Community Resources

Experience Middle Eastern and North African culture like never before with recipes, music, poetry, and more.

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona is excited to share free Middle Eastern and North African culture resources with our community members. Explore free language resources written by native speaking bloggers, homestyle recipes from Egypt, podcasts on contemporary issues in Beirut and Lebanon, and so much more.

Alphabetized Archives

  • Afghanistan Digital Collection (Afghanistan Center at Kabul University and University of Arizona University Libraries): More than 22,130 items, including 2,400 books, more than 3,000 pamphlets and reports in Afghan and Western languages and 7,000 different series of newspapers, serials, magazines, periodicals and journals from recent and not so recent Afghan history. Though focused on Afghanistan, the topics covered are wide-ranging, from art and archeology to agriculture, education to engineering, poetry to politics. The authors include academics, experts, NGOs, government institutions and Ministries.
  • Afghanistan Digital Library (a project of NYU Libraries): Works published in Afghanistan between 1870 and 1930.
  • Aga Khan Library Digital Collections: A diverse collections of rare books in the Aga Khan Library, London. They are digitizing their collections including Ottoman, Ismaili, Muhammad Abduh, and more.
  • American Center of Oriental Research Photo Archive: The complete collection, estimated to number more than 100,000 images, provides primary visual documentation of Jordan, including the major archaeological and cultural heritage projects that the center has sponsored across the country over the decades.
  • American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) Conservation Archives: 7,000 years of Egyptian history represented in 70,000 photographic slides, 200,000 images, 1,200 documents, 1,000 drawings, as well as a small selection of artifacts and multimedia content.
  • Anemi Digital Library: Established by the University of Crete Library in 2006, the Anemi Digital Library provides access to a rich collection of material related to Modern Greek Studies, including materials in Karamanlidika/Karamanı Turkish, Ottoman Turkish written in the Greek script. To access them, click here. The digital archive also includes collections on Greeks in Egypt, Cyprus, Edirne, Thessaloniki, Crete, and other areas of the Ottoman Empire in a variety of languages. To see this list of collections, click here.
  • Arabic Collections Online: Publicly available digital library of public domain Arabic language content. ACO currently provides digital access to 14,183 volumes across 8,675 subjects drawn from rich Arabic collections of distinguished research libraries.
  • ARCHNET: Open access to a very unique set of resources related to the built environment of the Muslim world. These archives, images, drawings, publications, seminar proceedings, articles, serials and project documentation comprise an unparalleled resource and research tool for the study of Islamic art and architecture.
  • AUC Rare Books and Special Collections Digital Library (American University of Cairo): Photos, postcards, periodicals, films, oral histories, maps, manuscripts, architectural plans, and more, mostly related to Egypt and the American University of Cairo.

  • Database for Ottoman Inscriptions / Osmanlı Kitabeleri Projesi: The Database of Ottoman Inscriptions (DOI) is a searchable digital database comprising information about, as well as transliterations and pictures of, all the Turkish, Arabic and Persian architectural inscriptions created in the Ottoman lands during Ottoman times.
  • Digital Bodleian (University of Oxford): A variety of digital collections including Oriental Collections, Maps, and more.
  • Digital Library of the Middle East: Offers free and open access to the rich cultural legacy of the Middle East and North Africa by bringing together collections from a wide range of cultural heritage institutions.
  • Duke University Libraries Arabic and Persian Manuscripts: The Rubenstein Library at Duke holds Arabic and Persian manuscripts dating roughly between the 9th and 20th centuries. The collection includes Qur'ans, hadith, and commentaries, as well as various literary texts. There is also a significant papyri collection from Egypt in Arabic and Greek.

  • Eckstein Albums at the University of Cambridge Skilliter Centre Research Library and Archives: The Eckstein Albums document a medical survey of maternal and infant health in rural Anatolia from 1935 to 1939, captioned by a German Jewish migrant to Atatürk’s new Republic.
  • Europeana Collections: Europeana Collections is an archive holding 50 million digitized materials from thousands of other archives, libraries, and museums covering a wide variety of subjects and regions including the Middle East and North Africa. 
  • The Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society: A Joint Venture with the Friedberg Genizah Project. Includes the Cairo and Yemenite Genizah, Judeo-Arabic corpus, and many more manuscripts, books, and documents that relate to Judaism and Jews.
  • Getty Research Institute Library: Pierre de Gigord collection of photographs of the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey.
  • Google's Mali Magic: 40,000+ digitized pages from Timbuktu manuscripts. Also, contains resources on Malian art, architecture, and music.

