10 execute the script. Another gold element, surrounded also by a fine line in brown pigment, appears in the last line of the text on this page. Resembling a lowercase “a” in the English alphabet, this is the Arabic character ha, which was commonly used as a fifth verse marker in Qur’anic manuscripts from this period: in this case, the ha denotes the end of the fifteenth verse of Surah 87. These decorative markers seem to interrupt the even spacing between words; two lie completely outside the formal rectilinear grid created by the text.The characteristics of these verse markers strongly suggest that they were added at a later time. Therefore this appears to be a Qur’anic manuscript that was executed in two distinct stages. The original text was written according to a convention common to the late ninth century: one that favored an aesthetic of austerity through abstraction over legibility. At some later point, elaborated verse separators and perhaps some additional diacritical markers were added to assist the reader, thereby enhancing the functionality of the manuscript. This particular manuscript may have come from a type of prayer book known as a juz’, a single volume in a set of thirty—one for each day of the month—that comprised a complete edition of the Qur’an.5 If so, it is tempting to consider how a pious Muslim might have appreciated and used this text over a thousand years ago to contemplate the power and majesty of the Divine. Jeffrey Brown 1 Francois Déroche, The Abbasid Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 34-35. The term Kufic derives from the city of al-Kufah, in modern southern Iraq, but examples of this script can be found in manuscripts from all throughout medieval Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia. See also: Widjan Ali, The Arab Contribution to Islamic Art: From the Seventh to the Fifteenth Centuries (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press,1999), 79. 2 Martin Lings, The Quranic Art of Calligraphy and Illumination (London: World of Islam Festival Trust, 1976), 18. Francois Déroche, Islamic Codicology: An Introduction to the Study of Manuscripts in Arabic Script (London: Al-Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation, 2006), 222-24. Marcus Fraser and Will Kwiatkowski, Ink and Gold: Islamic Calligraphy ( Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 25-26. 3 Fraser and Kwiatkowski, 39-40. For contemporary manuscripts of similar script style and execution, see Fraser and Kwiatkowski, 30-51, and Déroche, The Abbasid Tradition, 67-107. In particular, see Déroche, The Abbasid Tradition, 97, for another manuscript that contains these same verses of Surah 87. 4 Déroche, Islamic Codicology, 169-171. See also the later Qur’anic manuscript from this current collection for this attention to geometrical and mathematical ratios. 5 Fraser and Kwiatkowski, 49.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz