Items from The John Rylands Library’s Arabic manuscripts collection are available online for the first time via our Manchester Digital Collections (MDC) platform. 

Explore fully digitised copies of Quranic manuscripts, in particular a 14-volume trilingual muṣḥaf (written copy of the Qur’an, Arabic MSS 760-773), as well as codices containing poetry and animal fables, calligraphy, science, ethics, Arabic Christian works and a curious text relating the (imaginary) disputation between a coffee-drinker and a smoker.  

The John Rylands Research Institute and Library’s Arabic manuscript collection comprises nearly 900 codices covering roughly 1,000 years and a wide range of subjects. These include many Qur'anic codices, other religious works, and texts across subjects such as history, medicine, geography, cosmography and literature. Though most of the collection is Islamic, it also features a handful of Christian religious texts.

The majority of the Arabic codices were acquired by Enriqueta Rylands in 1901 with the purchase of the Earls of Crawford collection, the Bibliotheca Lindesiana, rich in Islamic volumes. Further codices were acquired by the Rylands Library via gift and purchase, and through merger with the University Library in 1972. These later acquisitions include manuscripts formerly belonging to Syrian and Arabic scholar Alphonse Mingana (1878-1937), Chetham’s Library and to Dr Moses Gaster.

This digital collection is the start of the Arabic manuscripts collection being made available virtually and to all, and will be added to as part of the Library’s continuing digitisation and retrospective cataloguing programme. Read Curator Zsófia Buda's blog to learn more.

For more: https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/explore-our-arabic-manuscripts-on-manchester-digital-collections/

Manchester University: Explore Arabic Manuscripts on Manchester Digital Collections