?
Собрание рукописей шейха Изнаура Несерхоева
Sheikh Iznaur Neserkhoev (1881–1974) from village Bolshye Varandy, now in the Shatoysky district of the Chechen Republic, was a student and murid of Yusup-hajji Baybatyrov. The private collection of Sheikh Iznaur’s manuscripts and books, now kept in Grozny by his descendants, is unique for Chechnya: the collection contains autographs of his works in Arabic, other manuscripts, early printed books and lithographs, copies of Qurans, as well as numerous letters and documents (about 200 items of storage is still largely unexplored). This article is an overview of this collection; the work in it was carried out in the summer of 2025 by the staff of the Center of Islamic Manuscripts of the IOS RAS: we managed to attribute, digitize and describe most of this collection. We also publish a translation of the testament of Sheikh Iznaur, which is a fairly vivid example of the wasiyat genre and contains a number of orders regarding the collection of manuscripts, books and documents belonging to the Sheikh. A separate array of the collection consists of documents and letters: about the division of inheritance, marriage, private correspondence, wills of various persons, as well as numerous extracts on fiqh. These documents can now be regarded as one of the important sources of information about some Chechen alims, about whose activities and lives we currently know little. They make it possible to restore to a certain extent the almost lost picture of the intellectual life of the region in the first half to the middle of the 20th century.