Bibliotheca Islamica

Bibliotheca Islamica (BI) is the Orient-Institut Beirut’s platform for the critical edition of mainly Arabic texts. The series dates back to 1929, when Hellmut Ritter edited the Kitāb Maqālat al-islamīyīn wa-ḫtilāf al-muṣallīn of Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī al-Ašʿarī, a seminal text on dogmatic positions in the early Islamic period. Since then, the OIB has published more than fifty titles in this series. Among the most prominent are the 30-volume biographical lexicon “al-Wāfī bi-l-Wafayāt” by Ṣalāhaddīn Ḫalīl b. Aibak aṣ-Ṣafadī (d. 1362) and the monumental history of Egypt and the Syrian lands entitled “Badāʾiʿ az-zuhūr fī waqāʾiʿ ad-duhūr” by Ibn Iyās (d. after 1522). We intend to supplement this well-established profile of the BI with Arabic translations of some classical works (for example, texts from Persian or Ottoman Turkish). Projects of this kind are thus highly welcome.

All published titles of the series (even those which are out of print) are now online. They can be displayed page per page or be downloaded in their integrity in a PDF format from the OIB’s website via the links to the MENAdoc collection, hosted by the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt in Halle. New titles will become available in open access at the time of their publication.