istac library
A university, being the highest institution of learning, may reflect the quality of a particular civilization and nation, and its library can be the primary yardstick for measuring its quality and capacity. While great scholars have built great libraries, it is also true that great libraries have helped to produce great scholars. We can mention one particular case. At the end of the 18th century, the Gottigen Library in Germany was by far the most outstanding one in Europe, and the proud professors there owed their scholarly success solely to the university library.
ISTAC could neither draw good scholars who can read in several languages to work with it for an extended period nor properly train future researchers and scholars without a good library. It is for this reason that a vast amount of time was spent to acquire materials from all over the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds.
For the Insitute to achieve its goal, it has to assemble an authoritative and high-level library reflecting the authentic religious and intellectual tradition of Islam radiating from the works of theologians, philosophers, metaphysicians, sufis, scientists, jurists, historians, poets and artists and at the same time also the cultural and intellectual traditions of the West, and even of the Orient, as projected by their luminaries.
The library presently (2006) consists of more than 150,000 volumes: almost 60,000 in the general and reference collection, almost 30,000 in the serial collection, more than 31,610 in the special and rare collection, about 2,547 manuscripts in book form and 17,922 items in microforms.
The library also holds journals of erudite scholarship in various Islamic languages such as Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu and Malay, and Western languages such as English, French, German, Dutch, Russian, Greek and Latin. The manuscript collection is being digitalized. These works include encyclopaedias of religions, cultures and sciences; multilingual and authoritative dictionaries of major Islamic languages and languages of the Occident and the Orient; bibliographies encompassing various disciplines; catalogues of rare collections of Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Malay and other Muslim manuscripts kept in various libraries of the world; indexes of different sciences; collected works of major thinkers and authors; proceedings of world conferences in many disciplines in the human and natural sciences; major works on religion, philosophy, metaphysics, theology, law and jurisprudence, science and technology, languages, literatures, poetry, history, art and architecture, fine arts, education; and Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Malay and Urdu manuscripts dealing with diverse subjects and fields of knowledge.
The library consists not only of materials on all aspects of Islamic thought and civilization, but also of materials on other religions and civilizations that Islam has influenced and vice versa. Thus major works on the Greek, Roman, mediaeval, and modern Western civilizations have been acquired. Since the Malay world is at the intersection of India and the Far East including China, Japan, and Korea, with which it has historical and contemporary contacts, ISTAC’s library has and will continue to obtain materials on important aspects of the thought and history of these civilizations as well. ISTAC has in fact acquired important works on Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism, as well as a unique collection on sinology.
ISTAC’s library has also acquired the valuable collections of important scholars of Islamic studies in various fields of philosophy, Arabic philology, Turkish and Central Asian history, and Islamic Art and Architecture.
