Qur'an, Surat al-Fatiha, Manuscript

Type: Manuscript

Date: 19th century?

Setting: Afghanistan or Pakistan?

Produced By/For: ?

Contents: Qur'an, Surat al-Fatiha?

Shelf Mark: MS Victoria 2000-003

Location: Shelf 02/B/16 (Acc. 2000-003)

Description by Jan Just Witkam, Professor of Paleography and Codicology of the Islamic World, Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands (2010)

MS Victoria 2000-003

Arabic, with some Persian, manuscript on indigenous paper, 28 × 17.5 cm, leaves unnumbered, ca. 500 ff., fully vocalized large naskh script (text area with frame: 20.5 × 10.5 cm), in two hands; the second, more recent hand on a text area with frame: 20.5 × 10.2 cm on the final 20 leaves of the volume only, from the middle of al-Nāziʿāt onwards till the end, first word in this hand: wal-Ǧibāl, Qurʾān 79:32; this part in the second hand is apparently a newer replacement for the final quire of the original manuscript; 11 lines to the page, illuminated double opening page (ff. 1b-2a) for sūrat al-Fātiḥa and the beginning of sūrat al-Baqara (last word on f. 2a: qablika, in Qurʾān 2:4), black ink with rubrication (for sūra titles, marginalia, etc.), entire text within a composite frame (blue, red, but the part in the more recent hand has a more simply executed double frame in red ink only), catchwords on every verso page, full-leather Islamic binding, the greater part of which has been preserved, but which is now only loosely connected to the text block. The leather shows simple blind tooled ornamentation.

A copy of the Qurʾān from the North West Frontier area of former British India, or from Afghanistan, apparently the complete text.

The text of sūrat al-Fātiḥa (f. 1b) has been provided with an interlinear translation in Persian, which is not well legible anymore. The wide interline in the entire manuscript might indicate that a full Persian translation of the Arabic text was to be added. There are original and later numbering mark for the agž āʾ and their subdivisions in the margins. As the first gǔ zʾ covers 17 ff., the entire codex may contain slightly over 500 ff. The agž āʾ do not coincide with the quires.

Earlier provenance: Loosely inserted is a short handwritten note (on stationary ‘15, York Terrace, Regent’s Park.’) saying: ‘ Jany 13, 19. This Koran was discovered in an Indian Temple during the Indian Frontier war—Tirah Campagne. V.L. Eardley-Wilmot Capt RE’.

Taken from The Islamic Manuscripts in the McPherson Library, University of Victoria, Victoria B.C. by Jan Just Witkam, Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 1 (2010), pp 101-142.

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