The Oldest Manuscripts from India and Their Histories (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Islamic Manuscripts, 2020
A Qurʾan manuscript (British Library Add 5548-5551), attributed to fifteenth-century India, features a curious case of English annotations within its folios. The annotations take the form of interlinear translations superimposed onto its Persian counterpart. This article takes the contents of the English annotations and its physical placement within the body of the text as a platform to investigate the socio-cultural contexts of the manuscript's circulation. In doing so, it illustrates the life of its owner, Charles Hamilton, an eighteenth-century military official and Orientalist at the East India Company. The content of the annotations suggests the manuscript's function as a tool for language acquisition in the midst of Orientalist attempts at colonizing Indian knowledge; its physical placement, an embodiment of British encounters in India. The article builds on the nature of manuscript collecting by Company officials and the role that objects can play as they intersect with intellectual history.
Revived Leaves: The Qur`an Endowed by Kishvad ibn. Amlas the Oldest Known Qur`an Manuscript on Paper
Mahdi Sahragard, 2023
In 1969, circa 1,000 fragments of the Qur'an were found in the space between two ceiling covers in the Holy Shrine of Imam Riḍā in Mashhad, Iran. Some of these were among the oldest Qur'ans produced in Iran. Three volumes in that cache are the only remaining parts of a fourteen-volume Qur'an, copied in Ramaḍān 327/939, endowed to the Holy Shrine by Kishvād b. Amlās. The volume is in vertical format and was copied on paper. Presently, it is the oldest known dated Qur'an manuscript on paper in the world. The similarities of the script and illumination to some undated and unsigned Qur'ans give us some hints about the Kufic script and illuminations in central Iran. The present article discusses the codicological and paleographical features of this copy.
Qur'an manuscripts from Southeast Asia in British collections
Malay-Indonesian Islamic studies: a Festschrift in honor of Peter G. Riddell, 2023
Published in: Malay-Indonesian Islamic studies: a Festschrift in honor of Peter G. Riddell, ed. Majid Daneshgar and Ervan Nurtawab; pp. 9-50. Leiden: Brill, 2023.
A Jewish Qur'an: An Eighteenth-Century Hebrew Qur'an Translation in Its Indian Context
Religions, 2023
This essay places the Washington Library of Congress Heb. Ms 183, a Hebrew Qur’an translation from eighteenth-century Cochin, in its South Indian context. After pointing out important general differences between early modern European and South Asian inter-religious cultures and attitudes to translation, this essay analyzes three salient differences between Ms 183 and its Dutch source. Then, the essay scrutinizes three relevant and interrelated contexts: the eighteenth-century Indian diplomatic culture of owning and exchanging scriptural translations; the social position of Muslims and Jews as ‘guests’ and diplomatic brokers; and the rise of Muslim military power in Malabar. On this basis, I argue that this Hebrew Qur’an translation was intended to be cultural– diplomatic capital for Jewish diplomats dealing with Muslim rulers, indicating that not only rulers translated the scriptures of their subjects but also subjects those of their rulers. In addition, by showing how the Mysorean rulers implemented Islamic reforms and how Jewish practices were attuned to majoritarian religious practices, the essay suggests that Ms 183 was also meant to serve Jewish religious purposes, making this manuscript possibly a rare instance of using non-Jewish religious scriptures for Jewish religious practice.
The Gwalior Qurʾan is the first dated Qurʾan with a fālnāma, the first dated Qurʾan in bihārī and the first dated manuscript to be illuminated in Sultanate India. It is a milestone in the history of the book in Sultanate India. This paper proposes a codicological investigation of the manuscript and a visual and spectrometric analysis of its decoration. Its purpose is to identify the major alterations brought about in the codex, in order to reconstruct as much as possible its original condition and formulate a few hypotheses about how it could have been produced. In addition to an important lacuna, the authors identify several types and most likely periods of intervention, ranging from restorations to additions and over-and re-paintings. They raise several questions. Is only a part of the decoration original? Why does this reveal pigments and dyes that are less typical of India than Iran? How many hands carried out the illumination, and how did the team collaborate?
2023
FULL BOOK AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD FOR FREE IN THE LINK: https://smithsonian.figshare.com/articles/book/The\_Word\_Illuminated\_Form\_and\_Function\_of\_Qur\_anic\_Manuscripts\_from\_the\_Seventh\_to\_Seventeenth\_Centuries/21948098 Diplomatic gifts, war prizes, or library treasures of royal and princely libraries—handwritten Qurʾans have also been endowed to mosques, tombs, and other religious complexes to perpetuate and transmit their baraka (divine blessing). Artistic, historic, and religious contexts and materiality of Qurʾans are investigated, from use of costly materials such as gold and parchment to development of special scripts, intricate illuminated designs, and meticulously tooled bindings. This edited collection resulted from a 2016 symposium at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sacker Gallery in conjunction with the exhibition The Art of the Qurʾan: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts.
International Conference on the Punjab History and Culture, 2020
The present study is based on primary data from the specific collection of Ganjbkhsh library Islamabad which included the only Illuminated Qur'an manuscripts (QMs) that belong to Lahore school of art under the Mughal regime. The study is conducted under the framework of codicology, that focuses on the material and structure of the book (writing surface, colours, ink, calligraphy, design, layout and binding). The specific objective of this study is to analyse the significant features of Qur'an manuscripts that designed in Mughal era by the Lahore school of art. The common object of the study is to organize the Qur'an manuscripts (QMs) chronological order and examine the difference among the QMs. The city of Lahore has been considered as the centre of excellence for the art and craft even before the Mughal regime. Many more regional and foreign influences have impact on the art of Lahore. The arrival of the new ideas in the form of art had been adopted by the artist of the Punjab and other regions of the subcontinent. The Mughal era proved to be the dynamic period to produce illuminated manuscripts of Qur'an. The artists came from the central Asia, Turkey and Persia to the subcontinent during this Mughal Era and created a significant impact on the local art and craft.