Tipping the Scales in Favor of Charitable Bequests: A Critique

ABSTRACTThis article explores the role of different social groups in early modern Dutch towns in organising and financing poor relief. Examining both the income structure of Dutch urban poor relief organisations and voluntary donations and bequests by citizens reveals what motivations lay behind their involvement, and how and why these changed over time. In the seventeenth century, ‘middle groups’ donated more often and higher mean amounts, reflecting their efforts to contribute to urban community building. In the eighteenth century, the elite became relatively more involved in charitable giving. Also, the urge to give to one's own religious group seems to have increased in this period.

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Mīrzā Muḥammad Khān Qazvini

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies ◽

10.1017/s0041977x00083804 ◽

1950 ◽

Vol 13 (2) ◽

pp. 547-550

Author(s):

Mojtabā Minovi

Keyword(s):

Great Loss ◽

Formal Instruction ◽

Religious Colleges ◽

Charitable Bequests ◽

The Times ◽

Obituary Notice

The death of Mīrzā, Muḥammad Khān Qazvīnī is a great loss to scholarship, and will be felt most keenly in Persia itself, where men of such learning are rare to-day. I do not propose to say much here about the details of his life, for in 1924 he wrote a fairly full autobiography, which was published with four other lives as an appendix to The Bulletin of the Sciences of Finance and Economics, Tehran. This autobiography was reprinted in a collection of his articles called Bīst Maqāleḥ e Qazvīnī Vol. I (ed. Poure-Davoud, Bombay, 1928). More recently he wrote a shorter account of his life, which was published in the monthly periodical Yaghmā (Miḥr 1327/Sept. 1948). He died on 27th May 1949, when he was 72 years old, having been born in March 1877/Rabī’ I 1294. A moving obituary by his great fellow-scholar, S. H. Taqizādeh, appeared in the Ittilā‘āt, and The Times of London published an obituary notice a week later.Qazvīnī's father was a scholar of some repute, and one of the four jointauthors of the great Persian biographical work Nāmeh-e Dāneshvar¯n. Qazvīnī himself, who was born in Tehran, was educated under the traditional Eastern system, and learnt more by his own efforts than from formal instruction. He was orphaned before he was twelve, and soon afterwards became a student (ṭalaba) in one of the old religious colleges supported by charitable bequests; but like other zealous students he managed to attend the lectures of all the eminent masters of his time.

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