Mufti Muhammad Šakir efendi Muidović’s Library

Abstract

Muhammad Šakir efendi Muidović, born and bred in Sarajevo, spent almost his entire working life serving as the mufti of Sarajevo. During his lifetime, he collected a valuable library of works from different scientific disciplines, and he bequeathed it in his will to his heirs as evladiyyat waqf (family endowment), provided that his most capable and competent descendants would look after the library. Considering that the descendants did not abide by the waqif’s (endower’s) last will and testament and that they sold out of the library by the middle of the 20th century, this paper focuses on the way in which Mufti Muidović’s library was sold out. Our goal in this paper was to determine the exact number of preserved manuscripts from Mufti Muidović’s library and the place where they are stored and kept today. Moreover, this paper presents the activities that the Islamic community had undertaken in order to safeguard and protect Mufti Muidović’s library, while the appendixes to this paper contain the title and type of the works in Mufti Muidović’s library, registered on the list made by Muhammad Enveri Kadić, which is, to be sure, of major significance, since hitherto conducted research mentions only the number of the works that Mufti Muidović had left to his library.