Editor’s note: On November 12, 2023, a day after the publication of the article “A Legacy of Lost Heritage” below, Simerg received a communique from ITREB in Karachi, via an Ismaili institutional leader, providing further details on the extent of the damage to the Ismaili institution’s Central library located in Karachi. According to the communique, the damage was more limited than initially thought and reported in our piece. In particular, the more than 200 manuscripts are completely safe because of protective measures taken to ensure their safekeeping. The Gujarati and Khojki-language magazines were previously moved to a different location within the library and were also saved. While a significant number of other materials in the library were damaged due to heat, smoke and water, rather than completely destroyed, they may be recoverable to some degree.
Simerg sincerely hopes that the majority of important objects and documents in the ITREB library remain in their original state and that those that were damaged are recoverable. We also hope that proper fire safety rules are in place to avoid such incidents from taking place in the library as well as Ismaili institutional buildings, especially the older ones, around the world. As noted in a UNESCO Study, the cost of restoring documents and books damaged in a library fire is substantially greater than what would be spent to store the materials under the best fire protection conditions.
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A Legacy of Lost Heritage
On the morning of November 2nd, 2023, at 9:15am local time, the National ITREB (Ismaili Tariqah and Religious Education Board) building for Pakistan located in the Garden East district of Karachi caught on fire. Fortunately, no one was hurt in the blaze. However, it quickly became apparent there would be another casualty.
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Located within the building was an important library housing tens of thousands of printed materials, photographs, memorabilia, audiovisual materials and manuscripts. The fire destroyed much of the collection. What wasn’t burnt or singed by the fire was then subject to water damage as firetrucks attempted to extinguish the blaze which was fed by the thousands of pages of flammable material in the building.
In the context of the Central ITREB Library located in Karachi, the local history, writing and output of the Khoja Jamats in particular, and more broadly of the Jamats of the Indian Subcontinent and to a lesser extent Eastern Africa and Northern Pakistan were preserved in the portion of the collection that focused on the contemporary period. In this post, I have included some gems of materials that I was able to capture on some of my journeys as an homage to the library and its role in my own archival research and being able to cobble together a social and religious history of the Ismailis.
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While assessing the full extent of the damage is still an ongoing process, a number of items were able to be saved including a unique collection of Khojki manuscripts which were housed in fire retardant boxes. When I first heard about the tragedy the next day, I was devastated to learn of the loss of such a treasure trove of materials so important to better understanding the history of the Ismaili community. I had had the opportunity to consult the library on several occasions during my visit to Karachi over the years, including on my last visit in 2013. I was amazed from my first visit in 2006 at the breadth and richness of the collection and easily lost myself for hours and days within the library perusing its shelves, flipping through the pages of its meticulously organized items and often feeling a sense of delight at a personal discovery of a publication or image I was unaware of or that shed important light on a question I’d been pondering.
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My own research interests were in the printed collection of the library in English and Gujarati including the photographic documentation of the community in the Indian Subcontinent and around the world. I had taken the opportunity to photograph umpteen works so that I could consult them in more detail and at my leisure once I returned to my home and now I realize the singular importance of those acts of documenting the legacy of the production of individual Ismailis and of Ismaili communities and institutions around the world. Much of ITREB’s Central Library collection owes a debt to Ismailis in Karachi, Pakistan, and around the world who donated materials including photographs as well as the library’s role in actively obtaining and safeguarding those materials.
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The Importance of Local Libraries
Since the establishment of The Institute of Ismaili Studies in London in 1977, a central repository of the community has been under development and many familial, local, institutional and national collections have been kindly donated to the IIS for safekeeping, preservation, digitization with the larger mandate of providing resources for research. However, before that, the guardians of these materials were often personal collectors, families and smaller institutions such as The Ismaili Society and Ismailia Associations, the predecessors of the now-ITREBs as well as local Jamatkhana libraries. In fact, it was because of these collections, not necessarily large-scale libraries, that scholars such as Wladimir Ivanow, Husayn Hamdani, Asaf Fyzee, Jawad Muscati and many now celebrated Nizari Ismaili authors, scholars, khalifas and waezeen of current and previous generations were able to make breakthroughs in their understanding of the Ismaili past and had source materials for their research.
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The importance of these regional libraries, especially for local researchers, cannot be underestimated. Throughout my travels over the past 25 years to areas where Ismailis live or once lived, its has often been the works preserved in individual homes, in smaller institutional collections and in local and regional Jamatkhana libraries that have provided some of the most unique documents and witnesses to history; and it is through them that have come the greatest insights and breakthroughs. Large institutional collections such as those of national libraries or of learned societies have become more accessible as they digitize their collections, but it is our debt to local institutions that cannot be underestimated.
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Local institutions, including Jamatkhanas, throughout the world have often preserved innumerable documents, manuscripts, published works, photographs and even newspaper cuttings which shed light on one of the least understood and most complex periods of Ismaili history — the last few hundred years. As Jamats in local environments fell under the dominion of various empires and rulers, and later national governments, local histories become increasingly important for understanding how Ismaili communities have come to be where they are today.
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Furthermore, since the early 1980s as part of the global processes of standardization and institutionalization, the focus of important publications such as local Ismaili magazines have shifted the majority of their spotlights to the Imam, his family and the work of Imamat institutions where previously the magazines also included much more detail, output on the production and development of Ismaili communities through the lens of the local and told from the ground-up. While there has been many things gained in the centralization of the Ismaili magazines, one of the most notable losses has been the capturing of stories of the ground realities, literary output, reflections of individual Ismailis and the vibrancy and details of the local development of Ismaili communities.
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I wrote this short piece with the hopes that it would be an homage or memorial of sorts to the Central ITREB Library Pakistan and to encourage families and small institutions to safeguard their collections for the benefit of the community in the service of documenting its past. We must also remember that just as important, however, is to preserve the present for future generations.
Date posted: November 11, 2023.
Last updated: November 13, 2023 (see editor’s note at top of page).
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About the author: Rizwan Mawani has a background in Anthropology and Religious Studies and is the author of Beyond the Mosque: Diverse Places of Muslim Worship (I. B. Tauris in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2019). Rizwan has written for a wide variety of audiences and his work has appeared in academic publications, encyclopedias as well as the Wall Street Journal and The Huffington Post. Rizwan was previously Website Content Editor and Research Coordinator in the Department of Constituency Studies at The Institute of Ismaili Studies. His current research focuses on the past two centuries of global Ismaili history with a focus on the Jamatkhana and its development during that period.
We invite our readers to read his earlier piece The Aga Khans, the Hereditary Imamat and the British Monarchy: A 150 Year Relationship of Respect, Cooperation and Friendship that appeared in Barakah, a website dedicated to His Highness the Aga Khan. A reformatted version of Rizwan’s piece was also published on this website (Simerg).
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