Early Arabic Printed Books from the British Library:
Explore Islamic faith and law with the first major text-searchable online archive of pre-20th century Arabic printed books
Early Arabic Printed Books from the British Library is the online presentation of one of the world's most important Arabic collections, based on A.G. Ellis's 1894-1901 record of publications. The full collection includes books on a variety of subjects, printed from the 15th to 19th century in Arabic script, as well as translations into European and Asian languages. Together, these works demonstrate Europe's fascination with and assimilation of ideas and knowledge originating in the Arabic-speaking world.
Early Arabic Printed Books from the British Library: Religion and Law includes works of Islamic literature, key among which are numerous editions of the Qur'an with translations and commentaries, traditions (hadith), works of the religious life, and much more. Islamic law materials include works of Hanafi law, Maliki law, and Shafi'i Law, as well as fiqh, statutes, and rulings.
Scholars can search on the full text of items in Arabic, English, French, German, Latin, Italian, Dutch and Spanish while also being able to discover content in Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, Syriac and more.
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Additional Details
subjects covered
- Law & Legal Studies
- Middle Eastern Studies
- Religion & Philosophy
Support Materials
View and download these PDFs
Platform Features & Tools
Optical Character Recognition
Full-text searching across Arabic language texts with newly developed optical character recognition software (OCR).
Arabic-Language User Interface
Meet the research needs of Arabic speakers with a complete and selectable Arabic interface with right-to-left text and navigation.
Subject Indexing
Library of Congress Subject Indexing to facilitate discovery and research of content by subject.
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