SIGNED MUSTAFA AL-RIFA'I, STUDENT OF AHMAD AL-NAZIFI, SHUMEN, BULGARIA, OTTOMAN EMPIRE, DATED AH 1270 / 1853-4 AD

In the 19th century, one of the most important places of Ottoman manuscript production was Shumen, a strategically-important fortress in what is today Bulgaria. Tim Stanley and Süheyl Ünver have independently worked on the corpus of manuscripts there, identifying more than fifty Qur'anic scribes from the town, apparently divisble into three groups according to their original teacher: Seyyid Mehmed Nuri, Ahmed Zarifi, and Ahmed Nazifi (Tim Stanley, The Decorated Word, volume II. Oxford, 2009, p.226). By the 1850s, Qur'ans from Shumen had come to be remarkably homogenous: all observe the principle of ayet ber kenar, in which every page ends with a completed Qur'anic verse; all are written with 15 lines of text to a page; all have between 300 and 310 pages. The dimensions of these manuscripts are also fairly constant. Although these manuscripts were produced in quantities to make them available to many relatively prosperous subjects of the Ottoman Empire, Shumen Qur'ans were presented by Ottoman sultans to important figures including Ali Rif'at Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt, and al-Husayn, Sharif of Mecca. The production of Qur'ans in Shumen came under increasing pressure with the rise of lithographic printing, and came to a complete stop with Bulgarian indepedence in 1878. For a fuller discussion of the Shumen school of calligraphy, see Tim Stanley, "The Shumen Phenomenon", The Decorated Word, volume II. Oxford, 2009, pp.222-51.

The illumination of Shumen manuscripts - though united by a Baroque idiom and a bright, pastel colour palette - exhibits some variety, suggesting that there were several different schools of illumination in the city, alongside the numerous calligraphers. The frontispiece and colophon of this Qur'an is organised around a central medallion with calligraphic panels above and below, within illuminated margins. The colophon of our manuscript is somewhat similar in design to a Qur'an in the Khalili Collection, signed by Sayyid Muhammad Nuri and dated to AH 1266 / 1849-50 AD (Stanley, op.cit., no.54). The marginal medallions and binding are also similar to a Qur'an from the collection of Cengiz Çetındoğan, signed by Mehmed Nuri and dated AH 1267 / 1850-1 AD (Nabil F. Sawat, Understanding Calligraphy: the Ottoman contribution, London, 2014, no.23). The turquoise doublures on our binding can also be found on another manuscript in the Khalili collection, dated to AH 1256 / 1840-1 AD (Stanley, op.cit., no.55).

An undated Qur'an signed by the teacher of our scribe, Ahmad al-Nazifi, sold Sotheby's London, 24 April 2013, lot 44. A Qur'an signed by another of his pupils, Husain al-Zahidi, sold Bonham's London, 27 May 2021, lot 20. Mustafa Rifa'ti is listed by Tim Stanley as one of 10 different scribes whom he is known to have taught (Stanley, op.cit., p.247).