The Project
Al-Falaj is a free, open directory connecting researchers to dispersed archival and primary source material relating to the Arabian Peninsula and its historical borderlands — manuscripts, photographs, maps, governmental records, oral history, archaeological surveys, trade documentation, and institutional collections held in archives worldwide.
الفَلَج — a falaj is an ancient underground irrigation channel, used across the Arabian Peninsula for millennia, that runs beneath the surface to connect scattered water sources with the communities that need them. This directory works the same way: the sources already exist. The problem is finding them.
The Arabian Peninsula's archival record is dispersed across institutions that did not acquire it with researchers in mind: colonial offices, missionary societies, oil company archives, individual explorers' estates, national museums in countries far removed from the region itself. A researcher in Riyadh looking for photographs of Makkah from the 1880s may not know to contact Leiden University, or that the photographer named in the catalog entry may not be the person who actually took the images.
This directory exists to change that. Every record includes the holding institution, a direct link where available, and a clear access status — open, partial, or physical visit required — so that researchers know what they are dealing with before they begin.
On Methodology
The further back you trace a source, the more likely you are to find it credited to the wrong person, held in an institution that had no connection to its making, or missing entirely from the literature that claims to cover the region. This is not accidental. It reflects who controlled the infrastructure of documentation — the expeditions, the photographic equipment, the publishing houses, the archive catalogues — and whose names attached to the material as it moved through those systems.
Working in this field means learning to read the gaps as carefully as the records. A collection catalogued under a European explorer's name may contain work made by local guides, fixers, or documentarians whose names never made it into the finding aid. A misattribution repeated across a century of scholarship is not a minor error — it is a claim about who gets to be a historical actor. The case of Abd al-Ghaffar, whose Makkah photographs were credited to Snouck Hurgronje in the literature for over a hundred years, is one of the clearest examples of how that happens and how difficult it is to correct.
Al-Falaj tries to work against this — noting contested attributions, flagging gaps as explicitly as records, and giving space to sources that have been systematically overlooked: Muslim documentarians working within the region, pilgrimage routes from Central Asia, West Africa, and Southeast Asia that produced extensive source material, collections in European institutions that have never been examined in relation to the Peninsula.
This is not a finished project and it never will be. Sources will be added, corrections made, and gaps identified more precisely as the work continues. That is the point: the Arabian Peninsula's archival record is not static, and neither is this directory.
Al-Falaj is built on a conviction that open access to historical information is not a luxury but a condition for honest scholarship. Too much of this region's documented past sits behind institutional paywalls, in uncatalogued storage, or remains misattributed in the literature. Every record added here is a small act against that. The goal is a culture of shared knowledge — built collaboratively, held in common, free to use.
If you know of a source, an individual, an archive, or a correction not yet reflected here, the directory is only as complete as the people who contribute to it.
Who is behind it
Ghada AlMuhanna Abalkhail is a Berlin-based cultural advisor, visual anthropologist, and author specialising in the archival and material record of the Arabian Peninsula. Her research into primary and archival sources for the region spans institutions across the United Kingdom, Netherlands, France, Germany, the United States, and the Gulf states.
Al-Falaj is the direct outcome of years spent navigating dispersed collections across dozens of archives — and a conviction that no one else should have to start from scratch. We are all step ladders to more knowledge.
Al-Falaj is a free, non-commercial directory. It carries no advertising and is not affiliated with any institution. All records are the result of independent archival research.
To suggest an addition, flag an error, or report a broken link — use the contact page or reach out directly via the links above.