On the side line of a visit paid by a Kazakhstani delegation to the manuscripts office, expert and responsible of manuscript treasury of Astan Quds Razavi’s organization of libraries, museums, and document center said, “Astan Quds Razavi’s library is one of the biggest and oldest libraries in the Islamic world”.
He added, “Having over ninety thousand handwritten books, this center is considered as one the biggest backs of the Iranian and non-Iranian researchers in the area of science”.
He introduced Astan Quds Razavi’s central library as one of the most documented libraries in the world and went on to say, “There exists some documents from the Safavid era in this library which shows that this library was also active in the 8th century”.
The expert of manuscript treasury of organization of libraries, museums, and document centers of Astan Quds Razavi introduced organization as the biggest Qur’anic collections in the world and reiterated, “We have arranged a kind of categorization in the hand written texts existing at the center. One category of this collection is those Qur’ans written on the parchments”.
Fazel Hashemi Nejad added, “We have over 150 Qur’ans written on parchment from the 1st to 3rd centuries AH. These Qur’ans are attributed to household of the Apostle of God (S.A.W.), which are maintained here”.
He noted that among 22 thousand copies of Qur’an existing in the center some turn back to the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries. He also stated, “Writing styles of these Qur’ans are Naskh, Nasta liq, and Thulth. These Qur’ans have been written by salient figures of the Islamic world like Yghout Mosta’sami, Ala Edin Tabrizi, Alireza Abbasi, Ibrahim Sultan (son of Shahrokh), Baysonqor Mirza, Agha Mohammad Khan Qomi, and Master Ahmad Neyrizi who are all famous calligraphers in the Islamic world”.
He went on to say, “One important part of this collection is the translated books in Persian, Turkish, etc. The translated books are come from 4th to 13th and 14th centuries and they are very useful sources for the researchers”.
Fazel Hashemi also talked about the presence valuable books of the Islamic world in the libraries of Astan Quds Razavi and said, “Hand written texts by salient and well known experts in two sects of Shia and Sunni such as Allameh Helli, Sheikh Bahaei, Qeyas al-Din Jamshid Kashani are some other manuscripts of ours which are used by researchers”.
He also referred to some other books with the topics of medicine, pharmaceutics, and math and stated, “We also have some precious medical texts by Hanin Ibn Isaac written in 396 AH/ 1006 A.D.”.
Expert and responsible of Astan Quds Razavi’s organization of libraries, museums, and document center introduced another section of the collection as those related to artistic works. He also continued, “Qur’anic manuscripts are a very exquisite treasury which has been decorated by calligraphy, gold work, gilding and framing”.
Referring to the cover pages of the works, Fazel Hashemi stated, “These books have been decorated by very nice cover pages made up of wood, pulp, and fabric”.
At the end of his remarks, he said that in addition to the manuscripts, the center has got both print and lithographic books. He reminded, “300 thousand hand written and digital copies have been bought. We had ninety thousand handwritten books before this and we also had 250 thousand digital sources gathered from all over the world”.
On the sideline of Kazakhstani delegation’s visit, Asl Khan, deputy of Kazakhstan’s interior minister said, “We found very scarce books here and we got understood, by studying handwritten books of Islamic scientists, the importance of the scientific books of Muslim scholars”.