A KUFIC QUR'AN FOLIO
MORNING SESSION BEGINNING AT 10:00 AM
A KUFIC QUR'AN FOLIO

NEAR EAST OR NORTH AFRICA, 9TH/10TH CENTURY

Details
A KUFIC QUR'AN FOLIO
NEAR EAST OR NORTH AFRICA, 9TH/10TH CENTURY
Comprising Qur'an XCI (al-shams), vv.3(part)-12, Arabic manuscript on vellum, with 6ll. of elegant elongated kufic script, with gold rosette verse markers, gold ha-khamsa marker, gold and polychrome 'ashr medallion marker in kufic script, diacritics in black, vocalization in red and green, in Qajar mounts with calligraphic panel signed Jalal al-Din Mihr al-Husayni and dated Shawal AH 1284
Folio 7¼ x 10 3/8in. (18.3 x 26.4cm.)
Sale room notice
Please note that the illustration of this lot in the catalogue is reversed.

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Lot Essay

Other folios from the same Qur'an sold at Christie's King street, 7 October 2008, lot 2.
The overall impression given by these folios is of a perfect mastery of the balance between elongations, crescent-shaped curves and upstrokes. They seem to follow strict geometrical formulae that determine proportions of each leaf. François Déroche notes that 'the number of lines of the page and the height of the script is strictly controlled' (F. Déroche, The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, The Abbasid Tradition, London, 1992, p. 21). Ours has a text area of 9 in. wide (23 cm), exactly as a very similar six-line Qur'an in the Khalili Collection attributed to the 9th century (no. KFQ67, F. Déroche, op.cit., p. 68, fig. 20). The present folio and the Qur'an in the Nasser D. Khalili Collection belong to what Déroche terms the D group which is the most varied of the early Abbasid scripts (Déroche, op.cit., p.36).

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