Islamicate Manuscripts Initiative video features 2 Humanities scholars
UCLA Library
Professor Luke Yarbrough, top right, Azeem Malik, bottom left, and pages from volumes in the Islamicate Manuscripts Initiative.
| June 24, 2025
Since 2022, the UCLA Library has led the Islamicate Manuscripts Initiative, an effort to describe and conserve thousands of Islamicate and Arabic-script manuscripts, and to make the materials accessible to researchers and the public.
A new video produced by the Library about the initiative features two Humanities Division scholars: Luke Yarbrough, an associate professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and Azeem Malik, a doctoral candidate in the Islamic studies program.
Works in the collection date from 1100 to 1930 and covering a vast array of subject matter, from medicine to law, and from philosophy to astronomy.
The manuscripts also cover a broad geographic range, Yarbrough explains in the video. “They range from south Asia, modern-day India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, even including at least one Quran made in China, all the way to west Africa, back almost a thousand years.”
The Library’s Islamicate and Arabic-script collection is the second largest in North America.
“We’re very lucky as graduate students and as scholars to have access to this collection,” Malik says in the video. “Working on the manuscripts makes it easier to train others in looking at them – our skills in decoding handwriting, our skills in examining paper, examining geographic region, examining time period … we get a chance to practice that and then we get to teach other people how to do that as well.”
From 2022: Students make remarkable finds in ‘Encountering Arabic Manuscripts’ course