With roughly 1,300 manuscripts, the Kurdish dormitory at Al-Azhar possessed one of the most significant manuscript collections in Egypt and Syria until the nineteenth century, enriched by generations of book donations. The manuscripts themselves bear the imprint of centuries of activity and historical memory.:
We don't know how many manuscripts there were at the peak. Book theft was common in Egypt and elsewhere. A 19th-century author who conducted some research into libraries said the following about the library of Mahmud al Kurdi (Mahmudiya madrasa) in Cairo:
On Qaşabat Ridwan Street:...the Masjid of Mahmūd al-Kurdī also known as the Masjid of al-Mu'izz. It has a library of fifty-eight volumes. Jalāl al-Din 'Abd al-Rahman al-Suyūțī says in some of his works that this library is the one that helped him compose so prolifically, saying that it contained so-and-so number of books... Now, only this meager amount of books remain [in the library] due its [endowment] supervisors having stolen them.
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