The Arewa House established in 1970, has a long history of work in the area of Arabic/Ajami manuscript preservation and has initiated many programs for the procurement and preservation of Arabic manuscripts. It has over 836 photostats and photographs of Arabic/Ajami manuscripts in the form of letters, jurisprudence, history and poetry. These were collected by Professor Abdullahi Smith its former Director from (1970-1984), as a pace setting project for more collections in Northern Nigeria’s repositories.
Until April 2009, the Centre had only about 207 Photocopied Manuscripts other than Correspondences and 527 Letters, which are not catalogued. As a matter of fact, Procurement of Arabic Manuscripts by the Center had also stopped since the early 1980s. However, as a result of intensive fieldwork, which resumed in 2009 in the Northern parts of Nigeria especially, in States like Adamawa, Plateau, Jigawa, Katsina and Bauchi States, the Center collected more than 3160 Original Manuscripts. Also, the Centre collected about 111 copies of what was popularly known as market copies Manuscripts. As noted earlier, until April 2009, Arewa House itself had only 3 handwritten Original manuscripts and 34 of the so called “Market Copies” out of 207 Manuscripts other than Correspondences. It is interesting to note that, the situation has now tremendously improved with new acquisitions made particularly from Adamawa (over 985 catalogue originals), Katsina (30 catalogued originals) Plateau (870 originals catalogued) and many more “Market Copies”. Currently, the Arewa House has gone far in its negotiation with the management of the National Museum and Monuments for the possibility of rescuing Jos Museum Arabic Manuscripts Collection to Arewa House as permanent loan to the Centre. Also, a lot of activities are currently going on in the same direction
- Published in
- Kaduna, Nigeria
