This work is a Descriptive Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts in the Third Collection of the Asiatic Society, which has been compiled by the noted scholar, Mohammed Abdullah, and edited by Dr. M. Firoze. The methodology, adopted long ago by the famous scholar Wladimir Ivanow, has been followed in this volume by the compiler, for whose arduous labour the Asiatic Society expresses its sincere gratitude. This Descriptive Catalogue would certainly be useful to the scholars, because the subjects of the manuscripts are clearly stated in the contents. Dr. M. Firoze has done an appreciable work in editing the volume in a competent manner.

Before introducing the present Catalogue, I would like to point out that it was mainly due to the initiative taken by the President of the Asiatic Society, Professor Biswanath Banerjee, that 507 loose, unarranged hand-written sheets - containing the required specifications, with a brief description, of 498 manuscripts from the Third Collection of Persian manuscripts of the Society - submitted by the cataloguer, could be chiseled into a publishable form.

To elaborate it, when the bundle of above-mentioned sheets was sent to me with a letter from the General Secretary of the Asiatic Society, Professor Ramakanta Chakrabarty, I wrote back to him explaining that what the cataloguer had submitted could not be published unless it was recast in the form of a book with Introduction, Classification, Indexing, etc., which was certainly a tedious job. My reply to the General Secretary, made President Biswanath Banerjee disappointed, because the latter, who always takes interest in promoting Arabic and Persian studies at the Asiatic Society, was quite eager to publish a catalogue of Persian manuscripts on the line of those of Sanskrit and Pali in the post-Bicentennial Silver Jubilee year (2008-2009) of the Society. Professor Banerjee, therefore, affectionately asked me to do the needful so that the Catalogue was published anyhow in time, and graciously mentioned it too in his Presidential Address at the Annual General Meeting of the Asiatic Society, held on April 24, 2008. Hence, it was purely out of my deep regards for Professor Banerjee that I took up the work by recasting the whole thing in the same format as adopted by Wladimir Ivanow in his two descriptive catalogues of Persian manuscripts at the Asiatic Society Society's Collection (1924) and Curzon Collection (1926).

Book's Contents and Sample Pages