Folio from a Qur'an Manuscript

The present page comes from a now dispersed manuscript of the Qur'an, many folios of which once belonged to the scholar R.M. Riefstahl, hence it is now known today as the Riefstahl Qur'an fragment. Copied on vellum—the material used to copy manuscripts in the first four centuries of Islam, before paper began to be widely used—the "good side" of the parchment (the other side of the sheep's skin is less absorbent and the ink fades much more quickly) shown here includes seven lines of text from verses 36–38 of sura (or Chapter) XLVII, whose title is Muhammad. The type of angular, horizontal script employed here, called Kufic because it probably developed initially in the town of Kufa in Iraq, was the calligraphy that unified the Islamic world during its first centuries. In this case, the angularity of the bold script is moderated by the roundness of many letters that look on the page as large black dots, their inner blank spaces reduced almost to a needle-point. The colored double lines and dots present above and below the written words help the reader to recognize the letters and to properly read the words, a rather difficult task with this type of script; the group of six gold dots arranged in a triangular shape marks instead the end of a verse. Although it is difficult to recognize local styles of Kufic in this early period, this particular calligraphy and the illumination of the Riefstahl pages find very good parallels in two manuscripts produced in Damascus and Tiberias at the end of the 9th century and the beginning of the 10th. Those two codices suggest a similar date and provenance for the present page and the others from the same manuscript found in public and private collections. The side here reproduced is the recto of the page.

Stefano Carboni in [Walker et al. 1994]

Inscription: Seven lines from sura 47 (Surat al-Muhammad) - verses 36–38

Rudolf M. Riefstahl, New York (until 1930; gifted to MMA)

Mexico City. Colegio de San Ildefonso. "Arte Islámico del Museo Metropolitano de Arte de Nueva York," September 30, 1994–January 8, 1995, no. 1.

Ettinghausen, Richard. "Islamic Art." Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin vol. 33, no. 1 (Spring 1975). ill. p. 12 (b/w).

de Montebello, Philippe, and Kathleen Howard, ed. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide. 6th ed. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992. p. 312, ill. fig. 3 (color).

Schimmel, Annemarie. "Islamic Calligraphy." Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, n.s., vol. 50, no. 1 (Summer 1992). p. 3, ill. fig. 1 (color).

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Daniel S. Walker, Arturo Ponce Guadián, Sussan Babaie, Stefano Carboni, Aimee Froom, Marie Lukens Swietochowski, Tomoko Masuya, Annie Christine Daskalakis-Matthews, Abdallah Kahil, and Rochelle Kessler. "Colegio de San Ildefonso, Septiembre de 1994–Enero de 1995." In Arte Islámico del Museo Metropolitano de Arte de Nueva York. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1994. no. 1, pp. 46–47, ill. (color).

Ekhtiar, Maryam. How to Read Islamic Calligraphy. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018. p. 72, ill. fig. 32.