Case 6: Middle Eastern Manuscripts 2: Qurans & the Hadith
Another focus of St John’s collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts are Islamic religious texts, the Quran in particular. The College’s holdings are the result of a general curiosity about the sacred text of Islam throughout early modern Europe. Copies of the Quran were sought-after despite being on the Catholic index of forbidden books between 1547 and 1670 and similar suppression by Protestant authorities (Hamilton, p. 3).
Four of St John’s five Quran manuscripts are displayed here, originating from 16th- and 17th-centuries Iran (MSS 201, 304) or possibly Mughal India (MS 215), and North Africa (MS 107). Manuscripts of the Quran are extraordinarily beautiful works of art, created as physical expressions of their sanctity (Small, p. 40). As representational art was discouraged, creativity focused on calligraphy and traditional decorative patterns. The decoration in Quran manuscripts is mostly structural, supporting the reader’s navigation through the text, focusing on features such as ‘titles of chapters, verse endings, groups of verses and other readers’ aids’ (Small, p. 28). Arguably most widely known among Western audiences are the highly decorated frontispiece pages, which aim to ‘awe readers and immediately direct their attention to the glory of God and the divine glory of his book’ (Small, p. 54).
By the 15th century, six decorative scripts, also called ‘the Six Pens’ (Gacek, p. 251), were ‘celebrated for their artistic merit’ (Small, p. 52). Most of St John’s Qurans are written in the Naskh script (MSS 201, 304, 215), although the Thulth script also features in MS 304. Both of these scripts are among the Six Pens. Naskh evolved as a bookhand in the late 10th/early 11th century, with later regional variants, and was long used for non-Quran texts (Gacek, p. 162). Outside its original administrative context, Thuluth was predominantly used as a display script for book titles and chapter headings especially in Quran manuscripts (Gacek, pp. 274-5). St John’s MS 107 from North Africa, possibly Morocco, uses a combination of the Kūfic (for headings) and Maghribī scripts. Both terms are generic and cover a variety of scripts. While Kūfic was ‘originally a script of the city of Kūfah’, the term is now
applied to ‘great variety of old scripts used mainly for the copying of the Quran in the late Umayyad and early Abbasid periods’, although an argument has been made to use it describing an ‘angular style used to […] transcribe the Quran’ (Gacek, p. 138). Maghribī refers to many scripts used in southern Spain and North Africa as well as sub-Saharan Africa (Gacek, p. 147).
Added to this display is the College’s only copy of the Hadith (MS 369), a collection of Mohammad’s sayings and deeds.
