Middle Eastern Studies: Arts and Culture

This free monthly journal carries many articles and stories on varied aspects of traditional customs and practices of the Middle East. From falconry to poetry competitions, from dhow building to pearl diving you can find articles by academics and journalists often with excellent images.

Intended to be a visual encyclopedia of human behavior and culture, online in streaming video. Contains classic and contemporary documentaries; previously unpublished footage from working anthropologists and ethnographers in the field; and select feature films. International in scope and thematic areas include: language and culture, kinesthetics, body language, food and foraging, cooking, economic systems, social stratification and status, caste systems and slavery, male and female roles, kinship and families, political organization, conflict and conflict resolution, religion and magic, music and the arts, culture and personality, and sex, gender, and family roles.

A website on Muslim contributions to civilization.

Self-proclaimed "urban online hub for all that is new, hip, enticing and funk in the Middle East.

An online community for architects and scholars with a special focus on the Islamic world, based at MIT, features a virtual library of digitized books, journals, reference tools, as well as thousands of images of architecture in the Islamic world.

The Cleveland Museum of Art makes highlights of its collections available through its collection online website. The museum's Islamic art collection includes ceramics, metalwork, glass, and works on parchment and paper. The strongest holdings are in miniature paintings. The museum's collection of Islamic textiles, comprising some 450 items, is considered one of the finest in the world.

The Europeana Cultural Collections database provides digital access to over 23 million objects, from more than 2200 participating institutions in 34 countries. The database includes more than 10,000 Islamic art objects and hundreds of Islamic manuscripts, some of them digitized in full.

The Musée du Louvre houses one of the world's greatest collections of works of art from prehistoric times to the 19th century. The Louvre's Department of Islamic Art reopened in Sept. 2012, with some 2,000 of the museum's 18,000 Islamic art objects on display in the new Islamic galleries. The Louvre's web site provides access to several databases of digitized images of the collection, some with both French and English search interfaces.

This website offers an archive of over 4000 images of patterns and other design features drawn from the rich cultural heritage of the Islamic world.

The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, home to one of the world's great collections of Islamic art, also has a digital collection that provides online access to selected images from its over three million works of art and artefacts - paintings, graphic works, sculptures and works of applied art, archaeological finds and numismatic material.