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be used for the final purpose of the endowment. Some benefactors retained a
part of the vakuf for themselves and their family, and immediately earmarked a
part for religious, charitable, and social institutions. Those were known as semi-
family vakuf s [ yarı âilevî vakıf]. After a time, usually after the vakuf founders’
descendents had passed away, the latter types of vakuf (family and semi-family
endowments) would be transformed into the former type of vakuf, the vakf-ı hayrî.
In this respect, we can say that the foundation of a pious endowment relies on two
inseparable entities: one is a concrete legal act in which an individual declares
that in the Name of God, he or she endows a part of his or her property; the other
is the aim of the endowment—that the endowed property should serve Islamic-
religious, cultural-educational, and humanitarian purposes.
Giving away part of one’s property to charity so that other people should draw
support from it is an act intended to please God. Islamic jurists found a basis for
the vakuf legislation in the hadith s (oral traditions of the Prophet Muhammad).5
That would be a sufficient motive for any Muslim believer to do a religiously
commendable deed—to found a vakuf by donating a part of his or her property
to charity. As an endowment founded in accordance with religious principles, the
vakuf was a contribution first to the religious and simultaneously to the social and
economic aspects of the community where it was founded, irrespective of the
value of the assets at its disposal.
A benefactor who was able to endow relatively large assets would stipulate that
they be used for the construction of places of worship, schools, hospitals, libraries,
bridges, public baths, public kitchens, public drinking fountains, or hostelries. In
the legal foundational act itself, the benefactor fixed the amount of funds he or
she anticipated would be needed for the maintenance of the building(s) within the
endowment and the salaries to be paid to vakuf officials. Such vakuf s were a direct
contribution to the common good, and were called müessesât-ı hayriye.
Another type of vakuf was the asl-i vakf. These would be founded with smaller
funds and combined with others. In that way they contributed to increasing the
assets of a larger endowment and to its growth. The more assets a vakuf had, the
more it could contribute to the religious and social life of the community.
Religious endowments were founded and developed throughout the Ottoman
Empire. In particular, they were established in the territory of present-day Bosnia
and Herzegovina, which was part of the Ottoman Empire from the fifteenth
century to the end of the nineteenth.
As the vakuf played an important role in the religious, social, and economic life
of the Ottoman Empire, the question arises as to what Ottoman women’s attitude
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towards pious foundations may have been. In this paper, we shall address this
issue, taking as an example the area of today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina.6
Certainly, the most reliable sources for studying the institution in general
are vakufnama s [in Turkish, vakıfnâme or vakf iye]—documents concerning the
foundation and purpose of endowments. How available are the documents that
would testify to the foundation of the vakuf over a five-century period? How many
of these documents have been preserved to this day? Where can they be found?
These queries themselves show that the topic studied here can be addressed only
from the starting point we have at our disposal, and which, by this mere fact, can
provide only partial clues to the subject at hand. Our approach is as justified as the
point of reference is reliable.
Our point of reference is Opširni popis Bosanskog sandžaka iz 1604. godine
[Comprehensive register of the Bosnian Sancak/ Sanjak of 1604] (2000), which
is a translation into Bosnian of the Defter-i Mufassal-i Liva-i Bosna (hereafter
referred to as Defter).7 This volume contains a register of the vakuf s which had
been established by the end of the sixteenth century in the Bosnian Sancak, a
territorial and administrative unit of the Ottoman Empire that comprised a major
part of today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina.8 In this register, we searched for records
of women who had founded a vakuf in this early period of Ottoman Bosnia.
Records in land registers are very short. The Defter is only a record of data;
it does not explain or comment on it. Nevertheless, from the recorded data, we
can gain some basic insight into our topic—specifically, that a number of women
were registered among the people who had donated their property to charity by
1604 and thus founded a vakuf.
These data enable us to make certain assumptions. For instance, when we
look at the records on women as founders of vakuf s from the perspective of the
definition of a vakuf in Islamic law, we can say that in the early period of Ottoman
Bosnia, women were able to own property and dispose of it by their own free will.
We can also surmise that women had access to the courts, since the contract for
the foundation of a vakuf was concluded at court, i.e. before a kadı [ qadi].9
Who were the women founders of vakuf s? What did they endow? What did
they endow their property for? Starting from these questions, we shall study the
records in the Defter pertaining to female benefactors in Bosnia in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries.
Women Founders of Independent Endowments
The 1604 Defter includes a record for the endowment of Shahdidar, the wife of
the deceased Husrev Beg in the city of Sarajevo. The value of the endowed assets
was 115,000 akçe (aspers), intended for the construction of a mescid [ masjid] (a
place of worship) and a mekteb (a school).10 By tracing this record in the Defter,
we tried to collect more information about the endowment from the sixteenth
century established by a woman named Shahdidar.
