Ginan Central: Archive

University libraries continue to play a vital role in housing and making extant primary sources accessible to scholars and community members in today's digital world. Advances in digital technology have made it possible for academic institutions and communities with rich intellectual heritage to come together to forge mutually respectful and beneficial partnerships in order to safeguard intangible and hidden knowledge sources.

The purpose of this website is to facilitate much-needed bibliographic and scholarly attention to ginans, a collection of gnostic and devotional hymns of the Ismaili Muslim community. The website serves as a digital finding-aid for manuscripts of ginans available through various institutional and individual collections.

This website was developed by Karim Tharani, tenured librarian and faculty member at the University of Saskatchewan. Visit Ginan Central for more resources on ginans. For more information or questions, please contact

Perhaps the greatest obstacle for further studies on the ginan literature is the almost total absence of any kind of textual criticism on the literature. Thus far merely two out of the nearly one thousand compositions have been critically edited. Naturally, the availability of reliably edited texts is fundamental to any substantial scholarship in this field.

Professor Ali Asani
Harvard University
Source: The Harvard Collection of Ismaili Literature in Indic Languages: A Descriptive Catalog and Finding Aid, 1992.