Research Guides: *Middle East and North Africa Studies: Primary Sources

What Is a Primary Source?

Primary sources provide raw data (such as first-hand accounts or other direct evidence) about a topic, usually created during the timeframe under study by witnesses or recorders who experienced the subject being documented. It is the content of the source which matters, not its physical format; a digital article in the Jordan Times on "the challenges, successes of women leaders in Jordan’s municipal sector" serves the same primary source function as the print version of the article.

This guide will highlight some of the Herskovits Library's and University Library's materials which can be considered primary sources, depending on your project.

Primary Source Examples

Disciplines	Primary source examples
Anthropology, Archaeology	Articles describing research, ethnographies, surveys, cultural and historical artifacts
Communications, Journalism	News as reported events (printed, radio, TV, online), photographs, blogs, social media sites
Education, Political Science, Public Policy	Government publications, laws, court cases, speeches, test results, interviews, polls, surveys
Fine Arts	Original art work, photographs, recordings of performances and music, scripts (film, theatre, television), music scores, interviews, memoirs, diaries, letters
History	Government publications, newspapers, photographs, diaries, letters, manuscripts, business records, court cases, videos, polls, census data, speeches
Language and Literature	Novels, plays, short stories, poems, dictionaries, language manuals
Psychology, Sociology, Economics	Articles describing research, experiment results, ethnographies, interviews, surveys, data sets
Sciences	Articles describing research and methodologies, documentation of lab research, research studies

Online Resources

Confidential Print. Middle East, 1839-1969 This link opens in a new window The Confidential Print series, issued by the British Government 1820-1970, is a fundamental building block for political, social and economic research. The collection covers Middle Eastern history from 1839-1969; countries included are: Afghanistan, Egypt, Sudan, Persia, Suez Canal, Turkey, Jordan, Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Syria.
Digital Library of the Middle East This link opens in a new window The Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME) offers free and open access to the rich cultural legacy of the Middle East and North Africa by bringing together collections from a wide range of cultural heritage institutions. Developed by an engineering team from CLIR and Stanford Libraries, the platform federates and makes accessible data about collections from around the world.
Ethnomusicology: Global Field Recordings This link opens in a new window Produced in collaboration with the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive Ethnomusicology: Global Field Recordings is comprised of over 60 field collections from ethnomusicologists dating from the mid-twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. This resource also features material from the University of Washington Ethnomusicology Archive relating to prominent ethnomusicologist Robert Garfias. The audio recordings, videos, field notebooks and journals in this resource document musical traditions and how music interacts with different societies and cultures all over the globe. There are recordings from Alaska to the Pacific Islands, West Africa to Indonesia, including religious music, secular music, celebrations and funerals. There are interviews with musicians, slides and photographs of field sites and photographs of instruments being played and in isolation. - Publisher

Middle East Materials Project (MEMP at CRL) - Guide to Collections MEMP preserves collections in digital and microform format of unique, rare, hard to obtain, and often expensive research material for Middle East studies. It also preserves deteriorating printed and manuscript scholarly materials. The geographic scope of MEMP coverage includes Arab countries, Israel, Turkey, Iran, and related areas not covered by other cooperative materials projects.

