Manuscripts from this collection date between 16 and cover an impressive range of subjects, from language, literature and history to religion and Islamic Law. The second part of the collection only came to Leiden around the last turn of the century, through contacts of former curator Professor Jan Just Witkam. In the years following his visits, the manuscripts came to Leiden via Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857 – 1936). The first part of the collection to come to Leiden was collected by Cornelis Adriaanse (1896–1964), Dutch consul in Jeddah, who travelled to Yemen several times in the 1930s to sign a declaration of friendship and co-operation with the ruler of Yemen, Imam al-Mutawakkil Yahya. The Yemeni manuscripts in the Leiden Special Collections came to Leiden in two distinct stages. Yemeni manuscripts in the Leiden Special Collections Ṣimt al-Ǵumān fī Śarḥ ar-Risāla an-Nāsiḥa li'l-Ikhwān (Or. Legend Purported inter-relationship between significant ancient Old Testament manuscripts (some identified by their siglum ). Kitab al-Muntaza' al-Mukhtar min al-Ghayth al-Midrar al-Mufattih li-Kama’in al-Azhar min Fiqh al-A’imma al-Athar (Or. ![]() The Bodleian holds what is probably still regarded as the best collection of Hebrew manuscripts in the world, alongside an extraordinarily rich collection of early Hebrew and Yiddish printed books. She wrote about some of her findings regarding one manuscript in the Leiden Special Collections blog. Nearly 800 fully-digitized Hebrew manuscripts and printed books from the medieval and early modern periods. Karin Scheper, conservator at UBL, subjected every manuscript slated for digitization to rigorous inspection. The Zaydi Manuscript Tradition project was not only a chance for the UBL to make an important part of our Middle Eastern manuscript collections available for remote research, education and the general public, but also an opportunity to look at the state of conservation of the manuscripts. The Leiden Zaydi manuscripts will soon be available through the Zaydi Manuscript Tradition project’s platform but are already available through the UBL Digital Collections. ![]() In 2017, Professor Sabine Schmidtke (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) received a grant for the digitization of the Leiden manuscripts and many others in Western and Arabic collections in the Zaydi Manuscript Tradition project. The Leiden Special Collections hold circa 150 of these manuscripts. Many of these manuscripts were scattered over different continents in the last few hundred years. Extremist groups and indiscriminate bombardments are destroying many of the unique manuscript collections gathered over more than seven hundred years through intensive cultural exchange on the Arabian Peninsula and far beyond. The extraordinarily rich and unique literary tradition of the Zaydi Shiite Muslims, which has been flourishing in Yemen for over seven hundred years, is under serious pressure.
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