Introduction
Legal-religious documents (Asnade Sharei) constitute a category of records generated to resolve disputes and consolidate relations between people and society. Due to the authenticity, validity, and chronological proximity to the events they describe, these documents often take precedence over many historical and jurisprudential sources. The documents entail a lot of precious information on the historical, economic, social, jurisprudential, and judicial issues throughout various Iranian historical eras. Petitions (Esteshhadnameh) are a specific type of legal-religious document that entail the daily occurrences of past lives. Historically, when a dispute arose or a matter required verification, individuals sought the testimony of witnesses by requiring their handwriting and seals that are historical equivalents to the modern signatures. Every witness would state his observation on the subject and validate his testimony with a seal. That is, a petition was a written inquiry by a single person, resulting in a collective response under specific conditions by those acquainted with the matter, written in a textual form. It said that exploring these documents provides significant insights into the style of writing, the legal-religious terminology of the era, the kind of social conflicts, and the social position of the witnesses.
A huge bulk of legal-religious writings and documents has survived from the Qajar era, and these petitions are among the survived documents. The documents that are products of the era's jurisprudential-judicial system, hold a specific, largely fixed structure that, while simple, have a specific document drafting style compared to other religious documents. These petitions can give us precious data on the judicial and social affairs of every period. The information of the petitions under research in this study revolves around themes such as inheritance, land and agricultural disputes, physical altercations and homicide, forced possession of property, theft, endowment, forceful reconciliation, the non-recitation of marriage contracts, debt recovery, destruction of commercial and residential property, and ownership of houses, shops, lands, palaces, and caravanserais, as well as water rights in village Qantas, joint ownership of properties, and in transition of part of the ownership of a property.
Key Notes
1. Introducing of the petitions (Esteshhadnameh) from the Qajar and Early Pahlavi periods preserved in the Malek National Library and Museum, and introducing the potential of this archive
2. This article represents the first independent scholarly research conducted on the petitions of the Malek National Library and Museum Archives.
Materials and Methods
Using a descriptive method, this study tried to introduce and examine 32 petitions archived at the Malek National Library and Museum, dating from the Qajar to the Early Pahlavi period. A primary focus is the reviewing of one of the most significant petitions in the collection, dated 1225 AH (during the reign of Fathali Shah Qajar). This document is about four endowed shops belonging to Aqa Mahdi Khayyambashi in the Tehran Bazaar, the proceeds of which were dedicated to a mosque and a water reservoir near to the Imamzadeh Zeid shrine. This document reveals that these endowments have been encroached upon and diverted from their original purpose over the past time, and has been endorsed by the scholars leading scholars of the capital in four stages in the years 1266, 1279, 1281, 1316, and 1332 AH. Consequently, the petition has been validated and endorsed again in the four different times.
Results
The findings showed that, similar to other historical petitions, the documents under study are simple, devoid of ornamentation, and have different structures. They originate from various regions, including Tehran, Isfahan, Tabriz, Mahabad, Guilan, Behbahan, Shiraz, Kermanshah, and Torbate Jam. These documents are both short texts of two or three lines and extensive scrolls, validated by the seals and handwriting of witnesses, ranging in number, from a one to 120 witnesses.
Discussion and Conclusion
One can conclude by the study of these petitions that the style, register, and method of these kinds of documents are used today with only minor differences compared to the past.