While paper and ink are rather durable means of recording information, the sad fact is that books don’t last forever. Throughout the ages, numerous manuscripts have been lost to fire, flood and natural degeneration. Many other books of historical interest for Muslims are now in private collections or museums and are inaccessible to researchers, let alone the general public.
The Al-Azhar project aims at digitizing and creating an online resource from Cairo’s world famous Al-Azhar Library. Through the project it is hoped that 42,000 ancient Islamic manuscripts and 128,000 books will be scanned and posted online for free public use.
This project, the biggest of its kind in the world, began in 2001 upon the instructions of Dubai Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Rashed Al-Maktoum in cooperation with Dr. Mohamed Sayed Tantawi, the grand imam of Al-Azhar. The project has a budget of $5 million. The objective of using the latest technology to preserve the wealth of knowledge now housed at one of the world’s oldest universities is now well advanced.
The project’s website, www.alazharonline.org, has received tremendous international interest with more than 30,000 visitors from all over the world in the last three weeks, 45 percent of them from the United States. The books are indexed by author or subject. There is a separate section for rare manuscripts, many of which shed light on the thought of the early Islamic centuries. Unfortunately there is no English interface on the site, so Arabic is a must.
Each entry for a book or manuscript gives a summary of details on the author and an abstract of the book. Then the actual scanned pages of the book may be read online. Scanning the actual pages of the works avoids any chance for corruption of the text. It is especially interesting, even for those who cannot read Arabic, to see the beautifully illuminated ancient manuscripts. The website is certain to become an inspiration and reference for Muslims worldwide.