In our recent blog, we introduced some of the Quranic codices featuring our new digital collection of Arabic manuscripts. Apart from the muṣḥafs (written copies of the Qurʿan), it also offers volumes of poetry, animal fables, scientific treatises and Arabic Christian works.
A Christian calendar
One of the Christian works is a Coptic calendar listing religious festivals and fast days (Arabic MS 687). According to Alphonse Mingana who catalogued the collection in the 1930s, this thin volume, written around the 13th century, was once part of a larger liturgical work. Apart from the bookplate of the Bibliotheca Lindesiana on the back paste-down, the manuscript reveals very little about its history but on its last page, someone added an note: “You who buys this book, buy it for a good price” and a curious doodle.*
Virtuous vices
Another intriguing item in the online collection is a disputation between a coffee-drinker and a smoker concerning the claims of coffee-drinking or smoking to precedence (Arabic MS 615). The author does not reveal himself, but he says that the first man who invented coffee-drinking was the Yemenite Sufi al-Shaikh ʿUmar al-Shādhilī from the port town of al-Mukha (المخا). For coffee lovers: this is where the word mocha comes from! Apparently, al-Shaikh ʿUmar used to prepare coffee in order to keep men awake during religious prayers. We know very little about the history of this manuscript prior to its inclusion into the Bibliotheca Lindesiana. There is a signature by ʿAbd al-Raḥman Khalīl Muhandis (عبد الرحمن خليل مهندس) on the last page (folio 41a), who was most likely a previous owner. However, as it is so often the case, we don’t know it changed hands and ended up in the Earls of Crawford’s library
The famous Barmakid family
The Barmakid family was one of the wealthiest and most influential Persian families during times of the early ʿAbbasid caliphs (8th century CE). Several of its members were serving as advisors of the caliphs. Many tales have been circulating about the family. For instance, Jaʽfar ibn Yahya Barmaki, the caliph Harun al-Rashid’s vizier, appears in several stories of the Thousand and One Nights. The Rylands holds a manuscript containing stories of the Barmakids composed by Muḥammad Diyāb al-Itlīdī around 1100 AH (1688 CE) (Arabic MS 109).
According to its colophon, the manuscript was copied in 1153 AH (1740 CE).ِ By the late 18th-century it is in the possession of a French dragoman (a professional interpreter) Jean-Baptiste Perille (d. 1805/6), who left his signature on the title page: ‘Perille’ and ‘صاحبه ترجمان پريل الفرانساوي’ (‘Belongs to the turgeman Perille the Frenchman’). Perille worked as interpreter in the Middle East and Morocco, and Istanbul, and as lecturer in Turkish at the Collège de France, Paris. Later, it was acquired by Nathaniel Bland, and after his death by the Earl of Crawford, and finally Enriqueta Rylands.
A work on calligraphy
Calligraphy is an important and highly regarded genre of Islamic art. The Rylands holds a Turkish work on calligraphy that offers examples of a range of different scripts (Arabic MS 97). As we learn from the section headings, the examples are based on the system of writing established by the famous calligrapher Ibn ul-Bawwāb (d. 1022 CE) as copied in 908 AH (1502 CE).
Right: Thuluth script, Ibn al-Bawwād’s style = قلم الثلث طريقة ابن البواب (Arabic MS 97, folio 11a).
Apart from the examples of various scripts the manuscripts also contains a poem about the art of writing: هذه القصيلة في علي الكتابة composed by al-Shaikh Shams al-Din bin Mohammad bin al-Wahid.
The copyist of the manuscript added his name and the date of copying on the last page: Mehmed bin Ḥasan bin Mehmed bin Ahmed bin ʿAmar(?) al-Tayyibi (or al-Ṭībbī?) al-Shafiʿi, Shawwal 908 according to the Islamic calendar (that is 1502 CE):
محمد بن حسن بن محمد بن احمد بن عمر القفيرالطيبي الشافعي في شهر شوال المبارك من شهور سنة ثمان وتسعماية من الهجرة البنوية الحمد لله علي حال ونعمة فضل
Two Turkish owners, father and son(?), left their mark in the manuscript inscribing their names onto the first folio: Abū al-Ḥüseyin Ibrāhīm Muṣtafà Efendī, dated 1151 AH (1738 CE) and el-Seyyid Ḥüseyin el-Kamāl el-Ṣāẕelī, son of the late Ibrāhīm Ketẖüdā Tüfekçīyān Muṣṭafà Efendī, dated 1179 AH (1765 CE).
At some point after 1765, the French orientalist Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838) acquired the volume (see his bookplate on the front paste-down). A few year’s after de Sacy’s death, in 1843 his son sold his manuscript collection and the calligraphy manual ended up in the library of another orientalist, Nathaniel Bland (1803-1865). When Bland died, the manuscript together with many others was sold through bookseller Bernard Quaritch to Alexander Lindsay, 25th Earl of Crawford, and eventually it was purchased by Enriqueta Rylands and became part of the Rylands’ Arabic manuscript collection.
Explore more wondrous manuscripts in our new online collection and keep an eye out for more items coming later this year!
Further reading
The Barmakids – Invisible East – University of Oxford, website.
The Rise and Fall of the Barmakids: Stories from a Forgotten Persian Manuscript. Pizhman Firuzbakhsh (translator), Arezou Azad (translator), Ziya al-Din Barani. Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming.
Roxburgh, David J. “On the Transmission and Reconstruction of Arabic Calligraphy: Ibn al-Bawwab and History.” Écriture, Calligraphie et Peinture 96 (2003): 39-53. https://doi.org/10.2307/1596241
Blair, Sheila S. Islamic Calligraphy. Edinburgh: University of Edinburg Press,
2006.
The Ibn al-Bawwad Qur’an (Dublin, Chester Beatty, 1431), copied by ibn al-Bawwad himself in Bagdad around 1000.
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*Thanks to Dr Dóra Zsom for translating the note.