The Oldest Manuscripts from India and Their Histories

2003

Founded in 1922 and moved to al-Haram al-Sharif in 1929, the Islamic Museum in Jerusalem houses artifacts covering nearly all oflslamic his tory and originating in North Africa, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and the Middle East. This beautifully illustrated volume, published with the support of UNESCO in both English and Arabic, treats a small part of the Museum's collection: a selection of its Qur'an manuscripts. The work, divided into three parts, first introduces the Islamic Museum and its collection, then provides background information concerning relevant textual and art his tory, and finally presents 3 I Qur'an manuscripts in detail. Part One, "The Islamic Museum," gives an overview of the Museum's holdings, including wood, metalwork, ceramics, glass, tex tiles, coins, stone inscriptions and architectural elements, and documents. Most of the artifacts are material salvaged fr om repairs to the haram area or objects fr om the endowments of the Aqsa mosque and madrasahs in Jerusalem, Nablus, and Hebron. The collection includes many exquisite pieces: Umayyad floral woodwork panels fr om the al-Aqsa Mosque, a striking glass mosque lamp of the Mamluk amir Tankiz fr om Hebron, and the salvaged remains of Nur al-Din's pulpit, built in Aleppo in 564/1168 and brought to the Aqsa Mosque in 583/1187 by Salah al-Din after his conquest of Jerusalem. (Unfortunately, the ornate wooden pulpit was nearly destroyed by arson in I 969.) Part Two, "Background," treats Arabic calligraphy, illumination, bindings, and the textual history of the Qur'an. Kufi c, an old, square script said to derive from stone inscriptions, is used for the text of the old est Qur'an manuscript in the collection and for headings and panels in later manuscripts. The bulk of the manuscripts are written in the more cursive Naskhi script, which became popular by the tenth century, and the similar but taller Thuluth and Muhaqqaq. A number of the collections manscripts fr om North Afr ica are written in Maghribi script, which derives from Kufi c and differs signifi cantly fr om the common eastern scripts. This vol ume allows the reader to view some stunning examples of illumination,

História da Historiografia, 2015

and undertaking a historical contextualization, this paper problematizes the epistemis and epistemological framework underlying the articulation of Chiragh 'Ali's discourse, focusing on how he viewed the Qur'an and Shari'a according to the intellectual debates in the 19 th century. Often refuting, in his writings, missionary and Orientalist criticisms of Islam as being hostile to reason and incapable of reform, Chiragh 'Ali rather argued that the Islamic legal system and schools were human institutions capable of modification. While defending that the Qur'an taught religious doctrine and rules for morality, Chiragh 'Ali held the opinion that it did not support a detailed code of immutable civil law or dictate a specific political system, drawing on an examination of the traditional sources of the Islamic law and methods to overcome the rigidity of traditional theologians.

ReOrient Journal , 2020

This essay presents a broad overview of certain key works and intellectual trends that mark traditional scholarship on the Qur’an in South Asia, from the late medieval to the modern periods, roughly the fourteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Far from an exhaustive survey of any sort, what I have attempted instead is a preliminary and necessarily partial outline of the intellectual trajectory of Qur’an commentaries and translations in the South Asian context—in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu—with a view to exploring how shifting historical and political conditions informed new ways of engaging the Qur’an. My central argument is this: in South Asia, the early modern and modern periods saw an important shift from largely elite scholarship on the Qur’an, invariably conducted by scholars intimately bound to the imperial order of their time, to more self-consciously popular works of translation and exegesis designed to access and attract a wider non-elite public. In this shift, I argue, translation itself emerged as an important and powerful medium of hermeneutical populism pregnant with the promise of broadening the boundaries of the Qur’an’s readership and understanding. In other words, as the pendulum of political sovereignty gradually shifted from pre-colonial Islamicate imperial orders to British colonialism, new ways of imagining the role, function, and accessibility of the Qur’an also came into central view. A major emphasis of this essay is on the thought and contributions of the hugely influential eighteenth-century scholar Shah Wali Ullah (d. 1762) and his family on the intellectual topography of South Asian Qur’an commentaries and translations.

2011

IslamIc manuscrIpts from cambrIdge unversIty lIbrary Foreword the first Islamic manuscript to enter the library was a copy of the Qur'an donated in 1631 by the arabic scholar William bedwell. since that time the library's Islamic manuscripts collection has grown in size and diversity to over 5,000 items. they shed a light on many aspects of the culture of the Islamic world, its beliefs and learning. such a collection was amassed over subsequent centuries either from scholarly collectors or purchased by skilled librarians to add more depth to the already impressive range of treasures. but this extraordinary collection has remained relatively unknown outside the library. today, the aim is to change this with a number of different approaches. We are creating a fully searchable online catalogue of the manuscripts and digitising a selection of the most beautiful and interesting texts to make them available to the international scholarly community anywhere in the world via the internet. at the same time, the practical care of the original items, carried out by our own skilled conservators, will ensure their long-term survival for future generations. the Islamic manuscripts collection is supported within the library by a team of specialists whose knowledge and skills, whether academic, practical or technical, aim to bring them to the attention of researchers. but only with a sustained programme of scholarly cooperation with experts outside the library can the full content and significance of these texts be realised and their place in the wider context of Islamic scholarship become established. Anne Jarvis, University Librarian Detail from the opening of the Qur'an from the Palmer collection. (add.1138) Opening page of an Arabic work on metrical composition: the scribe is one of the secretaries of the Ottoman Court, dated 1592.