Parts of Bosnian writer Safvet Beg Bašagić’s collection of Islamic manuscripts are on display at an exhibition in the National Library in Tehran.
On view at the library’s Museum of Book and Documented Heritage are Islamic manuscripts and prints collected by Bašagić, also known as Mirza Safvet (1870-1934), who is considered the father of Bosnian Renaissance.
The manuscripts are borrowed from the University Library of Bratislava, the oldest library in Slovakia, ILNA reported.
Bašagić tried to preserve the collection in a more secure place than was the Balkan region of his time. In the turbulent developments in the Balkan region in the 19th and 20th centuries, his valuable collection eventually found a safe haven in the University Library.
Bašagić’s collection contains unique manuscripts and essential works of medieval Islamic scholarly literature and belles-lettres, spanning from the 12th to 19th century, and prints from two centuries, starting from 1729.
The exhibition opened on Sunday at a ceremony attended by the General Director of the library in Bratislava Silvia Staselova and the head of Rare Manuscripts at the National Library and Archives of Iran, Ali Ojabi who is an author, translator and critical editor of philosophical works.
A Bosnian Muslim, Bašagić was born in the town of Nevesinje. He received his PhD at the University of Vienna, Austria, where he studied Arabic and Persian and went on to teach oriental languages at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. His collection of Islamic manuscripts and old books was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 1997. Part of this collection is available online from the World Digital Library.
1000 Years of Islamic Civilization
The 284 manuscript volumes and 365 printed volumes portray 1,000 years of developments linked to Islamic civilization from the birth of the religion to the early 20th century.
Bašagić - a collector, literary researcher, journalist, poet, translator, bibliographer, museum curator and politician - preserved in this collection an image of Bosnian literature and Muslim literary heritage.
It comprises Arabic, Persian and Turkish works and rare Serbian and Croatian texts written in Arabic script.
After the Sarajevo National Library was burnt down on the orders of Bosnian Serbs under the command of convicted war criminals Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic in August 1992 during the Bosnian war, part of Bosnia’s cultural identity was erased.
An estimated three million books went up in flames, along with hundreds of original documents from the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The artifacts had been a testimony to Bosnia’s centuries-old history and its identity as a multicultural society, according to Deutsche Welle.
After the culturcide, Bašagić’s collection has emerged as a solitary and precious preserved corpus of monuments of Bosnian Muslim culture and Islamic culture in the European context.
The exhibition will run through April 27. The National Library is located off Haqqani Highway, near Haqqani Subway Station.
