Documents

This library was built beside Imam Reza’s (AS) holy shrine in the early 16th century CE and all donated and endowed works were kept and registered in it. Although before this, Qur’ans and Qur’anic booklets donated to the Roza Munawara, were kept in Qur’an house since the 10th century CE.

Endowment notices documents related to the shrine and Imam Reza’s (AS) court organization were assigned to the library at the time of construction of the library in the Safavid period; These documents created the AQR document centre. It was very important to keep the endowment notices, which were the AQR’S main income and expense documents; because the way of managing of many internal organizations of AQR, salary payment of staff and other expenses had been written in it with donators' ideas and conditions. Actually, these documents are internal regulations of the AQR administrative organization according to which custodians should administer the shrine. At that time, for keeping and retrieving the endowment notices, a list was made from them and delivered to the library with the endowment notice origin.  The variety of documents given to the library increased in the Qajar period; in addition to endowment notices, other documents such as kings' orders , writing compromises, lease contracts, etc. related to the endowment notices content, were assigned to  this collection for keeping, and similar to the previous periods, some lists were made from them which are in lists of the Qajar period. Up to the time of Pahlavi, the library documents pertaining to these endowment notices and the relevant documents had been delivered to the President of the Library.

 Reports belonging to 1965, which related to the transmission of the AQR Qur’an and Qur’anic pamphlets from the AQR old Qur’an house, revealed a number of “the AQR fiscal manuscript documents” from the past were kept in the golden arch of Atiq courtyard along with Qur’ans in the previous Qur’an house. It is the first document report with the exception of endowment notices in the library; however, during these years, nothing has been done to these documents only continue to be kept in closed bags in a room on top of the holy shrine’s roof.

Therefore, before the formation of affairs management of documents and press, some documents had been kept in the AQR library collection, all of which had related to the AQR donations and had the applied aspect for dealing with endowed properties of the holy shrine; that’s why they had been classified and registered.  There was not yet a plan for organizing documents and delivering them to researchers.  In 1984, at the time of restoration of the holy shrine, due to false wall demolition, approximately 283000 papers, the AQR Administrative Organization Documents, some explanations were given earlier about it, were found and transferred to the library and kept and bound in the form of small notebooks. These documents collection was kept in the archive hall of documents and Khorasan, a subset of press and documents archive, in the administration of documents and manuscripts.

Since 1995, with doing some actions and hiring some experts to recognize and create the scientific methods in listing and document register, the ability of this section was revealed to the library authorities for developing administrative and the need for technological actions and information, and document administration chart was provided and suggested; the AQR Central Administration agreed with establishing of documents office in the general office of the library in 1997.

Visit the site of the AQR Documents and Press Centre