Library Guides: Arabic and Islamic Studies: Introduction

Introduction

This subject guide highlights some key discipline resources to get you started with study and research.

Refer to the New Students Library Guide for everything you need to know about Library services and resources.
Build your researching, reading and writing skills with the Research Essentials Library Guide.
Streamline your access to online resources with the Library's quick access tools.

Encyclopedias

Oxford Bibliographies Online
Provides short, focused overviews of a wide range of topics including Islamic Studies, also pointing you to key works and further recommended readings.
Oxford Islamic Studies Online
Features content that covers over 5,000 A-Z reference entries, chapters from scholarly and introductory works, Qur'anic materials, primary sources, images, maps, and timelines. It is designed to provide a first stop for anyone needing information and context on Islam.

Encyclopaedia of Islam
A major reference work for the Islamic world. It includes articles on political and religious institutions, geography, ethnography, history, topography, monuments and more. It covers the Arabo-Islamic empire, the Islamic countries of Iran, Central Asia, the Indian sub-continent and Indonesia, the Ottoman Empire and all other Islamic countries.

Arabic sources

Middle Eastern manuscripts at the University of Melbourne
The core of the Middle Eastern Studies Collection was given to the University of Melbourne Library in 1972 by the then Department of Middle Eastern Studies. Arabic and Persian manuscripts are strongly represented in the collection, but there are also several Syriac, Urdu, Ethiopic, Sanskrit and Turkish texts. Over time this has grown to 183 manuscripts, including Qur’ans and related texts, books of poetry, astrology, grammar, mathematics, logic dictionaries, prayer books, biographies and books of sayings.

Kotobarabia : Arab Leaders, Historians and Philosophers Collection
This collection of ebooks offers approximately 5,000 titles from nearly 1,000 important, highly valued Arab thinkers, philosophers, historians, politicians, and theologians. It includes rare titles paramount for the understanding of Arab history, philosophy, theology, and politics. Each book is a faithful rendition of the title, all scanned from original editions.

Includes works by the Four Imams of the Sunni Sect, the Al Azhar Modern Sheikhs; various authors of the Modern Arab Enlightenment, and rare works by the former Egyptian royal family.
Kotobarabia Arabic E-Library
The Kotobarabia E-Library delivers over 3,500 contemporary and classic Arabic books from Egypt in e-book form for the first time. Works in the collection are divided into 29 thematic categories and several subcategories. It includes all types of publications: banned literature, fiction, non-fiction, scholarly and popular.
Kotobarabia Modern Arab Renaissance Collection
This is an electronic archive of books published 1820-1914 from Egypt, Syria and the Islamic World. With over 2,500 titles, this collection covers humanistic, intellectual and scientific fields. Subject categories include philosophy and theology, literature, arts, history and politics, including writings from Mahmoud Abdo, Gamal El Din El Afgahany and Rashid Reda.

Books

To find books on a particular subject, use a keyword search on the Library Catalogue. For example:

cultural anthropology

Medieval history

creative writing

Australian politics

Keyword searching often retrieves a large number of results. These four techniques can help you focus your search:

AND

Narrows your search

E.g. medieval AND history

Expands your search

E.g. climate OR weather

" "

Searches for an exact phrase

E.g. "social theory"

searches for variant endings

E.g. innovat* = innovation, innovations, innovators

The video below (3:47 mins) explains how you can use these advanced search techniques to quickly find relevant books and ebooks in the catalogue:

You can also find books on similar topics through the subject headings in item records. Click on these headings to view related subjects around your area and the all the books that the library has related to that subject. The image below shows where you can find subject headings.

Looking for a book and we don't have it or it's not on our shelves?

Inter-library Loans

Are you a graduate student or staff member? You can request books and journal articles through Inter-library Loans.

Visit the ILL website for more info.

A CAVAL card allows you to borrow from other Unis and TAFES. Visit the CAVAL website to find out how to sign up for a CAVAL card.

You can then use the Trove website to see which library has the book you want.

Databases and journals

Use databases to search across many academic resources (including peer-reviewed journals) at the same time.

Refer to the A-Z Ejournals and Databases page for a comprehensive list of available resources.

Core Arts and Humanities databases (try these first):

The selection of multidisciplinary databases below will retrieve results from different subject areas.

Discovery (EBSCO)
Use Discovery to look for books, ebooks, journal articles and more. It's a great place to start your search but does not give you everything the Library has. We highly recommend searching in at least one other database on this list as well as Discovery.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is one of the most popular ways to find academic sources for study and research. Did you know you can use it to search for journal articles that the University of Melbourne has access to? You can do this through the link above or set up your Google Scholar preferences to include Library content.
JSTOR
JSTOR is one of the largest databases the Library has access to. It is a multidisciplinary database so it looks in thousands of journals in over a hundred subjects - many of them related to arts and humanities. Highly recommended as your first or second place to search.
Scopus (Elsevier)
Scopus is another large, multidisciplinary database. It looks through journals, books, and conference papers. It has some advanced tools that can help you discover new research quickly - the 'times cited' and 'related articles' links are great time-savers. While it doesn't always have full-text PDFs it is still an excellent place to look for your research.
Web of Science
Web of Science is a massive, multidisciplinary database which includes a large amount of humanities and social sciences material from as far back as 1900. Like Scopus it has some advanced features that allows you to quickly link to related research.
ProQuest Central
Covering more than 160 subjects areas, ProQuest Central is the largest aggregated database of periodical content. This award-winning online reference resource features a highly-respected, diversified mix of content including scholarly journals, trade publications, magazines, books, newspapers, reports and videos.

Arabic and Islamic Studies-specific databases:

For more focused results try searching in one of these subject-specific databases.

Bibliography of Asian Studies
Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) is a comprehensive western-language resource for research on Asia. BAS provides indexing coverage of many important journals, particularly ones published in Asia, which are not indexed anywhere else. It also contains citations to Western-language chapters in edited volumes, conference proceedings, anthologies, Festschriften, and more. BAS covers all subjects (especially in the humanities and the social sciences) pertaining to East, Southeast, and South Asia published worldwide from 1971 to the present.
Index Islamicus
The Index Islamicus database indexes literature on Islam, the Middle East and the Muslim world. It is produced by an editorial team working at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, established to transmit knowledge about Islamic and Middle East studies, which have traditionally been part of the curriculum of SOAS. Records included in the database cover almost 100 years of publications on the world of Islam. Material cited in the Index Islamicus includes not only work written about the Middle East, but also about the other main Muslim areas of Asia and Africa, plus Muslim minorities elsewhere. Over 3,000 journals are monitored for inclusion in the database, together with conference proceedings, monographs, multi-authored works and book reviews. Journals and books are indexed down to the article and chapter level.
Twentieth Century Religious Thought : Islam
Twentieth Century Religious Thought: Islam is a research database focusing on modern Islamic theology and tradition. The collection will contain 100,000 pages at completion, detailing Islam’s evolution from the late 19th century by examining printed works, rare documents, and important articles by Muslim writers, both non-Western and Western voices. Content will represent a wide range of Islamic thought, bringing together such key thinkers as Muhammad Abduh, Fethullah Gülen, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Bediüzzaman Said Nursî, Abdolkarim Soroush, and Rifā‘ah Rāf‘i al-Ṭahṭāwī.