Thread. Notes on early Qur’ān bindings
1/9. The looting of Qur’ān manuscripts isn't something new! Here is a nice anecdote from the Kairouan collection. It gives me the opportunity to say a word about early Qur’ān bindings.
1/9. The looting of Qur’ān manuscripts isn't something new! Here is a nice anecdote from the Kairouan collection. It gives me the opportunity to say a word about early Qur’ān bindings.
2/9. The Kairouan collection, formerly kept in the Great mosque, is famous not only for its Blue Qur’ān but also for its large collection of early Qur’ān bindings. These were discovered in early 1940’s by the French Louis Poinssot.
3/9. The bindings – almost 175 covers – were isolated from their textblocks and stored in another room (the pigeonhole) because they were full of insects. In 1948, Poinssot and Marçais provided a meticulous description ("Objets Kairouanais") and date them between the 9th and 13th
4/9. Let me now introduce you no. 60 of Poinssot’s descriptions. this Qur’ān was a small oblong (landscape) format, with a binding in a shape of a box ("box binding"). However, there is no remnant of the original "protective walls" placed on the 3 open sides.
5/9. It is typical of the Qur’ān bindings in the 9th-10th as far as we know. The covers are made of wooden boards. They are covered with leather, decorated by pressing its surface with metal stamps. The type of decoration helped Poinssot to date this binding from the 10th
6/9. Most of the time, parchment leaves are glued inside each cover. Sometimes, we find recycled leaves from other Qur’āns (as in Damascus). More often, they are blank leaves, which are filled with notes: reading’s certificates, birth or death records and acts of donation...
7/9. None of that is in no.60. There is no illustration, but Poinssot transcribed the 5-lines text written inside the font cover. This woman obviously forgot to bring back this Qur’ān’s volume to the mosque… Or perhaps she stole it and tried to sell it on the Thursday market.
8/9. This incident isn’t dated. As there is no illustration we can’t give a dating by paleographical analysis. However, it took place certainly at a period when this 10th Qur’ān was still in use. In any case, this shows that Qur’ān mss were circulating, already in medieval times.
9/9. The Qur’ān bindings provide a lot of information about dating, provenance and circulation of the mss. Besides the Kairouan collection, other early bindings are preserved in the Damascus and San‘a’ collections. Unfortunately, none of them seem to be earlier than the 9th CE.
