Quran of Ibn al-Bawwab

Quran of Ibn al-Bawwab

This codex is one of the most famous Arabic Quran manuscripts due to the personality of the calligrapher: Ibn al-Bawwab (d. 1022) also known as Ali ibn-Hilal, Abu'l-Hasan, and Ibn al-Sitri was a famous calligrapher active in Baghdad during the Buyid period ** who reputedly produced 64 copies of the Quran. His highly coveted manuscripts passed through many hands and thus all but one are now lost. The **sole surviving Quran manuscript created by his skilled hand was created in the year 391H, which corresponds to AD 1000/01. Thus, it offers the only opportunity to gain insight into the work of such an important calligrapher and illuminator.
The Quran first came to Ireland as a gift of the Ottoman Sultan Selim I (1470–1512) and eventually came into the possession of Sir Alfred Chester Beatty (1875–1968), an American-British mining magnate the founder of his namesake library in Dublin. The value and significance of the manuscript remained unknown for a long time until Prof. David Storm Rice clearly identified it. Similarities with manuscripts preserved from the end of the 10th and the beginning of the 11th centuries can be identified, but the stylistic originality of this Quran is immediately apparent.

Innovations in Quranic Manuscript Production

The codex represents the oldest extant Quran written on paper as well as a transition in Quranic manuscript development. Aside from moving away from parchment, the new manuscripts were oriented vertically rather than horizontally. Ibn al-Bawwab also broke with tradition by abandoning Kufic script in favor of rounder, more legible scripts: the main text is written in Naskh (sometimes identified as Reyhan) while the opening pages, Sura headings, and statistical tables as the end of the manuscript were written using Thuluth script. These folios containing verse-counts were also expanded in this manuscript to contain information including the total word and letter count of each Sura, the word count of the entire manuscript, and the number of dotted and undotted letters.
Ibn al-Bawwab adopted new innovations in spacing: instead of spacing equally, he extended certain letters to then create asymmetrical gaps between words that draw the eyes of the reader across the page and also clearly marking new sections for easier identification. Individual verses on the other hand had no spaces between them and are demarcated by triangular clusters of blue dots with every fifth and tenth verse separated by a space with a standard gold marking.

The Mysterious Master Calligrapher

Little is known about the early life of this master illuminator and calligrapher. Ibn al-Bawwab literally translates as the “son of the doorkeeper” and is an indication of his humble origins, which was unusual for an artist during that period. He began his career as a home decorator before becoming an illuminator and eventually a calligrapher. Closely attached to the vizier Fakhr al Mulk Abu Ghalib Muhammad b. Khalaf at Baghdad, he rose to be among the ranks of the government administration and was in charge of the library of Buwayhid Baha´ al-Dawla at Shiraz for a period. He was also a devout man who knew the Quran by heart and is said to have produced 64 copies of it, and a man of letters who was well versed in the law as well as authoring a treatise and a didactic poem on the art of writing. His real title to fame, however, according to the early Arab authors, was to have perfected the style of writing invented, about a century earlier, by his famous predecessor, the vizier Ibn Mukla and to have brought it to a degree of well-balanced elegance which was to be surpassed later only by the efforts of Yakut al-Musta'simi.