National Security and the FBI Surveillance of Enemy Aliens This link opens in a new window Provides access to the Custodial Detention Index (CDI), or Custodial Detention List that was formed in 1939-1941 by the FBI to track individuals that it deemed a threat to national security. Documents in this collection range in date from 1940 to 1978.
Political Extremism & Radicalism This link opens in a new window Liberal democracies of North America, Europe, and Australasia throughout the twentieth century have experienced a variety of forms of extremism and radicalism that have shaped mainstream political thinking as well as cultural norms. To comprehend modern governmental and societal systems researchers must understand the environment that created them, their origins, and their adversaries. In the Political Extremism and Radicalism series Gale provides insight on unorthodox (by contemporary standards), fringe groups from both the right and left of the political spectrum through rare, hard to access primary sources. Content supports scholars and students answering questions on philosophical, social, political, and economic ideologies as well as on contemporary issues surrounding gender, sexuality, race, religion, civil rights, universal suffrage, and much more. Part 1: Far-Right and Left Political Groups in the U.S., Europe, and Australia in the Twentieth Century Part 2: Far-Right Groups in America Part 3: Global Communist and Socialist Movements
The President's Daily Brief: Nixon, Ford, and the CIA, 1969-1977 This link opens in a new window Prepared by the CIA and delivered to the president each day, these documents were used to brief Presidents Nixon and Ford on world events and global threats, including détente, Ostpolitik, and the thawing of East-West relations; Middle Eastern conflicts, such as the Yom Kippur War, the Jordan Crisis, and the Lebanese civil war; U.S. actions in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos; conflicts in Africa and Indonesia; Latin American political upheavals; and international monetary developments.
Presidential Recordings Digital This link opens in a new window A rich and engaging resource featuring annotated transcripts of the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon White House tapes. The online portal for annotated transcripts of the White House tapes published by the Presidential Recordings Program (PRP). Created by a team of scholars and researchers at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, these transcripts are presented in PRDE alongside the corresponding audio, enabling users to read and listen to these conversations simultaneously. This effort at deciphering the presidential recordings and decoding their meaning allows these extraordinary documents, many of which would remain otherwise inaccessible, to come alive, providing an intimate view of life inside the Oval Office. – Publisher
ProQuest History Vault - Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files, Africa and Middle East, 1960-1969 This link opens in a new window This collection offers a detailed view of U.S. foreign relations in Africa and the Middle East during the 1960-1969 period.
Refugees, Relief, and Resettlement This link opens in a new window With nearly 70 million individuals dislocated by war, famine, and environmental disaster, refugee crises have been, and will continue to be, a highly visible part of our global reality. But understanding and addressing what the future holds requires reckoning with the past. In the series Refugees, Relief, and Resettlement, Gale opens a window onto the history of refugees and forced migration so that the thousands of scholars and students who will study—and possibly work with—refugee populations may look profitably to the primary source record of the past to help them navigate the present and the future.
Vanderbilt Television News Archive This link opens in a new window Search the Vanderbilt Television News Archive of network television news programs and other news-related programming recorded since August 5, 1968. Streaming video of NBC and CNN content is available. The Archive makes all the items in its collection available to the public through a loan service. See a librarian for more information.

Maps

Note: For maps of Africa, see our Maps & Travel Guides LibGuide.

Al-Bab: Maps of the Arab Word
Al-Bab aims to introduce non-Arabs to the Arabs and their culture.
David Rumsey Map Collection: Images of Middle East
This historical map collection has over 64,000 maps and images online. The collection includes rare 16th through 21st century maps of America, North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Pacific and the World.
Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection: Middle East Maps
From the University of Texas at Austin.
Where is the Middle East?
From the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations.

