The Ottoman Turkish Manuscripts in Al-Khalidiyyah Library, Jerusalem

Preface:
By Barbara Kellner- Heinkele
The cataloguing and conservation efforts at al-Khalidiyyah Library in Jerusalem, underway Since 1986, have brought to light not only a voluminous corpus of well-Known texts covering all fields of medieval Islamic learning but also an unexpectedly high number of rare or even unique Arabic manuscripts. While the existence of these treasures was formerly known only to a small circle of specialists, the catalogues of Arabic manuscripts published in recent years have drawn international attention to the importance of this library and will promote research in all areas of Islamic Studies.
The collection, assembled over centuries within a family that played a prominent role in the social and administrative establishment of Palestine and Jerusalem, also contains a number of manuscripts, documents and printed books from the Ottoman period (early 16th to early 20th century) in both Arabic and Ottoman Turkish as a small number of manuscripts in Persian. An overview of these works was published by Lawrence
I. Conrad and Barbara Kellner-Heinkele in 1994
(Lawrence I. Conrad and Barbara Kellner-Heinkele, Ottoman Resources Khalidi Library in Jerusalem. In: Aspects of Ottoman History. Papers from)