13 Mamluk Qur’an Leaf Surah 87, al-‘A’la, verses 3-12 verso, verses 13-19 recto 700–710 AH, 1300-1310 CE Cairo, Egypt Paper, Dimensions: 19.4 x 14.2 cm Portland State University Library, Special Collections, Mss 37 The illuminator Sandal designed this fourteenth-century Qur’an leaf in compliance with a system of religiously-inspired geometric relationships that structured the work of Qur’an copyists. Adherence to these precise ratios for page layout, script and ornamentation, and emphasis on perfect calligraphy, was a sign of inward spirituality and cosmological orderliness.1 Within these guidelines, however, individual illuminators or their students produced unique Qur’ans, often by commission. They are identifiable in the details of lavish ornamentation of frontispieces, end pieces and panels, but also by the smaller, but no less distinctive, illuminated devices used for verse markers, marginal rubrics and chapter, or Surah, headings. The devices appearing on this leaf permit an attribution to Sandal’s atelier in Cairo, as similar illuminations are found on Qur’an pages located in the British Library and the Chester Beatty Library that are attributable by inscription to Sandal.2 The small, golden rosettes marking single verses, the larger, teardrop-shaped, fifth-verse markers, and an even larger tenth-verse roundel on the recto side, all have the precise, formulaic size relationships typical of Sandal Qur’ans. The internal decoration is floral or vegetal, and the tenth- verse roundels generally, as here, contain the Arabic word for ten, ‘ashar. Use of gold and blue paint, with touches of red, is typical of Qur’ans of this period.3 Almost all Mamluk Qur’an pages have an odd number of lines,4 but the recto side of this leaf has six. There is also a mismatch in the count of single verses in relation to the fifth- and tenth-verse markers. These puzzling discrepancies can be resolved by a text comparison. Referring to Surah 87, it is evident that one and a half verses are not shown here but may have appeared on a previous page. However, lack of traditional margins and a fragment of text at the top of the recto side indicate possible cropping of this leaf. Cropping would explain both the verse marker and line count oddities. Sandal, or perhaps a collaborating calligrapher, chose naskh script for this leaf. It was the most common copyist script, not limited by convention to Qur’an copies, but also used for government and commercial documents.5 It was easy to write, even
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