Manuscripts

Arabic Manuscripts from West Africa: A Catalog of the Herskovits Library Collection
We house an important collection of Arabic script materials from West Africa. It contains over 5,000 items collected from Africa and donated to the library by several Northwestern professors. Original, hand-written manuscripts make up more than 60 percent of the content, which also includes “market” editions (photocopies of handwritten works that are often sold in African marketplaces), printed editions, and photocopies. Most are in Arabic, though some are in ajami—African languages such as Hausa, Fulfulde, and Wolof written in the Arabic script.
Arabic Manuscripts at the British Library The British Library’s collection of Arabic manuscripts is world-famous. It is one of the largest in Europe or North America, comprising almost 15,000 works in 14,000 volumes. The collection includes some of the finest manuscripts of the Holy Qur'an along with autograph and other high-quality copies of major legal, historical, literary and scientific works. The manuscripts offer a rich resource for study of Islam and the Muslim world, Islamic arts and sciences, the Arab world and all aspects of Arabic writing.
Arabic Papyrology Database A tool enabling you to access the editions of Arabic documents written on different material such as papyrus, parchment or paper. Those productive editions are an often unraised treasure for almost every aspect of Islamic history up to the 16th c. A.D.
Avestan Digital Archive The Avestan Digital Archive (ADA) seeks to be a digital archive containing all Avestan manuscripts spread all over the world. The Avesta, the holy book of the Zoroastrian religion, was last edited at the end of the 90s of the 19th century by the German scholar K. F. Geldner. We claim that presently a new edition is needed.
Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, Muenchen The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek preserves an extensive collection of manuscripts, which will be made available step by step to the interested public on the Internet. The offer of works available in digitised form is expanded continuously. The digital copies produced from the originals are full colour copies, those produced from microfilms are available in a bitonal or grey-scale quality.
La Biblioteca Virtual de Patrimonio Bibliográfico The Virtual Library of Bibliographical Heritage is a cooperative project of the Ministry of Culture and the Autonomous Regions, which aims to distribute printed books and manuscripts from Spain's Historical Heritage by digital facsimile.
Bibliothèque Nationale de France - Arabic manuscripts
The Cultural Imaginings Project Cultural Imaginings: the creation of the Arab World in the Western Mind is a collaboration between The George Washington University's Gelman Library and Georgetown University's Lauinger Library funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services to evaluate automatic book scanning methodology by digitizing approximately 2,500 monographic volumes and a number of bound manuscripts from the Middle East and North Africa.
Digitized Arabic Manuscripts at the American University of Beirut Libraries
European Cultural Heritage Online - Collection of the Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiative (ISMI) This collection of historical sources is made openly available by the Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiative (ISMI). ISMI is an international collaborative endeavor that is working to make available a vast array of information online about the exact sciences in the premodern Islamic world. This material is accessible without charge for researchers and experts in the field as well as to the general public worldwide. The collection of historical manscripts of the Staatsbibliothek Berlin is made available in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin and the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
From Pen to Printing Press: Ten Centuries of Islamic Book Arts at the University of Indiana The purpose of the “Explore a Manuscript” section is to offer a detailed visual overview of Islamic manuscripts using a selection of works from Indiana University collections, thus introducing the viewer to some of the main formal elements of a variety of illustrated and unillustrated manuscripts. The six manuscripts from the collections selected to be featured in this section are representative of the wide artistic and thematic range of Islamic book art traditions. A number of these manuscripts are religious or devotional in nature while others are literary works.
Wellcome Arabic Mansucripts Online The Arabic manuscripts collection of the Wellcome Library (London) comprises around 1000 manuscript books and fragments relating to the history of medicine. For the first time this website enables a substantial proportion of this collection to be consulted online via high-quality digital images of entire manuscripts and associated rich metadata.
Wellcome Library - Arabic Manuscripts Nearly 500 volumes of Arabic manuscripts covering not only medicine and pharmacology, but cosmology, alchemy, cookery and more are available online.
Islamic Heritage Project - Harvard University The IHP collection now includes over 280 manuscripts, selected from Houghton Library and the Harvard Art Museum/Arthur M. Sackler Museum. Dating from the 10th to the 20th centuries CE, these Islamic manuscripts constitute a record of the diverse artistic traditions, literary cultures, learning traditions, and religious interpretations of the pre-modern Islamic world.
Islamic Medical Manuscripts at the National Library of Medicine For students, the site includes an extensive glossary of medical, scientific, and book-production terminology linked to the text. For advanced scholars, the site provides a catalogue raisonné (including images) from the 300 or so Persian and Arabic manuscripts in the National Library of Medicine. Most of these manuscripts deal with medieval medicine and science and were written for learned physicians and scientists. Some of the manuscripts are richly illuminated and illustrated.
