New online collection of Arabic manuscripts I: the Glorious Qurʿan

A small selection of the John Rylands Library’s Arabic manuscripts is now available online for the first time via our Manchester Digital Collections (MDC) platform.  Our new Arabic Manuscripts digital collection allows you to explore fully digitised copies alongside detailed descriptions.

The majority of the Rylands’ Arabic codices were acquired by Enriqueta Rylands, the widow of John Rylands, when in 1901 she bought the Earl of Crawford’s extensive manuscript collection for £155,000 (over £16 million today). According to his son’s account, the 25^th Earl of Crawford, Alexander William Lindsay (1812-1880) started to collect non-Western manuscripts in the 1830s when he was travelling around Syria and Egypt. His son, James Ludovic Lindsay, the 26^th Earl of Crawford, continued to build the library over his lifetime, and it became one of the largest private collections in Britain. In its heyday, the library known as the Bibliotheca Lindesiana contained over 100,000 printed books, 6000 manuscripts, and tens of thousands of archival materials and ephemera.

You cannot see the whole Arabic collection online, but there are printed catalogues describing almost all but a dozen manuscripts. Chaldean priest and oriental scholar Alphonse Mingana (1878-1937) catalogued the items acquired from the Bibliotheca Lindesiana in 1934. The Iraq-born Mingana emigrated to England in 1913 and a couple of years later he settled in Manchester where he spent the next 17 years of his life. Eventually he became the Keeper of Oriental Manuscripts at the John Rylands Library. About thirty years later, English historian and orientalist Clifford Edmund Bosworth catalogued further acquisitions.

The majority of the manuscripts we have now published are copies of the Qurʿan ranging over a thousand years. One of the earliest in the collection is a beautiful muṣḥaf (written copy of the Qurʿan) copied in the 9th century (Arabic MS 688). It was written on parchment with large Kufi characters. Since the handwriting is not the same throughout and the number of lines per page varies, the cataloguer Mingana thought that the leaves in the codex were probably taken from various old manuscripts. In the beginning of the 18th century, this codex was in the possession of a certain Rajab ʿAlī – you can see his inscriptions and official seal on folios 1a, 2b and 4a. A century and half later it was in Britain at the Earl of Crawford’s library, the Bibliotheca Lindesiana. How it changed hands and travelled through continents, we do not know.

The Rylands’ famous trilingual Qurʿan also comes from the Crawford collection (Arabic MSS 760-773). This multi-volume set is significant not only because of its lavish illuminations but also because of the translations it contains. Apart from the Persian rendering of the Qurʿan, it also preserved an early (the earliest known?) Turkic translation. There is an ongoing scholarly discussion both about the date of the manuscript (most likely 13th or 14th century?) as well as the nature of this Turkic translation (Khorezmian Turkic? Chagatai? Qarakhanid Turkic?). In any case, it is undoubtedly an important source for the study of Turkic linguistics. There is still a lot of research to be done on this item and how it ended up at the Earl of Crawford’s library. We will devote a separate blog to this manuscript.

We know more about the history of another stunning muṣḥaf, a golden Qurʿan, written around 1000 (Arabic MS 691). The letters – midway between Kūfi and Naskh script, were written by a Maghribi or African hand. The vocalisation was added in blue ink. This stunning volume once belonged to the French orientalist Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838), who accumulated one of the most comprehensive collections of Quranic manuscripts. After his death his collection was sold, and as the ex libris on the front pastedown proves, the golden Quran was purchased by a certain Chevalier J. Ferrão de Castelbranco about whom we know very little. James Ludovic Lindsay, 26th Earl of Crawford, bought it at the Castelbranco sale in Lisbon in 1883.

Nathaniel Bland (1803-1865), eminent scholar of Persian literature and member of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society accumulated a large collection of oriental manuscripts. Apart from being a collector he also developed a gambling habit, lost his fortune and eventually took his own life. In 1866 when Nathaniel Bland’s collection came to the market, the bookseller Quaritch purchased 204 of his Arabic manuscripts for the Earl of Crawford (together with a large number of Persian and Turkish volumes). One of these is a beautifully illuminated 18th-century muṣḥaf from the Ottoman Empire containing the entire Qurʿan (Arabic MS 6). According to its colophon, it was copied by Ibrahim Ahmad Ibraham “hāfiz al-Qurʿan” (memorizer of the Quran). As is often the case, we do not know how the manuscript left Asia and arrived in Europe.

Apart from Quranic volumes, you can also explore codices containing poetry and animal fables, calligraphy, science, ethics, Arabic Christian works and a curious text relating the (imaginary) disputation between a coffee-drinker and a smoker. We will introduce some of these in our next blog on The Rylands’ Arabic manuscripts.

The publication of this small group of precious manuscripts on MDC is just the first step of opening up our Arabic manuscript collection virtually – in time we will publish more items, so keep an eye on the website!

See our second blog on this new collection here.

Further resources

A. Mingana, Catalogue of the Arabic Manuscripts in the John Rylands Library Manchester (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1934).

Fihrist: Union Catalogue of Manuscripts from the Islamicate World