Old manuscripts get face-lift at Jerusalem mosque

In the 1920s, an urgent call went out to the literati across the Middle East from Arab leaders in Jerusalem: Send us your books so that we may protect them for generations to come.
Jerusalem was soon flushed with writings of all kinds, to be stored and preserved at the newly minted al-Aqsa mosque library.
But many of those centuries-old manuscripts are in a state of decay. Now, religious authorities are restoring and digitising the books, many of them written by hand. They hope to make them available online to scholars and researchers across the Arab world who are unable to travel to Jerusalem.

Hamed Abu Teir, the library's manager, called the manuscripts a "treasure and trust." "We should preserve them," he said.
The al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third holiest site, is located on a hilltop compound known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount. The holy site is ground zero in the territorial and religious conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbours.
The library and its 130,000 books are housed in two separate rooms in the compound, where modern steel bookshelves are affixed to ancient stone walls. Among the collection are some 4,000 manuscripts, mainly donations from the private collections of Jerusalem families.

UNESCO, which is providing assistance for the restoration project, says the library contains "one of the world's most important collections of Islamic manuscripts."

The drive to restore the manuscripts and get them online is part of a greater global trend that has seen an array of historical documents digitised and uploaded to increase access to researchers worldwide.
Here, the gap to be bridged isn't just physical distance. Residents of countries with no diplomatic relations with Israel, including much of the Arab world, are unable to visit Jerusalem and Palestinians living in the nearby West Bank or the Gaza Strip need to secure a permit from Israel to enter the city.

Officials hope to circumvent those hindrances by putting the manuscripts online.
"A student in the Arab and Muslim world can't access it. A student in Algeria or Saudi Arabia for example can't come here and access (the manuscripts). We want to grant him the knowledge in his own house," said Abu Teir.
Most of the manuscripts were donated in response to a call in the early 1920s from the Supreme Muslim Council, a religious governing body, said Walid Ahmad, an education professor at Israel's al-Qasemi Academic College who has researched the library.