الثقافية والتاريخية المتعلقة بتاريخ مصر المعاصر، بداية من عهد محمد علي في ١٨٠٥ ونهاية بعهد الرئيس السادات في ١٩٨١
Includes digital reproductions / recordings of interviews & speeches, photographs, advertisements, documents, maps, & more
Egypt: Records of the U.S. Department of State, 1853-1962
Archive covering Egypt from the years before the opening of the Suez Canal through the era of British domination, Egyptian nationalism, and independence.
Anwar Sadat Archives (University of Maryland)
Comprehensive electronic archive of publicly available, English-language material (both written and audio-visual) pertaining to the presidency of Anwar Sadat
Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Trans-Jordan: Records of the U.S. Department of State, 1836-1944
Covers U.S. perspectives on Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Trans-Jordan, from Ottoman rule to the era of British and French mandates following the First World War

U.S. Intelligence on the Middle East, 1945-2009 This link opens in a new window
U.S. Intelligence on the Middle East, 1945-2009 covers U.S. intelligence community’s spying and analytic efforts in the Middle East.
Confidential Print: Middle East This link opens in a new window
Digital collection of documents issued by the British Foreign and Colonial Offices.

Gertrude Bell Archive (Newcastle University)
Digital platform with images and transcriptions of photographs, letters and diary entries from the papers of the British archaeologist, and colonial diplomat Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) who traveled widely in the region, served the British administration in Mesopotamia, and was especially involved in the establishment of the Kingdom of Iraq.

Middle East Online: Series 1: Arab Israeli Relations, 1917-1970 This link opens in a new window
Includes original source material from the Foreign Office, Colonial Office, War Office and Cabinet Papers.

Foreign Office Files for the Middle East (1971-1981)
North Africa & the Middle East 2011-2013 (Internet Archive)
This collection documents the events in Northern Africa and the Middle East starting in January 2011. Content includes blogs, social media and news sites about Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Sudan and other countries. Countries separated by site groups (scroll down the page to see all of them). Archived content is in Arabic, English, and French.
Jasmine Revolution - Tunisia 2011 (Internet Archive)
This collection consists of websites documenting the revolution in Tunisia in 2011. Our partners at Library of Congress and Bibliothèque Nationale de France have contributed websites for this collection, and the sites are primarily in French and Arabic with some in English.
Middle East Women’s Activism digital archive (SOAS)
"...collection of interviews with 96 women of different generations in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, which form the basis of a monograph, entitled, Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. All interviews were conducted by Nicola Pratt, University of Warwick, in 2013-2014 as part of a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship exploring the relationship between gender and geopolitics in the context of the Middle East."
Portraits, Individuals and Groups of People in Algeria and Tunisia (U-M Library Digital Collections)
"Portraits, Individuals and Groups of People in Algeria and Tunisia is a collection of 69 photographs featuring portraits of people and landscapes of Algeria and Tunisia. The photographs, believed to have been taken around 1910, provide insight into ethnic costumes, clothing and dress codes of North African indigenous people during the first decade of the 20th century."
Sudan Memory / ذاكرة السودان
"The Sudan Memory project seeks to conserve and promote valuable cultural materials from and about Sudan through digitisation and via an online platform....The materials scanned by Sudan Memory include films, photos, manuscripts, objects, documents and art works."
Arachne
"iDAI.objects arachne (short form: Arachne) is the central object database of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) and the Archaeological Institute of the University of Cologne. It is administered by Reinhard Förtsch and part of the iDAI.world." A number of projects are represented, including Syrian Heritage Archive Project, The Archive of Friedrich W. Hinkel, Bequest of Friedrich Rakob, African Archaeology Archive Cologne
ARSHEEF (Princeton University)
"ARSHEEF is a collaborative project that aims at promoting research in North Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and South Asia. Based on first-hand experiences of scholars and graduate students, ARSHEEF makes available up-to-date guides to libraries and archives across North Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and South Asia."

