Thanks to @CLIRHC we are in Year 3 of @MmwProject uncovering hidden manuscripts in our collections. But we're especially excited by Islamic Manuscript Basics: https://kislakcenter.github.io/islamicmss/  a great introduction to their material study for non-experts (1/5)

Histories of colonialist collecting practices mean it's very common for U.S. rare book libraries to have a few Islamic manuscripts that are un-described and under-used. Librarians may not know Perso-Arabic languages and hesitate to promote access to these "unknown" books. (2/5)

But plenty of rare book library workers don't know medieval German, or Latin, or etc., and yet are often confident programming with (and historically and materially contextualizing) Christian devotional manuscripts or early printed books. (3/5)

This of course reinforces white hegemony and white supremacy. There are a lot of things rare book libraries and rare book library workers can do to interrogate the histories of their collecting practices, but here is one small thing: use your collections. (4/5)

This site, created by Dr. Kelly Tuttle and made possible by the @MmwProject is an accessible and digestible orientation to some frequent features of Islamic manuscripts (from layout to script to binding). It's great! https://kislakcenter.github.io/islamicmss/  (5/5)