Sana manuscripts2/5/2024 ![]() ![]() A462) and Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris (BN Arabe 324c). Forschungs- und Landesbibliothek, Gotha (Or. From 1905 to 1971 this exceptional Qur’an was subjected to extensive paleographic research, providing valuable insight into early kufic Qur’an manuscripts and their historical trajectories. Following repeated appeals by the people of Turkestan, the Qur’an was returned to Central Asia in 1924, where it has since remained. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Lenin, in an act of goodwill to the Muslims of Russia, reportedly gave the Qur’an to the people of Ufa, in modern Bashkortostan. Petersburg in 1868 after the Russian conquest of Central Asia and housed in the Imperial Library there (now the Russian National Library), at which time a number of pages were separated from the rest, including this one. The story of how it arrived there is not entirely clear, but most likely it was carried along the Silk Road from the Near East or North Africa via Merv, Bukhara, and Samarqand. The largest portion of the manuscript to which this folio belongs is presently kept in a madrasa library attached to the Tellya-Shaikh Mosque in an area of old Tashkent. One scholar has drawn parallels between the rows of arches in the surviving illuminated folio in Paris and those in a folio of the Sana‘a Qur’an, contending that these images resemble the shimmering mosaics of the Dome of the Rock and the Great Mosque of Damascus and were, in all likelihood, illuminated and executed by outstanding artisans trained in Byzantine (or Syriac) scriptoria. Based on orthographic studies and carbon dating, a number of scholars have dated this manuscript of the Qur’an to the end of the eighth and the beginning of the ninth century. Although its origin remains uncertain, we do know that hijazi was still in use in Cairo, Damascus, or Sana‘a during the late eighth or early ninth century. In fact, the verticality and the slight slant of the shafts of the letters and their position on the baseline demonstrate possible traces of the hijazi script (a script used before the development of kufic). The script used here is an early version of kufic. Only two illuminated folios from this manuscript survive (one in Paris, the other in Gotha) the remainder of the folios, like this one, are devoid of both illumination and diacritical marks. The text, which is from Sura 21 (al-Anbiya,"The Prophets"), verses 103–111, contains twelve lines in kufic script. Often referred to as the ‘Uthman or Tashkent Qur’an, this monumental manuscript is possibly the largest extant Qur’an on parchment. Monumental Qur'an Folio This oversize folio comes from one of the oldest Qur’an manuscripts in existence. ![]()
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