King Saud Library, Riyadh
Islamic Manuscripts from Mali - Library of Congress Features 32 manuscripts from the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library and the Library of Cheick Zayni Baye of Boujbeha, both in Timbuktu, Mali. The manuscripts presented online are displayed in their entirety and are an exemplary grouping that showcase the wide variety of subjects covered by the written traditions of Timbuktu, Mali, and West Africa.
Mahaja.com
MANUMED Project MANUMED is a project for the development of the written and immaterial heritage of the euro-mediterranean area.
Marmara Üniversitesi Nadir Eserler Koleksiyonu
Minasian Collection of Persian and Arabic The Minasian Collection of Persian and Arabic manuscripts consists of works related to the studies of theologians and scholars in centers of learning in Iran from the 16th through the 19th centuries. The manuscripts, which include both bound collections and single works, chiefly date from the 14th to the 17th centuries, and shed light on the social, religious, and political history of Iran and Shī'īsm.
Minassian Collection of Qur’anic Manuscripts - Brown University This database catalogues the holdings of over 200 Qur’anic manuscript folios dating from the 9th to the 16th centuries housed within the special collections of the Brown University libraries. These items were acquired as part of a treasury of rich artistic and textual items donated in 1998 to Brown by Adrienne Minassian, the daughter of Kirkor Minassian (1874–1944), who was an active art collector and dealer based in New York and Paris in the early 20th century. In addition to the forty distinct manuscripts of the Qur’an represented here, the collection includes numerous Persian manuscripts, calligraphic panels, Persian and Central Asian ceramics and other art objects, as well as an impressive selection of miniature paintings from the Persian, Mughul and Indian traditions.
Online Archive of California Search for "Arabic manuscripts"
Poetry and Prayer: Islamic Manuscripts from the Walters Art Museum The sacred, devotional, and non-religious manuscripts presented here were created across the breadth of the Islamic world and date from the 9th through the 19th century. They bear witness to remarkable achievements in literature and the arts of the book, such as calligraphy, illumination, and illustration.
Princeton Digital Library of Islamic Manuscripts Subject coverage is broad and comprehensive, including theology based both on Qur’ān and tradition (hadīth); Islamic law (fiqh); history and biography (especially of the Prophet and other religious leaders); book arts and illustration; language and literature; science; magic, and the occult; and other aspects of the intellectual and spiritual life of the Islamic world and its diverse peoples. Representative works of virtually every important Muslim thinker are present.
Oriental Digitized Materials at The Royal Library, Copenhagen Includes collections such as Arabic Manuscripts, Persian Manuscripts, Early Printed Books from Iran, and more.
Turning the Pages Online - National Library of Medicine A collection of various manuscripts and early printed books, from the Middle Easy and elsewhere.
Orientalische Handschriften - Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg
Islamische Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig
Mingana Collection - University of Birmingham The Mingana Collection contains more than 3000 manuscripts in at least eleven languages, ranging from around the 6th to the 20th centuries. The collection is focused on manuscripts from the Middle East in Arabic, Syriac, Persian and Greek and has particular strengths in illustrated manuscripts, and early Islamic and Syraic materials (including one of the oldest Qur'ans in existence).
Islamic Manuscripts - University of Michigan
Islamic Manuscripts Research Guide - University of Michigan In addition to details on the collection history, size, and scope, you will find strategies for locating manuscripts of interest, instructions for viewing manuscripts in the Library, and advice on locating, viewing and downloading digitized manuscripts.
The Book of Curiosities - University of Oxford, Bodleian Library In June 2002, the Bodleian Library acquired an illustrated manuscript of a hitherto unknown Arabic cosmographical treatise, the يKitāb Gharāʾib al-funūn wa-mulaḥ al-ʿuyūn, known as the Book of Curiosities. The manuscript is a copy, probably made in Egypt in the late 12th or early 13th century, of an anonymous work compiled in the first half of the 11th century in Egypt. The treatise is extraordinarily important for the history of science, especially for astronomy and cartography, and contains an unparalleled series of diagrams of the heavens and maps of the earth.
Penn in Hand: Selected Manuscripts - University of Pennsylvania
Daiber Collection Database - University of Tokyo This collection is the corpus of manuscripts mainly focused on Arabic, collected by Dr. Hans Daiber, a professor of Islamic studies in Germany, over many years. Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo purchased the collection, its first part in 1986-1987 and its second part in 1994.
Arabic Papyrus, Parchment, and Paper - University of Utah
West African Manuscript Database This project seeks to bring together, in a single database, a sizeable cross-section of Arabic materials, despite sometimes imperfect annotation and documentation, to provide users with an index to roughly two hundred years of Sahelian literary activity.
Middle East and North African Manuscripts - World Digital Library

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