In 1884 Sultan Abdul-Hamid II gifted the Library of Congress with a collection of Ottoman Turkish, Persian, Arabic works that he had richly embossed with this inscription in English, French and Ottoman: "Gift made by H.I. M. the Sultan Abdul-Hamid II to the national library of the United States of America through the Honorable A.S. Hewitt Member of the House of Representatives A.H. 1302-1884 A.D."

The lands of the Armenians were for millennia located in Eastern Anatolia, on the Armenian Highlands, and into the Caucasus Mountain range. First mentioned almost contemporaneously by a Greek and Persian source in the 6th century BC, modern DNA studies have shown that the people themselves had already been in place for many millennia. Those people the world know as Armenians call themselves Hay and their country Hayots' ashkharh –the land of the Armenians, today known as Hayastan. Their language, Hayeren [Armenian] constitutes a separate and unique branch of the Indo-European linguistic family tree. A spoken language until Christianity became the state religion in 314 AD, a unique alphabet was created for it in 407, both for the propagation of the new faith and to avoid assimilation into the Persian literary world.
Soon after the alphabet's creation, translations of the bible, religious works, and histories written in Greek and Syriac appeared. In many cases, the originals have been lost to the world leaving these important translations for the future. Alongside these, the Armenians began to write their own unique histories which have become vital documents for the study of the neighboring peoples, cultures, and countries.
The Armenian collections of the Library of Congress include a significant number of these works, many of them often deemed rare.

Cuneiform Tablets: From the Reign of Gudea of Lagash to Shalmanassar III presents clay tablets, cones, and brick fragments inscribed using the ancient writing system known as cuneiform from the Library of Congress’ collections. The Sumerians invented this writing system, which involves the use of a wedge-shaped reed stylus to make impressions in clay. Cuneiform Tablets: From the Reign of Gudea of Lagash to Shalmanassar III includes school tablets, accounting records, and commemorative inscriptions. This online presentation features 38 cuneiform tablets, presented with supplementary materials. The 38 tablets are dated from the reign of Gudea of Lagash (2144-2124 B.C.) to Shalmanassar III (858-824 B.C.) during the New Assyrian Empire (884-612 B.C.).

The Eltaher Collection consists of more than 2,000 items in various formats, including books, pamphlets, photographs, personal correspondence, and newspaper clippings among other documents. The majority of the collection is in Arabic, with some in English. The collection documents the history of the Arab world from 1912 to 1974, with a focus on the life of a well-known Palestinian Arab journalist and newspaper editor, Muhammad Ali Eltaher (1896-1974). In fiscal 2012, the Library acquired the collection from his son, Hassan Eltaher, an author and researcher who also wrote about the events that took place during his father's lifetime.
A subset of this major collection — more than 100 Palestinian pamphlets — is now available in digital form through this web presentation. These pamphlets are documents that relate, in some detail, to the British Mandate in Palestine (1923-1948). They cover the impact of the 1917 Balfour declaration and the Mandate on Palestine, and the way in which they enabled the Zionist movement to establish a state in Palestine in 1948.

The twenty monasteries which comprise the historic and legendary yet largely inaccessible monastic complex on Mt. Athos in Greece house a rich collection of over 11,000 manuscripts. In 1952 and 1953, the Library of Congress and the International Greek New Testament Project filmed the largest group of manuscripts in the history of Athos. This collection included 209 Greek and Georgian manuscripts of the Bible along with some 44 apocryphal writings as well as various documents on Byzantine music and letters.

The renowned Eastern Orthodox Monastery of St. Catherine’s on Mt. Sinai was constructed by the Byzantine Emperor, Justinian I, in the late sixth century AD over the relics of the martyred saint and the place of the biblical burning bush as identified by St. Helena, the mother of the Roman Emperor, Constantine. It is home to reputedly the oldest continuously run library in existence today. Its holdings of religious and secular manuscripts are legendary and allegedly second only in number to the collection held by the Vatican: from bibles, to patristic works, to liturgies and prayers books, and on to legal documents such as deeds, court cases, Fatwahs (legal opinions). The greater proportion of the manuscripts were copied in Greek, and then in Syriac, Georgian, Coptic, Armenian, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Ethiopic, as well as Old Church Slavonic...

