Description
In the spring of 1978, when I1 was in Jerusalemwith a team engagedin conservingand photographingMamlukdocumentsrecently discoveredin the IslamicMuseumof al-Haramal-Sharif,2I was fortunateenough to meet Mr.Haydaral-Khalidi,a formerofficial in the PalestineMinistryof Educationand memberof one of the most prominentArab familiesof Jerusalem Being informedof my interestin medievalArabic manuscripts,Mr.Khalidi invited me to visit the Khalidi Library, a family library of which he is chief custodian, located in the Old City of Jerusalem I was, of course, delighted to accept the invitation, as I knew the Khalidi Library by rumor to be one of the richest private collections of Arabic manuscriptsand books anywherein the world, and my interest in viewing it was considerablyheightened by the claim which I had read that it consists of "12,000 books and manuscripts,written in Arabic, English, French, Persian, and Turkish"