Writing and Preserving Islamic Legal Documents: Bukharan Fatwas inside a Central Asian Jung Manuscript in Qum (original) (raw)

Abstract

Written artefacts which record the legal opinion or fatwa (Ar. fatwā, pl. fatāwā) of an Islamic jurist or muftī have a long tradition in the Islamic world.1 The earliest extant fatwa documents that have come to light so far are recorded on papyrus from the ninth-tenth centuries and on paper from the eleventhtwelfth centuries.2 These early fatwas are in Arabic. In the eastern Islamic lands, among non-Arabic speaking peoples, fatwas were also written in Persian. At least eleven fatwas written in Persian on paper in medieval Islamic Khurāsān, from the region of present-day Afghanistan, are known.3 Though undated, based on their script, it is likely they are from the twelfth-thirteenth centuries. This study will focus on a more recent example of fatwa writing in Persian from nineteenth-century Bukhara in present day Uzbekistan. The three Bukharan fatwas examined here were found glued along with other fatwas and legal documents inside a manuscript in Qum, Iran, in 2007. Their long-distance displacement from Bukhara to Qum and their preservation inside a manuscript 1 The authors would like to warmly thank the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (csmc), Universität Hamburg and its Cluster of Excellence "Understanding Written Artefacts" for providing a stimulating intellectual home for writing this essay. We would also like to acknowledge the help at various stages of Aygerim Serikovna (Gylym Ordasy, The Museum of Rare Books, Almaty, Kazakhastan), Saidakbar Mukhammadaminov, Said Gaziev, Ahmad

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