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Arabic Manuscripts from West Africa: A Catalog of the Herskovits Library Collection

Our collection of Arabic script materials from West Africa contains over 5,000 items collected from Africa and donated to the library by several Northwestern professors.

Digitized Manuscripts

A small but growing selection of our manuscripts have been digitized and are freely available for online study.

Digitized Manuscripts

This process has occurred in conjunction with the Building Maktaba project, a joint collaboration between Northwestern’s Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) to pilot a digital collection of Arabic manuscripts from West Africa in English translation, thanks to a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) award.