A LARGE OTTOMAN QUR’AN
Ottoman Turkey, inscribed with the date 983 AH (1575)

Arabic manuscript on paper, 269ff. plus 4 fly-leaves, each folio with 11ll. of clear black ink naskh script, black diacritic marks, red intonation marks, chapter headings in gold with red diacritic marks within plain cartouches, gold circular verse markers, hizb markers in gold marginal letters and larger rosettes within the text, the opening bifolio finely and elegantly illuminated in gold and polychromes, a number of folios with unfinished interlinear gold cloudbands, some marginal hizb and juz' markers in illuminated stellar designs, catchwords, set within gold and black rules, with gold sprinkled endpapers, in gold-tooled flapped brown calf binding, in later dark brown blind-tooled flapped calf slip, the text panel 16.2cm x 9.5m, the folio 21.8cm x 15cm.

This elegant Qur’an, possibly produced in an important workshop under Sultan Murad III's reign (r. 1574 - 1595), is an example of the pure and clear ‘jali’ script that was deemed worthy of the sacred text. As expected, the opening bifolio is sumptuously illuminated. The body of the text, however, displays tantalising flashes of gold-burnished interlinear cloudbands, some only covering half the width of the folio and the chapter heading cartouches. The seemingly unfinished decoration opens a window to workshop practice and division of work: was the book given to different mohazib to illuminate before the binding? Was the opening bifolio the responsibility of the master mohazib and therefore executed independently and separately? Did the patron simply run out of funds? Did a political upheaval arrest the workshop’s progress? How come the book was bound in its unfinished form? The gold script at the bottom of the colophon attesting to its completion might be a later addition. The book poses intriguing questions for curious collectors and scholars.