The collection of manuscripts in the University Library in Bratislava is also one of the numerous similar libraries created in the past by an educated individual. Although its dimension is not big if compared to other collections of Islamic manuscripts housed by numerous libraries and museums abroad, it is a remarkable collection for several other reasons. Unlike those foreign collections of Islamic manuscripts, it does not come from an Asian or African Islamic country, but from the Balkans, the Islamic Bosnia. It originates in the family of a notable Bosnian intellectual living at the turn of 19th and 20th centuries, a nationalist, poet, scholar and journalist Dr. Safvet Beg Bašagić (1870-1934). He was paternally and maternally a descendent of two prominent Muslim families - the Bašagićs and the Čengićs - who had an influence upon the political and cultural development of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The collection was founded by Safvet Beg's father, Ibrahim Beg, who was a Bosnian poet writing in Turkish under the pen-name Edhem. This basic part, comprising about 85 to 90 volumes, is estimated to make up one third of the fund acquired by the University Library in Bratislava in 1924. Safvet Beg systematically enlarged this inherited collection. Until 1917, when he published the list of his collection of manuscripts (Popis orijentalnih rukopisa moje biblioteke. Priopćio Dr. Safvet Beg Bašagić. Sarajevo 1917. Glasnik zemaljskog muzeja u Bosni i Hercegovini XXVIII, s. 207-290), the number of described works was 249 titles in 196 volumes. When it was acquired by the University Library in Bratislava in 1924, it consisted of 266 manuscript codices. Thus, the collection is an evidence of the care of a Muslim intellectual about the cultural legacy of Islamic learning as a whole and, in particular, its inseparable part - the Islamic culture in the Balkans. Of course, it is also a proof of the cultural background of the Islamic Balkans on the one hand and of the cultural background of the Bašagićs as representatives of intelligentsia in this part of the Islamic world on the other hand. This merit is not downgraded by the fact that Safvet Beg was hardly able to collect at the end of 19th century all the works that were read and studied in Bosnia or elsewhere among the Balkan Muslims in the past, although he focused his collector's interest on the works created by Balkan Muslim authors. The fact that he was successful in this respect and that he managed to preserve a number of such works - scholarly as well as poetic - for the future, imparts a higher value to this collection. From a collector's point of view, it is significant that it constitutes the complete corpus in its original form (which holds true for the collection of manuscripts as well as the Muslim prints from Bašagić's library), only unessentially enlarged by subsequent purchases (contemporary state is 284 volumes). Since the tragic events in Bosnia, when the National Library in Sarajevo burned together with its manuscript and archive funds, Bašagić's collection of Muslim manuscripts in the University Library in Bratislava has been the only known intact library of Balkan Muslim manuscripts. This circumstance even more emphasizes its international and regional cultural and historical significance, which is affirmed by the fact that it has been included in the list of the monuments protected and monitored by UNESCO.

Safvet Beg Bašagić was born on May 6th 1870 in the village of Nevesinje in southern Herzegovina. After twelve years his family moved to Sarajevo, where Safvet studied at a Muslim grammar school with Arabic as the "classical" language. After obtaining certificate in 1895, he left for Vienna, where in 1899 he achieved the doctor's degree in the field of the languages of Islam through successfully exercising his dissertation "Bosnians and Herzegovinians in the World of Islamic Literatures". Its topic reveals his concern in the life of southern Slavonic Muslims in the era of the Ottoman empire in the Balkans as well as his lifelong effort to preserve the literary heritage of Muslim authors in the Balkans in the form of his collection of Turkish, Arabic and Persian manuscripts. After graduating he returned to Bosnia, where he edited various journals and worked as a grammar school teacher in Sarajevo. In 1910 he was appointed to a professorship at the department of Oriental languages in Zagreb. Since December 1919 he worked in Sarajevo as the curator of the Municipal Museum and he held this appointment until May 1927 when he retired for health reasons. He died and was buried in Sarajevo in 1934.

Safvet Beg Bašagić was a notable personality of the Muslim community in the Balkans at the turn of 19th and 20th centuries. He was a man who combined in himself the native traditional Islamic learning with the European one, which he acquired in Vienna, and with Slavonic nationalism. All of these cultural components marked his academic, literary (as a translator and author) and publicistic activities. They were the source of his deep interest in Bosnian and Herzegovinian literaries and scholars, as well as his favour toward classical Persian poetry. They also aroused interest in the manuscripts of classical Muslim literature and the works of Balkan, first of all Bosnian, authors, whom he dedicated several expert studies. (Bošnjaci a Hercegovci u islamskoj književnosti, Sarajevo 1912; Hrvati, Bošnjaci i Hercegovci u Turskoj carevni. Zagreb 1931 aj.) Nevertheless, he was not concerned only with the classical literary heritage of Islamic learning, but observed the contemporary literary and political development in the Ottoman empire as well. His Balkan Slavism was the reason of a number of conflicts with Austrian authorities, which, however, did not prevent him from introducing the spirit of European learning and culture in Islamic cultural environment in a way that was acceptable for often conservative Bosnian Muslims.