  • Hathi Trust Digital Library: HathiTrust provides long-term preservation and access services to digitized content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house member institution initiatives. Items in the public domain are in full-view for everyone and items held in copyright are searchable.
  • Hazine (Listicle of online archives of all types)
  • Hebrewbooks.org: Founded in order to preserve old American Hebrew books that are out of print and/or circulation.
  • Internet Archive: The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.
  • The Jewish Theological Seminary Library's Special Collections: Includes digital resources such as Hebrew manuscripts, Genizah fragments, Jewish marriage contracts from the 17th to 20th centuries, broadsides, and more. Additional resources are being digitized daily.

  • Kanaan: Kanaan is a digital archive offering images and virtual tours of historical and heritage sites and structures in the city of Gaza. Named after the Canaanites who settled Gaza thousands of years ago, Kanaan has so far documented 311 historical buildings and 76 archaeological sites on the Strip.
  • Khalidi Library Digital Collections: The Khalidi Library in East Jerusalem and the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) have recently re-catalogued the Khalidi Library's digitized manuscript collection.The library of the Khalidi family was established in 1900 to be open to the public, with the aim of encouraging the spread of learning, and reviving interest in the classics of Islamic learning, as well as modern subjects. The collection includes hundreds of works on legal topics along with works on the interpretation and recitation of the Qur'an, on Sufi thought and practice, among others. The vast majority of the texts are written in Arabic, but there are small portions in Ottoman Turkish and Persian, and two manuscripts in Kurdish.
  • Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies: Historical and cultural resources related to the Lebanese diaspora.
  • Koç University Digital Collections: This site provides access to over 210,000 digitized or born-digital images in the Koç University collections featuring prints, photographs, slides, maps, newspapers, posters, postcards, manuscripts, streaming video, and more.
  • The Kurdish Digital Library (Kurdish Institute of Paris): The largest Kurdish library in the West, it contains over 10,000 monographs about the Kurds, in 25 languages, several tens of thousands of published documents, collections of reviews and newspapers, journals, photographs, videos, post cards and posters, as well as audio archives and music recordings. Much of it is digitized.
  • Leiden University Overview of Digital Sources for the Study of the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey: Nicole van Os has compiled 50+ page PDF list of archives, periodicals, maps and other visual materials, podcasts, secondary literature, laws, calendars, and much more. All are related to the Ottoman Empire or Republic of Turkey and many, if not most, are open access.
  • Library of Congress Digital Collections: Includes collections such as Persian Language Rare Materials, Abdul Hamid II Collection, Iraq War 2003 Web Archive, and more.

  • Oman Digital Library (Middle East Institute): The Oman Library's digital collection consists of rare books and manuscripts. The topics range from history and culture to works of fiction from the early twentieth century. The collection includes materials in seven different languages -- English, Arabic, French, Farsi, Urdu, Ottoman Turkish, and Turkish -- and publications spanning the period from 1700 to 1921.
  • Open Archives: Openarchives.gr is a massive digital portal providing a single point of access to Greek scientific content sourced from libraries, archives, and research institutions across Greece and Cyprus. Like in the Anemi Digital Library, one can find materials on Asia Minor (click here) and materials in Karamanlidika/Karamanı Turkish (click here). Materials are available in a variety of other languages as well, though most are in English and Greek.
  • OPenn (Hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries): Curated collections like Cairo Genizah and Manuscripts of the Muslim World.
  • Oracc - Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus: A collaborative effort to develop a complete corpus of cuneiform whose rich annotation and open licensing support the next generation of scholarly research. Dozens of projects include translations of tablets ranging in topic from astronomy to literature to medicine to witchcraft and more.

  • The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive: 200,000 photographs, artworks, audio recordings and documents covering over 200 years of the Palestinian narrative.
  • Project SAVE (Armenian Photograph Archive): Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archive, Inc. collects, documents, preserves, and shares images of all subjects and time periods relating to the Armenian people and the work of Armenian photographers. The digital collection holds 11,000 images mostly photographed by Christian missionaries and workers in the Near East Relief (an American charity) from 1900-1920s.
  • Qatar Digital Library: Qatar National Library's archive covering modern history and culture of the Gulf and wider region. It includes archives, maps, manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs and much more, complete with contextualized explanatory notes and links, in both English and Arabic.
  • Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland: Free online access to part of the society's historical collections, including archives, manuscripts, artwork, photographs, and more.

