The objective of this project was to conduct a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of Islamic manuscript collections throughout the world, and eventually one hundred and six countries were covered, including descriptions of hitherto unknown collections in African countries such as Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Comoro Islands, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali Sierra Leone, South Africa and Togo.
European countries whose collections have been described for the first time include Albania, Cyprus Greece, and some countries of the former Soviet Union, such as Ethiopia, Latvia and Lithuania, whilst information about collections of Islamic manuscripts in Bangladesh, China, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines and Thailand, was also gathered for the first time.
There was no restriction on the language of the manuscripts; any manuscript written in the Arabic script was included in the survey. The largest proportion of the manuscript were in Arabic, followed by Persian and Turkish. Descriptions of collections containing manuscripts written in Urdu, Swahili, Punjabi, Hindi, and Kurdish were also discovered, to name just a few.
The survey included private as well as public collections of Islamic manuscripts, and provides information on the content of the collections, e.g. subjects covered, languages, approximate dates of the manuscripts, the significance of the collections, i.e. where they contain rare and unique manuscripts, or manuscripts of high artistic quality,and the conditons in which they were kept.
The World Survey of Islamic Manuscripts updates previous bibliographies in this field by covering countires and collections not previously investigated, whilst giving details of available and unpublished catalogues, handlists, registers, etc.
The World Survey of Islamic Manuscripts can never claim to be exhaustive, but we believe that it has gone a long way to promote continued research in the field of Islamic manuscripts and in doing so has helped to preserve the Islamic Heritage.
The following country entries stand out for the reviewer as particularly well done: Morocco, long and detailed as befits a country of such importance for Islamic MSS; the Netherlands (but can we expect other than the best from J.J.Witkam?); Palestine is excellently covered too and includes the whole of "Greater Palestine"; finally the Portugal , stands out with its on-the-spot descriptions of previously unpublished MSS and careful highlighting of important works. Meanwhile, our appreciation and congratulation go out to Geoffrey Roper who was responsible for putting the scattered entries together. -- G.Rex Sama; Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series, Volume 4, Part 2, July 1994
