ABSTRACT
The scroll of documents discussed below was found recently in the course of
work on a new catalogue which will include full descriptions of hitherto
unknown Sufi texts dating from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries kept
at the Institute of Oriental Studies “al-Beruni” (Tashkent).2 The documents have
been glued together to form one scroll, a procedure known from other types of
documents as for example, endowment deeds (vaqf-na¯mah) or other secular and
religious decrees and acts (ya¯rlı¯q, vas ¯ ı¯qah, etc.) (see Figures 3.1-3.3). The
beginning of the scroll has not been preserved. The language of the documents is
Arabic and Persian with only a few insertions of Turkic, mostly stemming from
the h ˙ ikmatlar attributed to Khwajah Ahmad Yasavi. The size of the scroll is 545
6 56 cm. The handwriting is nasta\lı¯q, at least by seven different scribes can be identified. The paper is evidently from Bukhara (transparent, glossy and cream
colour) and Samarqand (with dense structure and glossy). The different parts of
the scroll (judging by the seals) were drawn up at different moments, in a time
range spanning the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Only once an
author of one of the riva¯yat included left some brief information about himself
and cited two chains of a spiritual succession (silsilah) linking him to the
Mudjadidiyyah and the Qadiriyyah lines (see below).