  • SALT Research: Collections focus on the period from the late 19th century to the present day with an emphasis on Turkey -primarily Istanbul- and the geographies of the SE Mediterranean and SE Europe. Includes visual and textual sources and documents on the art history of Turkey post-1950, the development of architecture and design in Turkey since the start of the 20th century, and the transformations in society and the region from the last century of the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic up until the 1990s.
  • Schusterman Center for Israel Studies Research Guide: Resources guide to archives, newspapers, books, and more related to modern Israel Studies.
  • Sefaria: Free digital Jewish texts in Hebrew and translation. Their database can also be downloaded for research and projects.
  • Sifriya Haleumit (National Library of Israel): Books, newspapers, and more available through key word search.
  • Smithsonian Open Access: Collection images, books, more.
  • SOAS, University of London Digital Collections: As a world leader in the study of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, SOAS, University of London now makes selected collections available for online use.  Its digital collections include archives and manuscripts, photographs, maps, books and journals, newspapers, oral histories, films and audio.  Nearly all are available freely, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, all year round.
  • Syri.ac: Hosted by the University of Oklahoma's Department of Classics and Letters and the Office of the Vice President for Research, Syri.ac aims to be a comprehensive annotated bibliography of open-access resources related to the study of Syriac.

  • Wikilala: Intends to provide easy access to millions of pages of Ottoman print documents such as books, magazines, newspapers, etc. produced in the 200-year period from 1729 (when İbrahim Müteferrika started running the first Turkish printing press) to the letter revolution in 1928. Plans exist to Latinize and even simplify the texts accessible to make it available to a wider public. They have also recently added early Republican Period newspapers printed in the Latin alphabet. Anyone should be able to create a free account that will be accessible through at least 2022.
  • Women's Worlds in Qajar Iran: WWQI is an archive of materials related to the social and cultural history of Iran during the Qajar period (1789-1925). The archive seeks to support scholarship on women's history and gender studies by digitally compiling and making available an array of writings, photographs, financial and legal documents, artwork, and everyday objects contained in private and public collections around the world. 
  • World Digital Library (U.S. Library of Congress): Photos, maps, manuscripts from countries around the world.

Food

  • Al-Bab: Dedicated to all things related to Middle East and North Africa, Al-Bab hosts a food and recipe blog which aims to educate readers about the histories and complexities of MENA food traditions, while also providing recipes and updates on the latest MENA cookbook publications.
  • Clifford Wright: An accomplished food writer and cook, Clifford Wright’s website on Italian and Mediterranean cooking hosts a list of recipes by country and region, including from Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, and the Levant.
  • Food of Egypt (Egyptian recipes)
  • The Iraqi Family Cookbook: A blog introducing an Iraqi cookbook that includes over 150 recipes, which have been handed down through many generations.
  • Kitchen of Palestine (Palestinian recipes)
  • Lebmania (Lebanese recipes)
  • The Libyan Kitchen (Libyan recipes)
  • My Halal Kitchen: A blog revolving around Halal cooking. Its creator Yvonne Maffei shares recipes, reviews cookbooks, and discusses food history and travel experiences.
  • Ozlem’s Turkish Table: A blog committed to sharing the simple Turkish and Mediterranean recipes of professional home-cook Ozlem Warren.
  • The Persian Pot (Persian recipes)
  • Queen of Sheba (Yemeni recipes)

Map Collections

Music

  • Amir ElSaffar - Iraqi Maqam Class: A blog for beginners seeking to learn Iraqi Maqam.
  • Foundation for Arab Music Archiving and Research (AMAR): Started in 2009, AMAR is a Lebanese foundation committed to the preservation and dissemination of traditional Arab music. AMAR owns 7,000 records, principally from the “Nahda” era (1903 – 1930s), as well as around 6,000 hours of recordings on reel.
  • Gharamaphone: A site dedicated to preserving North Africa’s Jewish musical past.
  • The Golhā: The Golhā ('Flowers of Persian Song and Music') comprise 1400 radio programs consisting of approximately 886 hours of programs broadcast over a period of 23 years - from 1956-1979.
  • Harvard Library Archive of World Music: The Loeb Music Library hosts several collections of field recordings of musics worldwide, commercial recordings, and streaming resources of ethnomusicological interest. Some include Turkish classical, Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox, Ethiopian, and Iranian Khorasan.
  • Iraqi Maqam: An educational blog dedicated to documenting and explaining the ancient musical art of Iraqi Maqam, and to preserving the memory and works of Iraq’s most prominent Maqam masters.
  • Learn Arabic Music: An excellent resource for musicians of all levels to learn Arabic music forms.
  • Maqam World: Maqam World is an online resource dedicated to teaching the Arabic Maqam modal system, which is the foundation of traditional Arabic music.
  • Music Online: Contemporary World Music: Contemporary World Music delivers the sounds of all regions from every continent. The database contains genres such as reggae, worldbeat, neo-traditional, world fusion, Balkanic jazz, African film, Bollywood, Arab swing and jazz, and other genres.
  • Qeenatha Radio: Qeenatha hosts the largest Assyrian music database on the internet.
  • Radio Yerevan Archive: A corpus of over 900 Kurdish songs available for listening on various digital platform, compiled by the German-Kurdish Cultural Institute.
  • Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries: A virtual encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions. The collection provides interested listeners with a variety of online musical resources.
  • Syrian Cassette Archives (FORTHCOMING): A forthcoming project that aims to archive, preserve and share the substantial collection of audio cassettes that archivist Mark Gergis acquired in Syria between 1997 and 2010. The collection currently contains over 400 audio cassette-tapes from what can be called Syria’s cassette-era. Collecting these audio-artifacts reflects decades of on-site research and personal connections with Syrian music shops, producers and musicians.
  • Turkish Music Portal: Developed by the Turkish Cultural Foundation to preserve and promote Turkish culture and heritage world-wide. The site contains extensive background on the history and various forms of Turkish music, as well as on performers, instruments, and listening samples.
  • The Yayla: An internet radio program that explores the full range of Turkey's music past and present.

