Thread by @shakerr_ahmed

The Amajur Qur'an [Thread]

Last week, Dr. Arianna Rambach presented three unpublished folios from the Amajur Quran kept today at the Museum of Calligraphy in Damascus.

See her post at:
quranmss.com/2020/07/27/qur…

These folios were once part of the Dome of the Treasury (Qubbat al-Khaznah) in the Great Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. The dome was opened for German scholars in the late 19th century, and the Othomans transferred the Quranic fragments to Istanbul during WW I.

Some manuscripts reached Topkapi Palace, while the rest kept today at the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art as part of "Damascus Papers" consisting of 250,000 Quranic folios and bindings. This is certainly one of the largest collections of early Quranic fragments in the world.

The "Amajur Quran" is the earliest *dated* Quran manuscript so far thanks to the waqfiyyah (before 264 AH). Amajūr al-Turkī, who served as the governor of Damascus from 256 AH to 264 AH, presented this Kufic Quran to a mosque in Ṣūr (Tyre) in Lebanon.

Historical sources don't say much about Amajur other than being the governor of Damascus in the time of al-Muʿtamid, but we know he secured the roads, eliminated the bandits, engaged in the building of public works, and made this Qur'an a waqf in the city of Tyre.

The two surviving waqfiyas—dated Ramadan and Shawwal 262 AH—tell us that Amajur endowed a thirty-volume Quran put in two boxes (fi sunduqayn) and a house he owned in Tyre. The recipient institution is not mentioned, but it is likely a mosque or a religious centre.

The largest portion of the Amajur Quran is in TIEM (242 folios; 12 x 18.9 cm; 3 lines to page). These were discovered and examined by F. Francois Deroche in the 1980s as he worked there for five years to study the collection.

In fact, it was Bernhard Moritz who introduced the Amajur Qur'an to the field of Arabic paleography as he published in 1913 a sample kept at the Khedival Library.

My research concludes that Dar al-Kutub al-Misriyyah has at least three folios of Amajur Quran.

In 1983, D. S. Rice identified the "Quran of Amajur" fragment at Cambridge University Library (shelfmark Add. 1116 @theULSpecColl).

The library bought this 37-folia fragment from professor Edward Henry Palmer in 1878.

You can access it online:
cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01…

More folios also found elsewhere. The Ashmolean Museum (@AshmoleanMuseum) in Oxford hold two folios of the Amajur Qur'an. These were presented by Ralph Pinder-Wilson in 1996.

You can access it online:
jameelcentre.ashmolean.org/collection/3/p…

King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh once exhibited a double page of the Amajur Quran in 1985.

I inquired about it lately and was told it's not among the acquisitions of the Centre but rather a loan from another institution.

And lastly, the three folios from the Museum of Calligraphy in Damascus. These were photographed by Arianna Rambach in 2003 and published for the first time on QMSB in 2020.

Let's wrap it up:
- TIEM (242 folios)
- Cambridge Uni Lib (37 folios)
- Ashmolean Museum (2 folios)
- Dar al-Kutub (3 folios)
- 1985 exhibition, Riyadh (2 folios)
- Museum of Calligraphy (3 folios)
- A folio presumably in Tokyo (1 folio)

Total: 290 folios.

But the original multi-volume Qur'an was estimated to be 4000 folios. If so, extant folios of the Amajur Quran represent no more than 7.2% of the full manuscript. As always, more folios may surface in the future.