Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh

The Library complex of the University consists of a Central Library and over 80 college/departmental libraries. Libraries of the colleges, institutes and  departments, cater to the needs of postgraduates and students of professional courses.

The University has established Book Banks for the benefit of students of certain professional courses. The Central Library was set up in 1875, when this institution was established as Madarsatul Uloom. In 1877, the Madarsa became Mohammadan Anglo-Oriental College. Lord Lytton, the viceroy of India, laid the foundation stone,  and the library was named after him as Lytton Library. Eminent scholars like Gardner Brown, Arnold, Releigh, Horowitz, Storey and Auchtelpone functioned as honorary librarians in addition to their teaching responsibilities.

In 1960, it was named as Maulana Azad Library when the first Prime Minister, Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, inaugurated its present building. The Seven storied building is surrounded by 4.75 acres of land in the form of beautiful lawns and gardens.  It is the most beautiful building of the University and one of the few very attractive libraries in the country. The Library has about 9,00,000 books.

The collection consists of books, periodicals, pamphlets, manuscripts, paintings and photographs. M.A. Library performs the functions of a National Library so far as its collection of Oriental manuscripts are concerned. It is because of these rich collections of immense research value that this Library is reckoned among major libraries of the world. The oldest manuscript owned by the library is more than fourteen hundred years old. It is a fragment of the Holy Quran transcribed by Hazrat Ali, the fourth  caliph of Islam and is written on parchment in Kufi script. Another rare collection is the Halnama of Beyazid Ansari, no copy of which is available anywhere else in the world.

The Library has a sizeable collection of early printed books in various languages. The most outstanding among them is the Latin translation of the celebrated Arabic work on optics, opticam prafatis, by Ibn-al-Haitham (965-1039) published in 1572.

There are several farmans (decrees) of the Mughal kings like Babur, Akbar, Shahjahan, Shah Alam, Shah Alamgir, Aurangzeb etc. Another prized possession of the library is a “Shirt” on which the whole Quran is inscribed in khafi script. This shirt is believed to have been worn by a warrior of Mughal army.
Among the large collection of Mughal paintings is the painting of Red Blossom, which is magnum opus of Mansoor Naqqash, the celebrated court artist of Emperor Jahangir. Some valuable Sanskrit works translated into Persian have also been preserved in the library. Other possessions worth mentioning is the Ayurved in Telugu and the Bhasa’s in Malyalam script written on palm leaves. Abul Faiz Faizi, an eminent scholar of Akbar’s court translated several Sanskrit works into Persian, such as Maha Puran, Bhagvat Gita, Mahabharat and Lila Wati, these are also available.

The Maulana Azad Library is the library of Aligarh Muslim University in Aligarh, India. It consists of a central library and over 80 college and departmental libraries. These libraries cater to the needs of postgraduates and students of professional courses. It is also the largest library in India and second largest in Asia and contains collections of great historical importance.

The Library complex of the University consists of a Central Library and over 80 college/departmental libraries. The libraries of the colleges, institutes and departments, cater to the needs of postgraduates and students of professional courses. The seven-storied building is surrounded by 4.75 acres (19,200 m2) of land in the form of beautiful lawns and gardens.

Maulana Azad Library is regarded as the second largest University Library of Asia with more than 13.5 lakh books, E- Books and other documents. The foundation of the Library was laid in 1875 when Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, a great social reformer of his time, established a School that later became Mohammaden Anglo Oriental College in 1877 and finally Aligarh Muslim University in 1920 by an Act of Parliament. The foundation stone of the Library was initially laid by Lord Lytton, the then Viceroy of India. That is why the Library was originally named as Lytton Library. The foundation stone of the present grand seven storied building of Maulana Azad Library was laid on November 12, 1955 by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, ex Prime Minister of India, who most graciously came again to inaugurate the Library on December 6, 1960. The library has thus completed 50 years. It was named after Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the great Educationist, Statesman and the first Education Minister of independent India. During the last couple of years, library services in the University have been substantially updated and modernized. Developments in the library services with the advent of latest ICT applications include- campus wide access to Online Catalogue, Digital Resource Centre with 2 lakh e-books / Encyclopedias and many language learning softwares, online journals; Automatic Security Gate for books; CCTV etc.