11

Spread from a Qur’an section

China, Beijing; 1643–44 Ink and gold on paper; 24 x 15.3 cm

(each leaf) The David Collection Photo: Pernille Klemp patterns. Generous amounts of gold have been used for the backgrounds, for the interlacing surrounding the sura headings, and for the verse markers in the text. The original illuminations were executed by the famed artist Yari al-Mudhahhib (‘the illuminator’) in Herat in 1516, but the manuscript later went to India where al-Mudhahhib’s illuminations were restored and augmented by Indian artists. This Qur’an was part of the libraries of the Qutb Shahi dynasty of Golconda (1496–1687) and the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707).

As the art of Qur’anic calligraphy spread across the Islamic world, the scripts used generally retained their classical forms. There were, however, Muslim communities who were so geographically remote from the Islamic heartlands of the Middle East, Iran, and Central Asia that the calligraphic style of their Qur’ans began to deviate from the mainstream. This was especially true of the Chinese Hui Muslims. The Hui were descended from West Asian Muslims, many of whom had come to China with the Mongols in the 13th and 14th centuries. After the fall of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1272–1368) and the rise of the Han Chinese Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the Hui gradually integrated into Chinese society and lost contact with their coreligionists to the west. This gave their artistic production a distinctly Chinese flavour, as can be seen in a spread from a thirty-volume Qur’an penned by a female calligrapher in Beijing in 1643–44 (fig. 11). The text is written in Arabic, but in a particular script called Sini, which is the Arabic term for ‘Chinese’. Sini is derived from the classical rounded cursive scripts such as Muhaqqaq, but it is less regularized and allows more room for interpretation by the artist. In some cases, the Sini letters can even take on an unusual wavy appearance that may reflect the influence of Chinese brush calligraphy. The marginal decorations of this Qur’an are also highly evocative of the region in which it was produced. On the right, we see a small structure shaped like a Chinese pagoda, with a blossoming chrysanthemum below. These rather naturalistic motifs break with the traditional Islamic convention of embellishing the Qur’an with abstract decorations only.

Rasmus Bech Olsen is a curator at The David Collection.

Selected bibliography

Manijeh Bayani, Anna Contadini, and Tim Stanley, The

Decorated Word: Qur’ans of the 17th to the 19th Centuries, Part 1, London, 1999. Sheila Blair, Islamic Calligraphy, Edinburgh, 2006. Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, Cosmophilia: Islamic

Art from The David Collection, Copenhagen, Chestnut Hill, MA, 2006. Francois Déroche, The Abbasid Tradition: Qur’ans of the

8th to the 10th Centuries AD, London, 1992. Alain George, The Rise of Islamic Calligraphy, London,

2010. David James, After Timur: Qur’ans of the 15th and 16th

Centuries, London 1992. Joachim Meyer, Rasmus Bech Olsen, and Peter Wandel,

Beyond Words: Calligraphy from the World of Islam, exh. cat., The David Collection, Copenhagen, 2024.

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