Some important information is found in the same Defter. In the register of
quarters in the city of Sarajevo, there is one formed around “the mescid built by
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Gazi Husrev Beg’s wife.”11 It is known that in the conception of Islamic towns,
mescid s were the nuclei around which quarters developed. Therefore such quarters
were named after the mescid that had marked the beginning of the quarter, while
the mescid itself was known by the name of the benefactor. Religious rituals
were held, and lectures on religious and moral life were delivered in mescid s,
which were also centers of social life. Communal issues were resolved there at
the neighborhood level. The existence of a record in the 1604 Defter refering to
a quarter whose centre was the mescid known under the name of “Gazi Husrev
Beg’s wife” shows that this mescid had already been built within Shahdidar’s
endowment. Indeed, Shahdidar was the wife of Gazi Husrev Beg, Bosnia’s best-
known governor.12 We find confirmation thereof in another extant document.
Sicil [ sijill] (court record from the Ottoman period) No. 1 in the Gazi Husrev
Beg library collection of archive documents contains the transcript
of a vakufnama
that has been identified as the vakuf of Shahdidar, Gazi Husrev Beg’s wife.13 This
identification was not straight-forward, and was made by Fehim Dž. Spaho while
preparing a translation of the document from Arabic into Bosnian.14 The difficulty
was that the transcript, comprised of five folios in the court records (from 38 to
42), contains no mention of two important pieces of information. First, the name
of the benefactress is absent, though it is clearly understood from the Arabic text
that it is a woman ( wâqifa, waqafat wa habasat wa sabbalat—38/17).15 Second,
the end of the vakufnama was not copied, so we cannot reliably establish the time
it was drawn up.16
In the vakufnama transcript, we read that the benefactress whose endowment
occasioned the drawing up of this document had donated the amount of 100,000
akçe ( wa jamī’a mablaghin mi’ati alfi dirhamin—39/10). She had ordered the
construction of a mescid with that money in a part of Sarajevo ( wa dhālike jamī’
masjidin banathu wa shayyadathu wa a’lathu fī mahallati min mahallāt dāri al-
guzāt Sarāy—39/3–4), and also specified that 3,000 akçe should be set aside from
the endowed amount to build a school by the mescid ( wa sharatat an yubnā bayt
at-ta’llim bi qurbi al-masjidi al-mastūri fī dāhili haramihi bi salāsi ālāfi dirham
min al-mablaghi al-mazbūri—39/12–13). In addition to the relatively large
amount of 100,000 akçe, the benefactress also endowed a house in the city of
Sarajevo ( wa dhālike jamī’ al-manzil al-kāyin fī baldati al-mazbūra al-mahrūsa fī
mahallati al-jāmi’i al-marhūm Yahya pasha—41/6). She specified that the house
would be her home during her lifetime, and that after her death, it was to be sold
for the amount of 15,000 akçe ( yubā’u dhālike al-manzil al-mawqūf al-mazbūr bi
hamsata ‘ashara alf dirham—41/10–11). So, the value of the endowment under
this vakufnama, 115,000 akçe, is identical to the value of the endowment which,
according to the Defter, had been founded by Shahdidar. Other facts are also
common to the vakufnama and the Defter: both sources record that
1. The imam, the chief official leading the prayers in the mescid, was to receive
4 akçe per day as salary ( wa li al-imāmi kulla yawmin arba’a darāhima—
40/13);
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2. The müezzin [ mu’azzin], the official reciting the call to prayer, was to receive
2 akçe per day as salary ( wa li al-mu’azzini kulla yawmin dirhamayni—
40/14);
3. The mu‘allim, the official teaching children at school, was to receive 3 akçe
per day as salary ( wa li al-mu’allimi kulla yawmin salāsata darāhim—40/14).
In the interest of space, we shall not enumerate all the identical items in the
two sources; as mentioned above, their agreement has been demonstrated by
Spaho.17 On that basis, we are able to deduce how, in sixteenth-century Sarajevo,
a wealthy woman—the wife of a state official—formed her pious endowment by
endowing the property at her disposal. This woman’s vakuf served, on the one
hand, a religious purpose—a mescid was built and maintained; and on the other,
an educational purpose—a school was built and maintained. We cannot neglect
the economic purpose of Shahdidar’s vakuf either, as salaries were provided for
several officials from its proceeds. Finally, the social purpose of this institution
is seen in the fact that a quarter soon developed around the mescid. By founding
the endowment, Shahdidar made her own contribution to improving life in
Sarajevo at the time of its development from a provincial town into a city. The
rich endowment of Shahdidar’s husband Husrev Beg certainly contributed most
to this aspect of Sarajevo’s development.
