MAMLUK EGYPT OR SYRIA, CIRCA 1310-20

The elegant script on this folio makes full use of the space provided, with only four lines to the page providing ample space for calligraphic flourish. This manuscript would have once formed part of a multi-part Qur'an. As well as providing additional room for scribal virtuosity, David James highlights that this would have made it easier to use Qur'an manuscripts in collective reading sessions (The Master Scribes, Oxford, 1992, no.39, p.158). Other volumes from this Qur'an are well known and published: in addition to two folios from juz' XV in the Khalili Collection (James, op.cit., no.39), juz' XIX is in the Chester Beatty Library (MS.1461) and juz' XXII was displayed alongside this one in the World of Islam Festival at the British Library in 1976 (Martin Lings and Yasin Hamid Safadi, The Qur'an, London, 1976, no.77, p.55). Additional sections have been sold in these Rooms, 11 October 2013, lot 718 and 24 April 2015, lot 245. Of these the latter finished at verse 20 of sura al-mu'minin, only a few verses before our section begins.

The fact that our section includes an illuminated sura heading allows it to be dated quite precisely from comparable examples. A Qur'an in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin (acc.no.1479) has a frontispiece with similar eastern kufic calligraphic panels, as well as a similar feathery motif in a marginal pendant: it is dated by James to between 1306 and 1315 (Qur'ans of the Mamluks, London, 1988, no.3, p.221). Very similar calligraphic panels also appear on the frontispiece of a Qur'an in the Topkapi Museum, Istanbul, dated to AH 713 / 1313 AD (acc.no.TIEM450). The fact that on both of those manuscripts these panels only appear on the frontispiece, whereas in ours they appear throughout, give a sense of the unusual quality of this section, and the Qur'an from which it originally came.