The Seventeenth International Conference on Books, Publishing & Libraries

Abstract

The library associated with the name of Ḫwāja Muḥammad Pārsā (d. 822/1420) is one of the longest lived and finest waqf libraries of mediaeval Buḫārā. It housed hundreds of important Islamic manuscripts, but has not survived intact. Its contents are now scattered and divided among several institutions in various countries. Although several scholarly articles have already been written about the eponymous library, many questions on its history remain unanswered. Few years ago, we began cataloguing Pārsā’s library. The project has been supported by a research grant from the Islamic Manuscript Association. In total 162 manuscript volumes, which belonged to Pārsā’s library, have been found so far in Tashkent, Bukhara, Dushanbe, Kazan, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Paris and Islamabad. A few of our findings from working on the project shed some light on the history of the collection and its physical location. With this study, we share our findings and demonstarte how they add to our knowledge of the library’s history.