ORIENTAL-ISLAMIC MANUSCRIPTS

The Oriental-Islamic Manuscripts of the Bosniak Institute – The Adil Zulfikarpašić Foundation represent a valuable contribution to the overall manuscript heritage of Bosnia and Herzegovina. As a lover of the written word and a passionate collector, the founder of the Institute, Adil Zulfikarpašić, carefully and devotedly built the manuscript collection alongside the formation of other collections within the Bosniak Institute.

The collection developed gradually, starting from individual manuscript codices to the acquisition of entire collections. A particularly significant contribution to the formation of the collection came from the inclusion of several larger and important collections, such as the manuscripts from the Sikirić family of Oglavak near Fojnica, Sulejman Hafiz from Prizren, Ahmed Efendi Hodžić from Tešanj, the manuscript collection from Dr. Dušanka Bojanić's library, which was donated to the Institute by Alija Širbegović, as well as the collections of Seid Striko and others.

Today, the Bosniak Institute possesses a total of 1,086 manuscript codices with 1,662 works written in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Bosnian, created across the Islamic world from the 14th to the early 20th century. The collection encompasses works from all scholarly fields typically found in serious manuscript collections, both locally and globally. These include works on Islamic law, liturgy, copies of the Qur'an and parts of it, Qur'anic exegeses, collections of hadiths, legal rulings (fatwas), prayers (duas), grammatical and lexicographical works, and manuals for learning Oriental or Bosnian languages. In addition, the collection includes a significant number of literary works in prose and verse, medžmue (collections of diverse materials), historical chronicles, and works in the exact sciences (mathematics, pharmacology, astronomy, etc.), and, notably, works by Bosniak authors and manuscripts related to our region, either by the place of transcription or by the copyist.

To preserve this unique, authentic, and rare written heritage, the Institute has been systematically working on its collection and preservation for over thirty years, as well as on making it available to researchers and scholars both domestically and internationally. The entire manuscript collection has been cataloged and published in three volumes of the Catalog of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Bosnian Manuscripts from the Bosniak Institute's Collection, is almost fully digitized, conserved, and a number of manuscripts have been restored.