Periodicals

This list includes resources that are primarily digitized periodicals (e.g. newspapers, journals). More archives that include periodicals may be found in the archive section above, which encompasses a wide range of archival material.

  • Access to Mideast and Islamic Resources (AMIR): List of open-access historical newspapers and other periodicals in Middle Eastern Studies.
  • Al-Sharekh Archive: Al-Sharekh Archive is perhaps one of the only digitization initiatives to focus on literary journals in the Arabic language. The collection hosts over 200 literary journals dating from the early Arab renaissance (al Nahda) in the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twenty-first century.
  • Directory of Free Arab Journals: The Directory of Free Arab Journals (DFAJ) is an initiative of Middle Eastern Open Access activists aiming to produce a directory of all open access (OA) scientific journals produced in Arab countries. DFAJ currently includes 250 journals from 172 publishers in 17 countries.
  • Egyptian Press Archive: The Egyptian Press Archive is an initiative of the Centre d'Etudes et de Documentation Economiques, Juridiques Sociales (CEDEJ) based in Cairo and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA). The archive consists of more than 500,000 press articles and reports spanning the mid-1970s until 2010 and covering over 30 different subjects including Egyptian economic, social, and political life. 
  • Hazine (Listicle of online archives, including periodicals)
  • Isam İlahiyat Makaleleri Veri Tabanı / Articles on Theology Database: PDFs of articles
  • Iraqi Academic Scientific Journals: 353 open-access peer-reviewed academic journals on topics ranging from biology to Iranian studies. Some journals are in English but most appear to be in Arabic.
  • Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies: Arab American newspapers published in North and South America from the late 1880s to the mid 1900s.
  • Leiden University Overview of Digital Sources for the Study of the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey: Nicole van Os has compiled 50+ page PDF list of archives, periodicals, maps and other visual materials, podcasts, secondary literature, laws, calendars, and much more. All are related to the Ottoman Empire or Republic of Turkey and many, if not most, are open access.
  • Middle Eastern and North African Newspapers: The Middle Eastern and North African Newspapers collection is part of East View's Global Press Archive (GPA) program. This collection includes periodicals ranging from the 1870s to the present and covering major events in the region's history such as the 2 World Wars, the Suez Crisis, the rise of the petroleum industry, and the Arab-Israeli conflict, among many others.
  • The National Library and Archives of Iran: The site (in Persian) has recently made available digitized journals from the Qajar period to post-revolution.
  • NC State University Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies Arab American Newspapers Project: The Khayrallah Center has been digitizing Arabic language newspapers (rendering print and microfilm into image and PDF files) published in the US between 1894 and 1960. At this point our collection spans 17 newspapers, with nearly 300,000 pages. We continue to add to our collection daily from newspapers around the world, including Arabic language newspapers from the US, Argentina and Brazil. Fully searchable beta version.
  • Osmanlıca Mahalli Gazeteler: An online platform that is digitizing Ottoman-language periodicals AND translating them into the Latin script. There are newspapers from as far away as London. There is a way to search for key words, an Ottoman dictionary, and a date converter.
  • Syrian Prints Archive: Syrian Prints Archive is an independent documentary initiative "without any political, partisan or religious affiliations", that provides archiving and storing services for Syrian print media issued since the outbreak of the March 2011 Revolution, regardless of content or orientations. Between March 2011 and the end of 2014, Syrian media witnessed a significant rise in the number of print publications.
  • Tel Aviv University and National Library of Israel's Historical Jewish Press: This site contains a collection of Jewish newspapers published in various countries, languages, and time periods.
  • University of Arizona Library Digital Collections: Afghanistan newspapers dating between the 1940s and 1980s.
  • University of Bonn - Chronology of Periodicals: A comprehensive chronology of Arabic, Persian and Ottoman-Turkish periodicals, which were published during the period from 1840 to 1950 and were to find them.
  • University of Bonn - Digitization Project "Translatio": Includes Arabic, Ottoman/Turkish, and Persian periodicals dating between the 1860s and 1940s.
  • University of Manchester Library - Nashriyah: Digital Iranian history: These newspapers and periodicals, many of which have been only partially accessible inside Iran, cover the defining moments from the following three eras: The premiership of Mohammad Mossadegh and the August 1953 coup d'état against his government (1950-53); the 1979 Revolution; and the late 1990s/early 2000s ‘reform era’ of former President Mohammad Khatami.

