Karabudakhkent Mosque Collection

The present catalogue offers a granular description of a manuscript collection now hosted at the mosque of Karabudakhkent, a village situated in the Republic of Daghestan (Russian Federation). Representing one of the largest private manuscript collections today in the region, this mosque library covers an extensive chronological range, extending from the 18th to the middle of the 20th century. It includes 302 codices and 280 documentary items crafted in Arabic and Turkic languages, which shed light on the history of Islamic knowledge production in the North Caucasus across the Russian colonial and Soviet periods. This catalogue will be of value to researchers who study Islam in tsarist Russia and the USSR, the circulation of Islamic writing traditions between the North Caucasus, Iran and the Hijaz, and the wider history of autobiographical narratives and ego-documents.

Shamil Shikhaliev (PhD, 2007) is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He currently leads a project devoted to the study of Muslim intellectual biographies in Soviet-ruled Caucasus, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). He is the author of Portrait of a Soviet Islamicist: Muhammad Said-Saidov (1902-1985) (Vienna, 2026).Paolo Sartori (Ph.D., 2006) is Senior Research Associate at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where he also serves as the Chairman of the Committee for the Study of Islam in Central Eurasia (1552–2000s). He is the author of A Soviet Sultanate: Islam in Socialist Uzbekistan, 1943-1991 (Vienna, 2024).