Reading Arabic original documents is a serious challenge. At first sight, Arabic original documents seem to be casual and therefore rather illegible. Yet upon closer acquaintance, the opposite shows to be true: Arabic documents are highly formal. Written by professional scribes, they follow rather strict rules (not to speak of fashions) in both text and layout. However, only a few scholars have learned to read them and now take advantage of this formality, and only a very few of these share their knowledge with others.

Making this know-how accessible to a wider public is the explicit aim of this handbook: how to deal, in a cautious and self-critical way, with pre-17th-century Arabic documents on papyrus, paper, potsherds, parchment, etc. - how to find them, how to publish them, and how to use them as a source for research in linguistics, literary studies, and writing history.