Qur'an with part of Surat al-Qamar, Fragment

Type: Fragment

Date: 10th century?

Setting: North Africa?

Produced By/For: ?

Contents: Fragment of a Qur'an manuscript with part of Surat al-Qamar?

Shelf Mark: MS Victoria 1992-037-1

Location: Brown Collection Box 6 (Acc. 1992-037, Item #1)

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 1992-037-1

Arabic, parchment, 16.2 × 22 cm (largest measurement), 1 leaf with text on either side, ragged edges with damage especially in the four corners of the leaf (was the leaf taken out of an album?), also three larger and a number of smaller holes in the leaf, ʿAbbāsid bookhand, possibly of the 4/10th century, 16 lines of text on either page, text area: c. 13 × 19.0 cm, now kept in a passepartout.

The diacritics for the consonants are done with little strokes, the vowels are given with red dots; unadorned, rather primitive ten-verse dividers which are possibly of a later date, although there seems to be space left open for them, can be observed at the end of āya 10, 20 and 30.

An old fragment of the Qurʾān (54:1-32).

Recto (hair side): Qurʾān 54:1 (al-Qamar)—16 (wa-Nudhuri).

Verso (flesh side): Qurʾān 54:17 (laqad yassaranā)—32 (fa-hal).

Images of either leaf are shown at several instances in the Digital Image Database Online (DIDO), of the History in Art department of UVic, Nos. 085585, 085586, 085587, 085588, 266618, 266619.

Provenance: Bruce and Dorothy Brown Collection, officially transferred to the University of Victoria on June 27th, 1996. Earlier provenance: Acquired through Maggs Bros. Rare Books, London, who gave as the ultimate origin of the fragment ‘North Africa’.

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.

Description and Transcription by Sohrab Mosahebi (2022)

Description and Transcription by Sohrab Mosahebi as part of coursework for a manuscript studies class with Dr. Adrienne Williams Boyarin, June 2022.

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Recto

Verso