The Omar Ibn Said Collection consists of 42 digitized documents in both English and Arabic, including an 1831 manuscript in Arabic on "The Life of Omar Ibn Said," a West African slave in America, which is the centerpiece of this unique collection of texts. Some of the manuscripts in this collection include texts in Arabic by another West African slave in Panama, and others from individuals located in West Africa.

The Library of Congress is home to a noteworthy collection of rare Persian language manuscripts, lithographic books and early imprints, as well as printed books, housed in the African and Middle Eastern Division (AMED) and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

Calligraphy is a practical skill and a graphic science that developed gradually over the centuries. It is the subject of numerous studies analyzing its role in the faith, culture, and art of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish speaking lands. There are approximately 355 Islamic calligraphic items in the Library’s collections. While a corpus of Qur’anic fragments dating from the 9th and 10th centuries is written on parchment, the great majority of items are executed on paper.

This archive includes campaign sites archived during these countries’ election seasons since 2014.

This collection consists of official government websites for Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Tajikistan and provides an overview of the political, economic, administrative and social situation in these four countries.

This archive is comprised primarily of websites produced by the Afghan government, specifically the executive branch.

This collection of websites represents emerging expressionism by Egyptian political parties and movements, along with blogs and news media sites of the time.

In 2012, Egypt inaugurated, what was considered by many, one of its first truly free and fair elections, following the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. This revolution, part of the larger movement known as the Arab Spring in the West, resulted in the downfall of the Mubarak regime.

This collection consists of websites documenting the revolution in Tunisia in 2011, and is in French, Arabic, and English.
This collection was archived by Archive-It (built at the Internet Archive).

An increasing number of government organizations from countries of the Middle East and North Africa are relying on their official websites to disseminate their publications that would have otherwise been available in print format.

This collection documents the events in Northern Africa and the Middle East in 2011 after the Tunisian uprising. Content includes blogs, social media and news sites about Egypt, Yemen, Sudan and other African countries.
This collection was archived by Archive-It (built at the Internet Archive).

This archive is a collection of websites from Islamic political parties and political Islamist organizations.

April 19 – September 26, 2012
Commemorates the 500th anniversary of the first Armenian printing press and book at Venice in 1512 and the designation of Yerevan, Armenia, as UNESCO's Book Capital of the World 2012. Drawing from the Armenian collections of the Library of Congress, the exhibition displays the varieties of the Armenian literary tradition from the era of manuscripts through the early periods of print and on to contemporary publishing.

This story map offers an overview of religious prayer traditions in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, through a sampling of prayer materials housed in the Library of Congress African and Middle Eastern Division.

March 27, 2014–September 20, 2014
Persian gained prominence as a literary language and a lingua franca—a common cultural language—about a thousand years ago. A Thousand Years of the Persian Book explores a millennium of Persia’s rich literary tradition with materials ranging from illuminated manuscripts to contemporary publications. The seventy-five items in the exhibition are selected primarily from the outstanding Persian collection in the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division and will bring attention to the literary achievements of Iran and the greater Persian-speaking regions of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Central and South Asia and the Caucasus.

From the tenth-century seminal Shahnameh (Book of Kings) by Ferdowsi to the works of contemporary writers, the Persian language has changed very little in the last millenium. A Thousand Years of the Persian Book examines the richness and variety of the Persian book and its literary tradition. It showcases the Library’s unique collections, which are among the most important in the world today outside of Iran. The exhibition focuses on Iran but also includes items from the greater Persian-speaking lands of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, as well as from Central and South Asia and the Caucasus, illustrating the international nature of the Persian language. In addition to examining the diversity of literary styles, the exhibition demonstrates the continuity of the written word as a unifying cultural force in Persian-speaking lands.

Voices from Afghanistan highlights letters sent by citizens of Afghanistan to Radio Azadi, the Afghan branch of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. These letters capture the concerns and hopes of ordinary citizens in Afghanistan living under the extraordinarily difficult conditions of conflict and war. Unable to control the larger forces that maintain and perpetuate the conflict, Afghans attempt to put some order into their daily lives—the school boy who complains about the broken window in his school demonstrates how the bitter cold is his worst enemy; the school teacher seeking to help his students writes about corruption that enables unskilled individuals to take the place of good teachers. Afghans also channel their emotions into activities that bring them some respite and give them a sense of joy, such as music, poetry, and art.