News and Data

Archive of Arabic Talkshows (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München LMU)
Search programming by outlet, show, keywords, presenters, guests, date, country, etc.
Jarāʾid : A Chronology of Nineteenth-Century Periodicals in Arabic (1800-1900)
Ongoing project compiling a chronology of 19th c periodicals in Arabic or in Arabic and in another language or in Arabic written in a different script. Work in progress
Jara'id A Chronology of Arabic Periodicals (1800-1929) | 2020 Edition
2020 edition of this valuable research tool
Jrayed | Arabic Newspaper Archive of Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine
"digital archive of Arabic newspapers and journals primarily from late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine. The titles include a wide variety of political, cultural, religious and economic viewpoints, and span dailies to quarterly periodicals. This archive is searchable by title and author name, and can be browsed by date, title, city and frequency.
This collection contains 30,706 issues comprising 206,594 pages and 453,604 articles."
al-Quds (Jerusalem) Archive (Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University)
Digital archive for this significant publication which, when established in Jerusalem in 1908 by Jurji Habib Hanania (1864-1920), became the first privately owned public daily newspaper in Palestine
Arab World Online News
Selection of online news outlets for the Arab world
The Arabist (Issandr El Amrani et al)
Site covering Arab politics and culture with a particular focus on Egypt. Founded in 2003, less frequently updated since 2013. Includes reporting, podcasts, etc
Qifa Nabki : News and commentary from the Levant (Elias Muhanna)
Blog about Levantine politics, history, and culture, written by Elias Muhanna
Arab Barometer | الباروميتر العربي
Established in 2005, the Arab Barometer was developed in consultation with the Global Barometer project, a network composed of regional barometers in Latin America, Sub-Saharan, East Asia and South Asia. Like other regional Barometers, the objectives of the Arab Barometer are to produce scientifically reliable data on the politically-relevant attitudes of ordinary citizens, to disseminate and apply survey findings in order to contribute to political reform, and to strengthen institutional capacity for public opinion research. Reports, data, infographics, methodology, etc
Arab Pulse blog | نبض العرب (Arab Barometer)
Discussion and infographics of findings from Arab Barometer survey waves, organized by date, country, topic
Arab Barometer Survey Data
Discussion of the project's main methodological choices, challenges, and survey process for each wave and country, as well as data downloads and online analysis
Arab Barometer Public Opinion Survey Series (ICPSR, U-M)
The Arab Barometer Public Opinion Survey Series reflects multi-country social surveys designed to assess citizen attitudes about public affairs, governance, and social policy in the Arab World, and to identify factors that shape the public's attitudes and values. The first wave of the Arab Barometer began in 2006/07 with the first round of surveys administered in seven countries. An eighth country was surveyed in 2009. First wave covered Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Bahrain, Algeria, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Yemen. Fourth wave conducted in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, and Tunisia, 2016

Performing Arts

Arabic Wax Cylinder Collection (UCSB)
21 commercial brown wax cylinder recordings, made in the Middle East (likely Damascus), possibly around 1900. Recordings are solo and groups of male vocalists accompanied by stringed instruments (oud). Available digitally through the UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive
Kutay Derin Kuğay collection (UCSB)
"429 Turkish and Greek 78rpm recordings spanning the period between 1906 and 1963. Difficult to find in their original format and reissued largely with poorly done transfers, Greek and Turkish recordings such as these serve as an important musical chronicle of popular joys, anxieties, nostalgia, and emotional escapes during the painful yet ultimately hopeful transition from the late Ottoman Empire to the emergence of modern independent republics in the eastern Mediterranean"
Iraqi Maqam | المقام العراقي
Classical and Traditional Music of Iraq. This educational, non-profit blog is exclusively dedicated to document and explain the ancient musical art of the Iraqi Maqam, and to preserve the memory and works of Iraq's most prominent maqam masters.
Arabic Music : An Exhibition at The Irving S. Gilmore Music Library (Yale)
Music, song and dance (al@mashriq)
Overview of artists, instruments, etc
Educational Resources on Palestine (Society for Arab Music Research = SAMR)
"This curated list of resources is intended to provide university-level music and dance educators with relevant sources for understanding, contextualizing, and teaching Palestinian cultural practices....a starting point for understanding the role of music, dance, sound, and performance in Palestinian everyday life, resistance, and cultural practice in Palestine and elsewhere. Resources include articles and manuscripts, documentaries and feature films, musical recordings and transcripts, and online archives. They also include suggestions for how to facilitate discussions..." Also includes "a list of active Palestinian musicians living within and outside of Palestine"

Palaeography / Manuscript Studies

Islamic Manuscript Studies (Evyn Kropf)
Bio-bibliographical sources, reading lists, catalogs and digitized manuscripts, palaeography resources, etc

Handwritten Heritage : Arabic Texts in Manuscript

A selection from the Islamic Manuscripts Collection preserved in the University of Michigan Library

التراث المخطوط : نصوص عربية مخطوطة

مختارات من مجموعة المخطوطات الاسلامية المحفوظة في مكتبة جامعة ميشيغان

Exhibit featuring a selection of prominent Arabic writings from the classical and post-classical periods among the holdings of the Islamic Manuscripts Collection preserved in the University Library. Carefully transcribed copies of classic literary works by al-Mutanabbī (d.965), Abū al-ʻAlāʼ al-Maʻarrī (d.1057), and al-Ḥarīrī (d.1122) appear alongside influential grammatical, scientific, and mystical writings - even a text on musical theory and performance. Offered in conjunction with the Office of Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs (MESA) celebration of Arab Heritage Month. Last held March-April 2018

Handwritten Heritage : Arabic Texts in Manuscript (Evyn Kropf)
Exhibit booklet for the Handwritten Heritage exhibit. Bibliographic details in Arabic and English. Narrative and explanatory texts in English

Last Updated: Dec 3, 2024 3:32 PM

Subjects: International Studies

Tags: ancient near east, is guides, mena, middle east, north africa, southwest asia, southwest asia and north africa, swana