Arabic manuscript on cream-coloured paper, 309 leaves, 15 lines to the page written in neat naskhi script in black ink with diacritics and vowel points in red and black ink, gold discs decorated with alternating red and blue dots between verses, inner margins ruled in red, black and gold, catchwords in wide outer borders, illuminated devices of various shapes, sura headings written in white thuluth within gold panels, one double-page frontispiece richly decorated with stylised floral sprays in colours and gold, some discoloration otherwise in good condition, contemporary reddish-brown leather richly stamped in gold, central panels with stamped Ottoman emblem of the crescent and star, worn at edges, with flap
165 x 110 mm.

Footnotes

The scribe of this Qur'an states in the colophon that he was a resident of Shumen (al-Shumnawi maskanan), a city with a large Turkish population in north east Bulgaria which occupies a natural strongpoint between Ruse on the Danube and Varna on the Black Sea coast. According to Tim Stanley, 'During the Ottoman period it was a leading provincial centre for the production of copies of the Qur'an from the 1820s to the 1870s after which the production of Qur'ans in Shumen as elsewhere declined because of the introduction of mechanical reproduction using lithography'. Qur'ans produced in Shumen can be identified from information found in their extensive colophons and also from the distinctive style of illumination. Stanley states that 'because the copies of the Qur'an produced in Shumen were made primarily for export to other parts of the Ottoman empire, they have survived outside Bulgaria'. The Khalili Collection has eight of these 19th-century Ottoman Qur'an manuscripts. See M. Bayani, T. Stanley and J. M. Rogers, The Decorated Word: Qur'ans of the 17th to 19th Centuries: Part Two, pp. 222-233 ('The Shumen Phenomenon'); for examples, see nos. 54-60, pp. 230-245. See also the appendix on Shumen scribes (pp. 246-251): the scribe of the present manuscript is apparently not known, though his master Ahmad al-Zarifi is.

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An illuminated Qur'an copied by Husain al-As'ad, a pupil of Sayyid Ahmad al-Zarifi Ottoman Empire, Shumen, north-east Bulgaria, dated 29th Rajab 1272/AD 1855-56

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Matthew Thomas