A large Qur'an leaf written in bold kufic script on vellum, Near East or North Africa, 9th-10th Century

Arabic manuscript on vellum, seven lines to the page written in large bold kufic script in black ink with diacritics and vowel points in red and green, verse-ending marked with a gold flame-shaped palmette
275 x 373 mm.

Text
Text (recto only): sura XXII, al-Hajj, The Pilgrimage, part of verse 63?part of verse 65.

For a section of nine leaves from the same dispersed manuscript, see Christie's, Art of the Islamic and Indian Worlds, 26th April 2012, lot 58; and in addition a further section (lot 59) and a bifolium (lot 60). It has been suggested that the slight unevenness of the lines is the result of the scribe not marking the lines and writing free-hand. Another leaf is in the Nasser D. Khalili Collection (see F. Deroche, The Abbasid Tradition, London 1992, p. 126, no. 69, where he notes that the leaf may have been part of the famous MS. 322 in the Institute of Oriental Studies, St. Petersburg).