Introduction
The author spent several months in Jerusalem during the early 1990s, researching private libraries of some of the city's oldest families, including their own. They stayed in an apartment belonging to a Khalidi family waqf, or religious endowment, in the heart of the Old City, which had a view of two of the greatest masterpieces of early Islamic architecture: the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque. The Khalidi Library, founded in 1899 by the author's grandfather, houses over twelve hundred manuscripts, mainly in Arabic, dating back to the early eleventh century. The collection is one of the most extensive in all of Palestine that is still in the hands of its original owners.
