The Arabic shelf gathers Arabic-language literature rather than trying to contain the whole of Islam, Sufism, or the broader Middle East. Those neighboring traditions have their own shelves; this room is for works whose literary and historical life is especially tied to Arabic.

The present shelf has two doors: the pre-Islamic ode tradition of the Mu'allaqat and the classical adab world of the maqamat. Together they show Arabic as desert song, ornate prose, verbal performance, picaresque satire, and literary memory.

This shelf should grow carefully. Quranic, hadith, legal, theological, Sufi, Persianate, and Islamic philosophical texts may belong in neighboring rooms when tradition is more important than language. For Arabic Sufi material, begin with Sufi/Hallaj/Kitab al-Tawasin and Sufi/Hallaj/Bustan al-Ma'rifa in the Sufi shelf. For the composite Islamicate story-world of the Arabian Nights, see Islamic/Story Cycles/The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night — Richard Burton.