PROBABLY IRAN, 11TH/12th CENTURY

The tenth century saw a profound shift in Islamic calligraphy, away from the bold and regimented style of kufic and towards a new kind of writing, characterised by thinner strokes, letter forms dominated less by ninety-degree angles than by sharp, acute points, coupled with a more frequent use of decorative serifs and other calligraphic flourishes. Some of the strict regimentation which defined kufic is shed in favour of a hand which feels freer and more individualistic. Though Déroche proposes two broad families into which these scripts can be divided – the monumental NS.I and the ‘more mobile’ forms of NS.III – based on current research it has not been possible to create subgroups with as much ease as has been possible with older kufic scripts, largely due to the greater heterogeneity which characterises them (Francois Déroche, The Abbasid Tradition, London, 1992, p.132).

Rather than being a development of older Qur'anic scripts, the New Style represents the influence of chancery scripts used for inscriptions and administrative documents: an encroachment of the secular into the reign of the sacred. An Umayyad-era inscription in Antinoë in Egypt, signed by a certain Malik ibn Kathir, and dated to Rajab AH 117/July-August 735 AD is written in a script which bears a close relationship with the New Style (Alain George, The Rise of Islamic Calligraphy, Edinburgh, 2010, p.116). What few Islamic secular documents which survive from the eighth and ninth centuries also are written in a script which has little in common with classic kufic, but shares many features with that in our manuscript. The earliest dated instance of such a hand being used for a Qur’anic manuscript is a juz' in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, which bears a note indicating that it was corrected in AH 292/905 AD (Francois Déroche, op.cit., p.134). From the tenth century onwards kufic was slowly eclipsed in Qur’anic manuscripts, its use confined only to sura headings, probably as a deliberately archaic gesture.

As well as greater flexibility in the scripts, Qur’ans copied in the New Style exhibit great variety in terms of how they are constructed. A wide range of sizes are known, with our folios among the larger known examples. Some manuscripts had over twenty lines of script to the page, some only three or four. Some were horizontal in format, others vertical. There is also variety in terms of the material they were written on: some, like earlier kufic manuscripts, are on parchment, while others are on paper. Though the circumstances of its entry into the Islamic world are unclear, papermaking probably arrived in Baghdad at some stage in the eighth century. The earliest known dated Arabic language manuscript on paper was copied in 848 AD and is in the regional library of Alexandria (Malachi Beit-Arié, ‘The Oriental Arabic Paper’, gazette du livre médiéval, vol.28 (1996), p.9). The earliest known paper Qur’an was copied by a certain ‘Ali ibn Shadan al-Razi in AH 361/971-2 AD (Johnathan Bloom, Paper before Print: the history and impact of paper in the Islamic world, New Haven, 2001, p.60). Johnathan Bloom suggests that the adoption of a New Style at the exact moment that paper was being introduced was no coincidence: the fact that paper was cheaper than parchment meant that more people could own a copy of the Qur'an, and encouraged the adoption of more fluent, quicker hands in order to meet demand (op.cit., p.108)

Scholars have yet to agree on a term to describe this family of scripts: what Déroche terms ‘the New Style’ nineteenth-century orientalists dubbed ‘Qarmathian’, while modern authorities have also suggested broken kufic, naskhi kufic, ‘broken cursive’ (for a full discussion of the terms used for these scripts, see Sheila Blair, Islamic Calligraphy, Edinburgh, 2006, pp.143-6). The term ‘eastern’ kufic is derived from the fact that many of the manuscripts which state their place of origin were written in the Eastern Islamic world. These include a Qur’an divided between the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in Istanbul and a number of other collections - which was copied in Isfahan in Ramadan AH 383/October-November 993 AD. Confusingly, however, the survival of the so-called ‘Nurse’s Qur’an’ as well as a manuscript copied in Palermo in Sicily has also led some scholars to term this script ‘western’ (Martin Lings and Yasin Safadi, The Qur’an, London, 1976, pp.24-31). In reality, the appearance of similar scripts in both Isfahan and Palermo in the tenth century suggests that this was neither an eastern nor a western script, but one current across the whole 'Abbasid world.

The ‘eastern’ label used to describe this manuscript is appropriate here because of an unusual feature: the inclusion of Persian interlinear translations, suggesting that our manuscript was at some point with an owner who might not have been entirely familiar with Arabic. The script used for these translations looks forward to the next ‘phase’ in the development of Islamic calligraphy, being the use of fully cursive scripts to copy the Qur’an. It hints at the rise of ibn al-Bawwab and Ya’qut, which would eventually make the ‘New Style’ redundant. Another example of an eastern kufic manuscript with interlinear translations was formerly in the Lygo Collection (Will Kwiatkowski, Pages of the Qur’an: The Lygo Collection, London, 2006, cat.49, p.88). A single folio from this manuscript was sold in Part II of the Stuart Cary Welch collection, Sotheby's London, 6 April 2011, lot 13.