Folio from a Qur'an Manuscript

The Bihari style of Arabic script was used by the early Islamic dynasties until the advent of the Mughals in the sixteenth century. Unfortunately, few manuscripts survive in either Persian or Arabic from the first centuries of Muslim rule in India. The earliest example of Bihari script is a Qur'an dated 801/1399 from the provincial fortress of Gwalior and a later but undated Qur'an with calligraphic affinities to our leaf has been associated with a workshop at Jaunpur.

Often compared with the Maghribi script of North Africa, Bihari scribes, perhaps due to a lack of contact with established centers of Islamic calligraphy, ignored the codified rules of calligraphic proportion and style as developed by Ibn Muqla (d. 940), vizier to the Abassid court in Bagdad. Contrary to the rules in which each letter is carefully proportioned and spaced in relation to one another, the Bihari calligraphers appear to have treated each word as a seperate entity, to be written down immediately.

This Qur'an leaf, typical of the curving horizontal Bihari style, has been enlivened with alternating lines of gold, black and blue script exhibiting the distinctive wedge-shaped letters that slowly thicken at the lower endings. The leaf bears an ornamental cartouche with floral sprays containing the 'unwan or chapter heading for Sura 9, al-tawba or "Repentance". It is interesting to note that this is the only chapter in the Qur'an which does not begin with the invocation bi-ism Allah al-rahman al-rahim ("In the name of God the Clement, the Merciful"). The end of an ayya or verse is punctuated with a small gold and blue shamsa or "sun-medallion". The page is further embellished by a multi-colored rosette within the margin, inscribed with the word rabi' or " fourth", indicating that this is one-quarter of a thirty-part division or juz' of the Qur'an. Above and below the medallion written on angular lines is a paraphrasing of the verses in Persian.

Rochelle Kessler in Walker et al. 1994.

Inscription: top 8 lines:
8 (Surat al-'Anfal): end of 74 through 75
Chapter heading: Surat al-tawba, 130 [sic] verses
bottom 3 lines:
9 (Surat al-Tawba):1 to the beginning of 2
[M. Sardar 12/2011]

[ Terence McInerney Fine Arts Ltd., New York, until 1992; sold 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. 6.

The 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 Kahli, 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. 6, pp. 56–57, ill. (b/w).

Flood, Finbarr Barry, and Gulru Necipoglu. "From the Mongols to Modernism." In A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture. vol. 2. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2017. pp. 706–707, ill. fig. 27.5.