Shahdidar earmarked, probably at the time of the foundation of the vakuf, the
major part of the property she endowed (100,000 akçe) for the construction of a
religious and religious-educational institution. She retained, until her death, the
right of use over a smaller part of the property endowed for the vakuf, namely the
real estate comprising a house.
Was Shahdidar the only woman to have founded a rich pious endowment
(including the construction of buildings) in Bosnia before 1604? The 1604 Defter
suggests that this might be so; however, other historical sources show that in
the neighborhood of Mejtaš of the city of Sarajevo, a woman named Dudi Bula
(or Tuti Bula) commissioned the construction of a mescid in the years between
1528 and 1540.18 That mescid is indeed recorded in an older defter dated 1565.19
However, that record provides no specific information concerning the endowment
of the woman to whom it refers as Dudi Hatun—we only know that there was a
place of worship under that name at the time in Sarajevo, and two more sources
testify to that.20 Nevertheless, as they refer to later centuries, we do not have any
indication of the time when Dudi Bula’s mescid was built. If Mujezinović’s claim
is correct that this mescid was erected after 1528 and prior to 1540, then it is older
than the one built by Shahdidar. So far, nothing is known about the benefactress
Dudi Bula; it is worth mentioning that according to Mujezinović, the title bula
suggests that she was a religious teacher.21 Any other claim about her would be
speculative.
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Endowments of Women Within Other Endowments
The survival and functioning of buildings constructed within a vakuf depended on
funds available for their maintenance. The mescid built by Shahdidar continued
to exist from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth.22 Dudi Bula’s mescid, which
may be even older than Shahdidar’s, existed until the early twentieth century.23
Certainly these buildings had to have been refurbished over such a long period of
time. It is difficult to know today how long Shahdidar’s funds may have lasted.
What is known is that her mescid burnt down in a great fire that broke out in
Sarajevo in 1697, and that it was subsequently reconstructed by the inhabitants
of that quarter with state support.24 Later, the mescid was probably maintained
with funds from smaller vakuf s ( asl-i vakf) which had been joined to this one.25
It is also known that Dudi Bula’s mescid burnt down in the same fire.26 Although
we do not have reliable information concerning the reconstruction of Dudi Bula’s
mescid, it is certain that it too was reconstructed with funds from smaller vakuf s
and similar contributions.
Just as the large vakuf s ( müessesât-ı hayriye) were important for the religious-
educational, social, and economic life of the quarter in which they were founded,
the smaller vakuf s were equally important for the survival and functioning of the
large vakuf s for the communal good. Judging from the 1604 Defter, women from
that time contributed to the communal good by founding smaller vakuf s, which
they joined to existing larger ones.27 From the modest amount of information
contained in the Defter, it is hard to know how the benefactors—women or
men—may have decided to which large vakuf they would contribute
. In several
cases, nonetheless, we can discern some hints.
Nefisa and Hanifa—their names recorded in the Defter—were Havadže
Kemal’s daughters. Nefisa endowed the amount of 2,500 akçe, and Hanifa
3,000 akçe. These women joined the vakuf s they founded to Havadže Kemal’s.28
This benefactor had endowed funds for the construction of a masjid in the city
of Sarajevo, in the quarter where he lived.29 From these records, it is not hard
to reach the conclusion that Nefisa and Hanifa joined their endowments to that
founded by their father. If Nefisa and Hanifa were sisters, then İbrahim must have
been their brother: the Defter records that he was Havadže Kemal’s son. İbrahim
also endowed 4,000 akçe, and joined his vakuf to Havadže Kemal’s.30 These data
suggest that by endowing assets of their own and founding smaller vakuf s, the
children contributed to the larger endowment founded by their father. One more
fact that lends support to the hypothesis that these three individuals were closely
related—i.e. that all three were Havadže Kemal’s direct descendents—is that
their vakuf s were recorded in the same Defter, from which we can deduce that
they must have founded their vakuf s at about the same time.31 They were joined
by another benefactor, Mehmed Čelebi, whom the 1604 Defter records as a son
of Havadže Kemal; it states that he endowed funds for the building of two public
drinking fountains: one in the vicinity of Havadže Kemal’s mescid, and the other
in the vicinity of Havadže Kemal’s house.32 According to these records, Mehmed
Čelebi used his own funds to establish a vakuf, one that improved the quality
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of life in the quarter where his parents’ house was located, and where his father
had commissioned the construction of a place of worship. If the four benefactors
mentioned above were Havadže Kemal’s children, then this is an example of a
case in sixteenth-century Sarajevo where descendents, both male and female, used
part of their property to found smaller vakuf s and thereby helped and promoted
larger ones that had been founded by their father.33 This way the descendents
continued to do God-pleasing deeds, and, following the example of their parents,
stayed connected with their family of origin.