In the last fifteen years, book endowments in the early modern period have attracted Iranian researchers. Ashkevari’s pioneer work (2011) and Ja’fariyan’s collection of 324 waqf deeds of books from Safavid Iran (2018) are important contributions to this field. Moreover, Ashkavari recently published a 10-volume collection of the waqf deeds of books (2024). However, most of these deeds were not written in an independent paper but somewhere in the manuscripts, often in the opening or the colophon page.

   In this regard, a waqf deed dated 1613, preserved in the archives of Astan-e Qods-e Razavi, has distinctive features. It is scribed in an independent paper, keeps the original form of waqf deeds, and includes qadi’s endorsement and witness statements. Although the deed was created in Hyderabad Deccan, the style and composition of the deed followed the Iranian examples from that period. In other words, this is the authentic legal document that was used for a book endowment. By this deed, Mowlana Musa Gilani, an Iranian migrant to Hyderabad, endowed the Imam Rida Shrine with 158 books for the students of religious sciences. Furthermore, the backside of the deed contains a list of endowed books, primarily written in Arabic, which makes the deed more valuable. This paper analyzes this deed and the book list, highlighting the endowment’s features and historical background, and argues the relationship between the document and the books.

   This paper compares the document with other book lists, such as one from the Nader Shah period, dated 1738/39, and the other dated 1856. Both cover the whole collection of the Mashhad shrine library at these times. Based on these lists, this paper discusses the impact of Mowlana Musa’s and other migrants’ endowments to the shrine library.

Nobuaki Kondo is a professor at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 1997. He is working on the early modern history of Iran and the Persianate World and studying Persian documents, including waqf deeds. His major publications are Persian Documents: Social History of Iran and Turan in 15th-19th Centuries (RoutlegeCurzon, 2003), Islamic Law and Society in Iran: A Social History of Qajar Tehran (Routledge, 2017), Dastūr al-Molūk: A Complete Edition of the Manual of Safavid Administration (ILCAA, 2018). His recent articles are: “ʿIlm al-Siyāq and Bureaucrats in Safavid Iran” in Knowledge and Power in Muslim Societies (S. Rizvi and K. Morimoto eds., Gerlach Press, 2023) and “Shiʿite Donations in the Early Modern Period” Comparative Study of Donation Strategies (T. Miura ed., The Toyo Bunko, 2024).

The history of libraries in Islamicate West Asia and North Africa has long been dominated by a focus on the grand libraries of the ‘classical’ period (Abbasid Baghdad, Umayyad Cordoba, Fatimid Cairo). Over recent decades, this has changed, and the history of libraries has emerged as one additional perspective to write the cultural and also political history of societies across history and beyond the central seats of cultural prestige. As hardly any of these libraries still exist today, this turn to the wider landscape of libraries requires new methodological interventions. This lecture will take the al-Jazzar Library as a case study to discuss this broader trend in scholarship. Founded by the Ottoman governor of the province of Sidon, Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar (d. 1804), it was part of his massive building projects that changed the urban topography of Acre. His library remained until recently on the margins of scholarly interest. Yet, this book collection was part of the most visible and enduring aspect of his long rule, a splendid mosque and madrasa complex in the economic and administrative centre of his power. Even though this was a library on the cultural periphery of the Ottoman Empire, the holdings of this library included over 1,800 manuscripts, among them ‘ancient’ masterpieces such as the most important copy of Ibn al-Nadim’s (d. 995) bibliographic work, The Catalogue (al-Fihrist).

   Manuscripts bearing the stamp of al-Jazzār’s library have been known for a long time to sit in libraries around the world including Chester Beatty, Princeton and Berlin. Yet, the ‘discovery’ of the 1801-library inventory in the Ankara Endowment Ministry finally provided the decisive clue to study one of the most important cultural projects of its period in the Ottoman provinces. Situated at critical junctures of the political and intellectual history of the region, the library represents continuities and changes in the wider world of books and knowledge economies during the 18th and 19th centuries. This lecture will focus on methodological questions related to writing the history of libraries and on how to assess the translocations of endowed manuscript to new repositories.

Konrad Hirschler is Professor of Middle Eastern History and director of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at Universität Hamburg. He was previously Professor of Middle Eastern History at SOAS (London) and Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on Northern Africa and Southwest Asia between c. 1200 and 1500 with a focus on social and cultural history (history of reading, the book and libraries) with an emphasis on material culture. He is amongst others author of books such as A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture (2020), Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library (2016), The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands (2012) and Medieval Arabic Historiography (2006), co-author of Owning Books and Preserving Documents in Medieval Jerusalem (2023) and Muʾallafat Yūsuf b. Ḥasan Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī (2021), as well as co-editor of The Library of Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar (2025), Catalogue of the New Corpus of Documents from al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf in Jerusalem (2024), The Damascus Fragments (2020) and Manuscript Notes as Documentary Sources (2011).