Seven Volumes Scattered Across a Century

The manuscript's physical history after its creation is almost as scattered as the debate about where that creation happened. It began as seven bound volumes, a scale suited to a major mosque endowment rather than a private commission, and the bulk of it stayed in Qayrawan, the North African city whose Great Mosque anchored Ifriqiya's religious life for centuries, until well into the twentieth century, when the volumes were broken apart and their leaves dispersed to museums and private collections around the world. A portion of the first volume passed at some point through the collection of the Swedish diplomat F. R. Martin, who lived from 1868 to 1933, and one plausible account holds that those particular leaves were carried off from Tunisia as tribute to the Ottoman capital sometime in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, centuries before Martin ever owned them.

What survives at the Aga Khan Museum today is a fragment of that larger, scattered whole, two folios rather than a complete volume, each page a little over eighty centimeters wide. Its presence in a museum built around Ismaili patronage and Islamic art more broadly is itself part of the object's later story: a manuscript most plausibly commissioned under a Fatimid Ismaili state now sits, centuries on, inside an institution shaped by the same community's modern leadership, even as the question of exactly which workshop first laid gold onto blue parchment remains open.