For the first time since Pierpont Morgan purchased his first richly illuminated manuscript in 1899 - an Indian Ragamala - this part of the collection has been catalogued. Included are the late thirteenth-century Manafi-i hayavan of Ibn Bakhtishu, regarded by Richard Ettinghausen as one of the ten greatest Persian manuscripts, and several albums with fifty-seven miniatures that once belonged to Sir Charles Hercules Read.

The Islamic and Indian holdings comprise over one thousand miniature paintings from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries and nearly two hundred Quran leaves from the ninth to the eleventh centuries. Many of these manuscripts and paintings - all of which are fully described - are reproduced here for the first time. Consisting of six sections: Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Albums, Provincial Mughal, and Indian, this catalogue contains numerous indices, including an iconographic index of miniatures.