Qur'an Leaf in Kufic script with Sura heading on vellum, North Africa or Near East, 9th-10th century

Text: surat al-lail (XCII) vv.19-21, and, surat al-duha (XCIII) vv.1-4
Arabic manuscript on vellum, 5-7 lines of text per page, in elegant kufic script in dark brown ink, vocalisation marked with red dots, single verses marked by a pyramidal composition of 6 gold dots, an illuminated sura heading with kufic script in gold in reserve against a foliate motif in alternating white and gold, decorated in red, green and dark brown, framed within a knotted rope border with a circular palmette pendant thumb-piece extending into the margin with peacock-eye design comprised of leaves and buds bordered with dark brown, red and green dots

slight areas of lose to inked surface on the hair side of the vellum, in overall good condition, as viewed.
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This extremely fine Qur'an leaf exhibits a particularly elegant and graphically precise Kufic script with strong horizontal stretching of letters and ligatures. This practice, known as mashq, is perfectly represented by the 21cm. extension of the dad and alif maqsura on the fifth line of the recto. As is characteristic of Qur'anic manuscripts produced under the Abbasids and their contemporary dynasties during the ninth and early tenth centuries, in order not to disrupt the distribution of the text over the page, these exaggerated horizontals are visually balanced by the elegant sweep of the vertical letter forms, thus achieving the spatial harmony displayed on the present lot.

The marginal decoration in the form of a palmette and the rectangular field containing the sura heading richly decorated in green, red and dark brown are likely to have been influenced by the illumination of earlier Coptic texts. These illuminated elements evoke the distinctive Coptic colour scheme, shoulder band and terminal roundel (Upham Pope, A., A Survey of Persian Art, London and New York, 1939, p.1942).

However, although the sura heading might reflect features drawn from a previous tradition, its elaborate composition is distinctly Islamic. The stylised foliate adornments and repetitive geometric patterns are vehicles used in early Qur'anic manuscripts to make allusions to the Divine and the Infinite. More specifically, it is perhaps possible to suggest that the floral and arboreal elements recall Qur'anic reference to the word of God as a good tree and the description of heaven as a flourishing garden. It is with these subtle yet fundamental visual adornments that early Qur'anic illuminators embellished these masterpieces of Arabic calligraphy.

Related leaves and manuscripts are in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin (James, D., Qurans and Bindings from the Chester Beatty Library, London, 1980), the Iran Bastan Museum, Tehran, Ms. 4289 (Lings, M., The Quranic Art of Calligraphy and Illumination, London, 1976, no.5), and the Pars Museum, Shiraz.

Comparable examples of the palmette extending from the sura heading can be found in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Arabe 325, Arabe 351 (Déroche, F.,  Les Manuscrits du Coran. Aux origines de la calligraphie coranique, Paris, 1983, pls. I, II) and the Musée du Bardo, Tunis, Inv. 305 (De Carthage a Kairouan, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1982, no.342, p.259). None of these, however, can compare with ours in terms of elegance and precision.