Podcasts

  • Abbasid History Podcast: A platform for the study of the pre-modern Islamic(ate) past and beyond.
  • A Better Beirut: A podcast focusing on contemporary issues in Beirut and Lebanon.
  • Ajam Media Collective: An online space devoted to analyzing society and culture across the lands it refers to as Ajamistan. AMC imagines this landscape as spanning from eastern Turkey, across Iraq, the Caucasus, and Iran and into Central Asia, Afghanistan, and South Asia. These lands, AMC suggests, are united by a shared Persianate culture and heritage.
  • ANAMED Library: The ANAMED Library at the Koc University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in Istanbul records all of their lectures, on subjects ranging from the archaeological to the contemporary.
  • ARCE Podcast: The American Research Center in Egypt podcast program features exciting research and fieldwork, presented by scholarly authorities.
  • Art Illuminated: A podcast focusing on traditionally-inspired contemporary art and artists from the MENA region.
  • B is for Bacchus: A podcast featuring wine stories from the Levant, Eastern Mediterranean, and the Caucasus.
  • Bulaq: A podcast about contemporary writing from and about the Middle East and North Africa.
  • Identity Politics: A podcast on race, gender, and Muslim peoples in the United States.
  • Hazine (Listicle of podcasts)
  • Iranologie: A podcast exploring Iranian history and culture with episodes available in both English and Persian.
  • Kerning Cultures Network: A Middle East-oriented podcast collective with shows and episodes available in both English and Arabic.
  • KPFA - Voices of the Middle East and North Africa: KPFA explores the richly diverse world of MENA culture and politics, including the complex web of class, gender, ethnic, religious, and regional differences which distinguish the ways of life and political and ideological perspectives of the region's peoples.
  • The Kurdish Edition: A podcast to present stories and analyses related to the Kurdish politics, society, art and culture. Some episodes are in English and some are in Kurdish.
  • LSE Middle East Centre Podcast: A podcast sharing lectures, interviews, and book launches hosted by the London School of Economics and Political Science.
  • Middle East Focus: A weekly podcast featuring discussion and analysis on U.S. foreign policy and contemporary political and social issues in the Middle East and North Africa.
  • New Books Network: The Middle Eastern Studies podcast of New Books Network hosts interviews with scholars of the Middle East about their new books.
  • Ottoman History Podcast: A podcast about the Ottoman Empire, the modern Middle East, and the Islamic world.
  • Oxford Middle East Centre Podcast: A podcast sharing lectures, interviews, and book launches hosted by the University of Oxford.
  • She Speaks: Academic Muslimahs: An interview-based show featuring women Muslim academics, which is meant to elevate the profile of Muslim women in academia.
  • SOAS Radio: An online radio station and production company based at SOAS, University of London. SOAS radio broadcasts weekly and produces a variety of music and speech podcasts with a focus on Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
  • Society for Armenian Studies Podcast: A podcast devoted to interviewing scholars in the field of Armenian Studies.
  • Sowt: A podcasting network based in Amman, Jordan, that produces content (mostly in Arabic) for the Arabic-speaking world on topical matters like taboo culture, music, and politics.
  • Status Hour: An audio magazine started by the folks behind the popular e-zine Jadaliyya.
  • Tajine: A series on North African history and culture by the Ottoman History Podcast.
  • Tozsuz Evrak: A primary source blog that pairs incisive commentary with original historical materials related to people, creatures, and things within and beyond the Ottoman Empire.
  • Turkey Book Talk: Journalist William Armstrong has conversations with journalists, academics, and writers on Turkey and the surrounding regions.
  • UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies Podcast: An audio archive of lectures and conference panels hosted by UCLA's CNES.

Prose and Poetry