EARLY OTTOMAN QUR'AN
QUR’AN,
signed Ghaybi bin ‘Umar, Edirne.
Ottoman Turkey, dated the end of Muharram AH 822 (February AD 1419).
Arabic manuscript on thick, slightly polished buff paper (248 x 168 mm), ff. 348 plus two flyleaves, lacking a leaf between f. [346] and f. [347], else complete, each leaf with 13 lines to the page in a good naskhī in black ink, gold rosette verse markers set off with blue and red dots, sura headings in gold thuluth, ‘ashr marked with gold and polychrome marginal roundels, juz’ marked with gold thuluth in the margins, with a fine double-page opening of elegant illumination framing five lines of naskhī within clouds reserved against a pink cross-hatched ground, panels above and below text containing white stylized kufic and gold arabesques against a blue ground, all set within a border containing panels of flowers against a black ground, gold interlace enclosing small squares of blue and red, and geometric motifs in blue heightened with white; signed and dated colophon on verso of final leaf, also within clouds reserved against a pink cross-hatched ground, later owner’s name written in bold blue naskhī on either side, a few scribal corrections; modern carpet-page illumination added to recto of first leaf (apparently over remains of an original design), opening double-page illumination extensively restored where damaged or missing at extremities, some smudging and marginal soiling throughout, light dampstaining in several upper margins (just touching text on a few leaves), a few later marginal doodles and markings in pencil, a number of old paper repairs, recent professional marginal repairs throughout, approximately 15 ff. at beginning and end neatly remargined (loss of a word or two on some of these leaves due to old damage), f. [2] working loose; late nineteenth-century Mamluk-style brown morocco with flap, decorated in gilt and blind with a geometric pattern; rubbed, small repair at head of spine.
An important early Ottoman Qur’an manuscript, copied in the period (from 1363 to 1453) when the capital of the Ottoman Empire was based at Edirne (Adrianople) in Eastern Thrace. Very few Qur’ans are attributed to this centre but the quality of this manuscript, still evident despite some damage and restoration, may indicate imperial patronage.
The illumination bears a resemblance to a monumental Qur’an in the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in Bursa (MS.207) which has been called ‘probably the finest Ottoman manuscript to survive from the period before 1460’ (Raby and Tanindi, 1993, no. 1, pp. 106–11). Like ours, the illumination of that Qur’an has elegant headings in white stylized kufic on a ground of gold arabesques heightened with red. The text is set within clouds against a red hatched ground decorated with occasional leaves and flowers. The verse markers are, like ours, simple rosettes with polychrome highlights. The floral borders on a black ground flanking the text panels on ff. [1]v–[2]r are similar to the decoration that surrounds the headings on a Qur’an in the Chester Beatty Library (MS. 1492; see Lings, The Quranic art of calligraphy and illumination, (1976), p. 172, no. 89). Tradition associates that manuscript with the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I (d. AH 805/AD 1401).
The late nineteenth-century binding is decorated with a non-repeating geometric pattern influenced by Mamluk bindings. It seems to have been based, either directly or indirectly, on a splendid late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century binding in Dar-al-Kutub, Cairo (companion volume in the Museum of Islamic Art, Pergamon Museum, Inv.15622).