NORTH INDIA, MID 15TH CENTURY

This unusual text is not a conventional commentary of the Qur'an (tafsir). Rather, it relates details of certain stories which appear in the Qur'an, particularly those related to the Old Testament, and gives Persian translations of some key passages such as the Ayat al-Kursi. It is close in theme to the Historia Scholastica of Peter Comestor (late 12th century), which was popular throughout medieval Europe and the Near East. In her seminal article on bihari calligraphy, Eloïse Brac de la Perrière suggested that the appearance of interlinear commentary on most bihari Qur'ans was a function of their being used as 'a type of manual' at a time when Islam was beginning to become widespread in the subcontinent (Eloïse Brac de la Perrière, "Manuscripts in Bihari calligraphy: preliminary remarks on a little-known corpus", Muqarnas 33, 2016, p.75). This commentary might have been for a similar purpose, helping in teaching or private study.

The illuminated bifolio in this manuscript is at the beginning of Qur'an VII, sura al-a'raf. Brac de la Perriere mentions that it was fairly standard for manuscripts to have an illuminated division here, as well as at the beginnings of Qur'an XIX and XXXVIII. The style of the illumination is very similar to a Qur'an manuscript in the Walters Art Museum (MS. W563), which like ours has an inner border comprised of long blue cartouches with small black roundels in between, as well as headings above and below in chrysography on a blue scrolling field set within an unusual cartouche rounded at each end. That manuscript also has an illuminated division at the seventh sura and - though it has some marginal commentary in bihari - the majority of the script is in muhaqqaq (Brac de la Perrière, op.cit., p.84).