Put an Andalusi Quran beside a contemporary Egyptian or Iraqi one and the differences are immediate. The script is Maghribi, with sweeping round descenders that drop well below the line, a distinctive open final nun, and the letters fa and qaf dotted in the western way, below and with a single point, rather than the eastern way. The page is often close to square, a proportion the east abandoned. The support is frequently parchment, which the eastern book trade had largely given up for paper by the tenth century and which the west kept for Qurans much longer, apparently as a mark of respect for the text. Vocalisation and the marks of recitation are coloured, with red, yellow, green and blue each carrying a fixed meaning, so the page is legible as a set of instructions and not only as words.
The text carried is also, characteristically, not the one most readers of printed Qurans know. The Muslim west reads Warsh from Nafi rather than Hafs from Asim, a difference of recitation tradition rather than of content, and Andalusi and Maghribi manuscripts reflect that in their notation. Around the text sit illumination traditions of their own: geometric and interlace carpet pages, marginal roundels marking divisions of the text, and bindings with a flap that folds across the fore-edge and tucks under the cover, a western Islamic form.