The Messenger (Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم Sallallahu 'alaihi wa sallam) believes in what has been sent down to him from his Lord, and (so do) the believers. Each one believes in Allah, His Angels, His books, and His Messengers.
(Surah ‘Al-Baqara,’ Quran Chapter #2, Verse #285)
Cultural information in Islamic societies has a long history of being maintained in libraries.
Islam was established in the area where alphabets with fewer than 50 characters (as opposed to syllabaries and ideograms) first came into use, and it had access from the beginning to paper-making technologies imported from China. This situation facilitated both widespread literacy and the relatively convenient production, dissemination and storage of books. Previous libraries in Mesopotamia, Iran, and eastern Asia Minor had consisted of collections of clay tablets bearing cuneiform syllabaries with over 80 sound-representing characters, plus ideograms. In the Near East and Egypt, libraries were mainly collections of vellum or papyrus scrolls. The time of early Islam was the time when the codex-style book (the ‘normal’ book with pages bound in signatures) was replacing the scroll as a more convenient format for accessing written content on paper-thin materials.
Islam itself had the unique idea that God had written a holy book. It was held to have been pre-existing through eternity. It was quoted to the prophet Muhammad (citation of whose name in text is conventionally followed by the phrase “peace be upon him,” or the original Arabic ‘Sallallahu 'alaihi wa sallam’) by the angel Gabriel in order to be reproduced on Earth. Two earlier collections of religious writings, the Torah and the Gospels (Injeel) were also conceived of as pre-existing books, imperfectly transcribed on Earth. Thus God implicitly had a book collection and had allowed humans to reproduce it. This was an incentive to collect books.
My research will look into the history of these Islamic libraries and their contributions to current world knowledge and practice, as well as contemporary Islamic knowledge and practice. I started off initially looking at basic wikipedia articles (on Islamic libraries, Quran, alphabet, syllabary, codex) as well as online searchable Islamic texts (http://www.searchtruth.com/) and then followed links from those articles. Also googled combinations such as ‘islamic libraries history’. I also looked at the resources made available by the Swinburne library and accessed subscriber-paid sources of professional literature in electronic form made available through the Swinburne library.
