Description

A charming privately published pamphlet in Tatar language, mimeographed in black and blue, includes texts of the Islamic prayers and illustrations of correct way of praying.

The pamphlet was written and published by Hasan Hamidulla (1895-1988),s a Finland-based Tatar publisher, writer and entrepreneur. He was born in Nizhny Novgorod and moved with this father to Finland in 1915. In 1926 and 1927 Hasan served a military service in Turkey, after which he returned to Finland, where he was running a business with batteries and radios. In 1950 he moved to Helsinki.

From the mid 1920s on, Hasan was publishing books and magazines in Tatar language and was distributing them for free to the Muslim immigrants. He was closely involved with the Islamic religious centers in Finland and outside its borders.

All the publications were printed or mimeographed by the author in his private press in limited editions and today rarely appear on the market and no or only sporadic examples survive in the institutions.

Our examples come from an outstandingly curated private collection of unusual Tatar and Turkic printing and are bound in attractive privately made cloth binding.

We could not trace any examples on Worldcat.

References: Harry HALÉN, A Bibliographical Survey of the Publishing Activities of the Turkic Minority in Finland, 1979, no. 35.