A Research Guide to Middle Eastern Studies: Encyclopedias, and Biblios

Encyclopedia of Islam (access to all editions online) permits searching in both English and romanized Arabic. 

Encyclopædia Iranica

Online version of this comprehensive research tool dedicated to the study of Iranian civilization.

TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi Istanbul, 1988–

An updated and expanded Turkish encyclopaedia of Islamic studies, published by the Turkish Religious Foundation, with original articles of a high scholarly standard.

Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World 

The first cohesive reference work that covers the Jews of Muslim lands particularly in the late medieval, early modern and modern periods.

Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an 

A dictionary of Qurʾānic terms, concepts, personalities, place names, cultural history and exegesis extended with essays on the most important themes and subjects within Qurʾānic studies.

Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures 

An interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and global project which brings together upwards of 1,000 scholars to write critical essays on women, Muslim and non-Muslim, and Islamic cultures in every region where there have been significant Muslim populations. It aims to cover every topic for which there is significant research, examining these regions from the period just before the rise of Islam to the present.

Oxford Islamic Studies Online 

A database of reference content and commentary by renowned scholars in areas such as global Islamic history, concepts, people, practices, politics, and culture, and is regularly updated as new content is commissioned and approved. It encompasses over 5,000 A–Z reference entries, chapters from scholarly and introductory works, Qur'anic materials, primary sources, images, maps, and timelines, and provides a useful first stop for anyone needing information and context on Islam.

Index Islamicus

Bibliographic citations with subject indexing on Islam, the Middle East, and the Muslim world in general, including Muslims in Africa and Asia and major Muslim minorities worldwide. Topics covered include: education, law, bibliography and scholarship, libraries, philosophy, natural and applied sciences, arts, architecture, geography and travel, social sciences, archaeology, history, economics, politics and current affairs, as well as religion and theology.

Christian Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History

The database comprises introductory essays on the treatment of Christians in the Qur'an, Qur'an commentaries, biographies of the Prophet, Hadith and Sunni law, and of Muslims in canon law, and the main body of more than two hundred detailed entries on all the works recorded, whether surviving or lost. These entries provide biographical details of the authors where known, descriptions and assessments of the works themselves, and complete accounts of manuscripts, editions, translations and studies.

Oxford Bibliographies Online Islamic Studies

Islamic studies is an interdisciplinary field that includes history, religion, philosophy, anthropology, Arabic language and literature, as well as literatures in other languages including Persian, Turkish, and Urdu, and remains responsive to new discoveries, interpretations, ideologies and theories. This bibliography provides expert guidance to the field in all its diversity and throughout its developmental stages. The articles present a guided tour through the key literature on each topic, providing context for its development, and a balanced overview of the major issues within a given topic.

Bibliography of Arabic Books On-line (BABO) 

This resource aims to become a comprehensive bibliographic database containing information about virtually all books published in Arabic before 1960. BABO contains over 60,000 bibliographical records from the National Library in Egypt, the British Library and the Library of Congress.

Bibliography of Slavery and World Slaving

This is a searchable database containing verified references (except as noted) to approximately 25,000 scholarly works in all academic disciplines and in all western European languages on slavery and slaving, worldwide and throughout human history, including modern times. It includes all known print materials published since 1900 in scholarly formats, as well as digital scholarly journals, recent unpublished presentations at academic conferences, professional historical sites, and major museum exhibitions and catalogs.

Online Bibliography of Ottoman-Turkish Literature

Includes works that focus on Ottoman-Turkish literature at any time in history. 

Mamluk Bibliography Online - University of Chicago (MEDOC)

An on-going project of the Middle East Documentation Center at the University of Chicago, the aim of which is to compile comprehensive bibliographies of all primary sources relating to the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Syria, as well as all research and discussion--scholarly and popular--germane to the subject. The project takes the form of two bibliographies: the primary and the secondary.

Encyclopedias

Bibliographies

Hadith Report/Transmitter

This site has a word search feature (viz. a word in either the text of the hadith or in the name of the transmitter) and gives further information regarding that particular transmitter from the biographical literature as well as the location of the hadith and information on known chains of transmission