The goal of the project is to provide digital editions of more than 500 manuscripts and 827 paintings from the Islamicate world broadly construed. Together these holdings will represent in great breadth the flourishing intellectual and cultural heritage of Muslim lands from 1000 to 1900, covering mathematics, astrology, history, law, literature, as well as the Qur’an and Hadith. The bulk of the collection consists of manuscripts in Arabic and Persian, along with examples of Coptic, Samaritan, Syriac, Turkish, and Berber.

The primary partners are Columbia University, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania with significant contributions from Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College.

This project is funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources.

The collection is available here: http://openn.library.upenn.edu/html/muslimworld_contents.html

These 208 online manuscripts come from the following institutions:

+ 37 manuscripts from the Free Library of Philadelphia
+ 45 manuscripts from the University of Pennsylvania
+ 127 manuscripts from Columbia University
+ 1 manuscript from the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Eventually the manuscripts housed there will also be available in more public-friendly page-turning format but the OPenn raw files will remain the canonical source. In addition, the local library catalogs at Columbia, the FLP, and Penn will contain links to the digitized facsimiles as well as to other manifestations differing by institution (Columbia for instance will link to Internet Archive e-book versions).

Kelly Tuttle, the cataloger for the project has recently begun tweeting

images from the project at https://twitter.com/MmwProject

Source: Access to Mideast and Islamic Resources (AMIR)