Philosophy and social scientific thought are not areas that are, in this modern and largely material world, commonly associated with Islam.

However, in libraries and archives located in different cultures around the world are original and unpublished manuscripts that, should they be published and entered into existing and accessible catalogues and libraries of mainstream academic endeavour, would make profound and valuable contributions to the reservoir of human thought.

The UKALAA Foundation will work to bring to light the unpublished or obscure, yet highly precious, manuscripts on Islamic social and political thought, together with a reliable critical edition, and translate these works into English and the major languages of the world. These will then be added to the mainstream body of social and political thought available to the younger generations, as well as researchers in political and social thought and broader public.

An example of such manuscripts are those of the Ottoman period because understanding them requires knowledge of Ottoman Turkish written with Arabic script, a mixture of Arabic, Turkish and Persian and not widely known in today's academic community.

The aim is to produce a set of standard, definitive works, similar to Cambridge "Texts in the History of Political Thought" published by Cambridge University Press to enable this generation's young researchers to engage with the heritage of social thought from their own culture.