From its very onset in the late sixteenth century, the Leiden University library has been actively collecting handwritten materials in Arabic. Before the introduction of the printing press in the Middle East in the early nineteenth century, manuscripts were the only textual witnesses that gave access to the language, culture, religion and history of the Arab and Islamic world. The reasons for acquiring these manuscripts were manifold, starting with the humanist scholar’s need to study Arabic as a cognate language of Hebrew in order better to understand the Holy Scriptures, and the more urbane need of the statesman, diplomat and merchant to gain a more perfect understanding of an important commercial partner and, at times, political opponent. In the course of the nineteenth century the element of colonial expansion was added, with the pressing need to gather knowledge about the population of the Netherlands' colonial possessions in an Islamic country like Indonesia. In the post-colonial era a new world order called for a continued interest in the developing world and, especially since the 1970s, in an ever growing immigrant community from the Arab and Islamic world, resulting in what many like –or dislike– to call the ‘multicultural society’. The present-day place of Leiden as an internationally renowned centre of Arabic and Oriental studies need not be specified here.



The Leiden Arabic collections have acquired their present shape and character through the care of many generations of collectors, scholars and curators.

The Leiden University possesses the MSS left by early Orientalists like Josephus Justus Scaliger (1540-1609) and more than 200 MSS once owned or acquired by Jacobus Golius (1596-1667). The remaining Golius MSS are now in the Bodleian library in Oxford. The MSS in the private collection of the Leiden Orientalist Thomas Erpenius (1584-1624) are now in Cambridge. Among the early collectors the person of Levinus Warner (1619-1665) stands out, a Dutch diplomatic representative to the Ottoman Turkish Government, who left his collection of about 1,000 predominantly Arabic manuscripts to Leiden University.

The eighteenth century saw little progress in the Arabic holdings, except for the manuscripts and scholarly notes of three generations of Schultens (Albert, Joannes Jacobus and Hendrik Albert), professors of Arabic from 1732 to 1793.

In the nineteenth century the eminent philologist M.J. De Goeje (1836-1909) secured the accession of no less than 750 mainly Arabic manuscripts, brought from the East by an Egyptian scholar, Amīn al-Madanī al-Ḥulwānī, in 1883 and sold through Messrs. Brill of Leiden. In the first half of the twentieth century one should note the bequest of the collections of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936), perhaps the most famous among Dutch Orientalists. Snouck Hurgronje’s Arabic MSS consist predominantly of Islamic texts from Indonesia.

Until the 20th century the post of curator of Oriental collections was directly linked to the Chair of Oriental languages. In 1729 the title of Interpres Legati Warneriani (‘Interpreter of the Warner Bequest’) was created, emphasising the interest in the Leiden Oriental collections and the need to study, edit and publish its contents.

An excellent introduction to the history of the Leiden Arabic collections is Levinus Warner and his legacy (1970).

The broader context of Arabic studies at Leiden until the first half of the 20th century is described in J. Brugman [et al.], Arabic studies in the Netherlands (1979).