Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiative (ISMI)
Other involved scholars: Jamil Ragep (McGill University, Canada), Sally Ragep (McGill University, Canada)
Cooperation Partners: McGill University, Canada; American Council on Learned Societies
Member Institutions of the ISMI Board: Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations, Aga Khan University, London, U.K.; Archimedes Project, Harvard University, U.S.A.; Filologia Semítica, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain ; Encyclopaedia Islamica Foundation, Tehran, Iran; Institute for the History of Arabic Science, Aleppo University, Syria; Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Moscow, Russia; Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, U.K.; Warburg Institute, London, U.K.;
The Written Heritage Research Center, Tehran, Iran
The ISMI project aims to make available a vast array of information about the exact sciences in the premodern Islamic world. Through the internet, this material will be accessible without charge both to researchers and experts in the field and to the educated public worldwide. It will be an online database that contains the works of some 1,700 authors who span the entire Islamic world from Islamic Spain to India and the borders of China, beginning in the eighth century and continuing until the nineteenth. These works in astronomy, mathematics, physics, geography, mechanics, and related disciplines number in the thousands and are represented, conservatively speaking, by tens of thousands of manuscript copies spread throughout the world.
The first meeting of the ISMI Advisory Board was held at the MPIWG 18-19 September 2006. In December 2007 a delegation representing the MPIWG and the ISMI project and logistically supported by Professor Raza Ansari traveled to India for two weeks to survey manuscript collections in Aligarh, Patna, and Hyderabad and to establish ties with the National Mission for Manuscripts in New Delhi.
