SPAIN OR MOROCCO, 13TH CENTURY

The attribution of these striking pink folios to Spain rather than North Africa is based primarily on the use of paper. In North Africa, parchment remained the preferred material for the writing of Qur'ans into the 19th century. Spain, however, had been manufacturing and using high quality paper for manuscripts of all kinds for some time. Manuscripts like this one, on pink dyed paper are believed to have been produced in Jativa, near Valencia, the site of the earliest documented paper mill in Spain (Marcus Fraser and William Kwiatkowski, Ink and Gold: Islamic Calligraphy, Berlin-London, 2006, p.64). Dyed pink paper was used extensively by the Nasrids, notably for royal correspondence. A repository of correspondence with the rulers of Aragon reveal many letters exchanged between the two ruling houses between 1296 and 1418, much of it on sheets of pink paper identical in size to the folios in the present lot (Sheila Blair, Islamic Calligraphy, Edinburgh, 2006, p.393) Given extensive scribal and trade connections across the Straits of Gibraltar, however, a North African origin for the manuscript is equally likely.

The dyed paper, elaborate illumination, and bold maghribi script indicate that this folio is part of the 'Pink Qur'an', written in the 13th century. The generous use of gold and spaciousness of the script (at a rate of five lines per page, the original manuscript would have run into many hundreds of pages) suggests that this was a commission by a noble, or possibly even a member of the royal family. The word 'hubus' written in the top corner with pin-pricks also hints that the manuscript was later endowed to a religious foundation, probably in Merinid Morocco where books were often marked in that way. The pages in our section have not been trimmed, and two of them remain attached to one another with part of the original binding thread. They suggest that the original volumes were not made of quires but instead of single pages stitched together at the edges.

These folios come from the 10th volume of the manuscript, which was sold at the Hotel George V, Paris, 30 October 1975, lot 488, and subsequently appeared at Sotheby's, 14 April 1976, lot 247. Since then many individual folios from this manuscript have been offered at auction, including a section of thirteen pages without sura headings which sold in these Rooms, 26 October 2023, lot 48. A bifolio from the manuscript is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2017.232).