Andalusi Quran Manuscript

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.

The manuscript tradition did not end with the fall of Granada in 1492. It went underground. Muslims who remained in Spain were forced to convert in the following decades and became the Moriscos, a population that was Christian by law, Muslim in a good deal of private practice, and under surveillance by the Inquisition throughout. They continued to copy religious texts, in Arabic and in Aljamiado, which is Romance written in Arabic script, and they hid them. Caches have been recovered from the fabric of houses in Aragon and Castile, walled up under floors and between joists, the best known found at Almonacid de la Sierra in the late nineteenth century when a house was being demolished.

Those hidden libraries are now a principal source for what Morisco religious life actually consisted of, as opposed to what inquisitorial records say about it, and they are notably practical: prayer instructions, calendars, legal opinions on how to live as a Muslim under a Christian regime, and copies of the Quran. The Moriscos were expelled from Spain between 1609 and 1614, so the manuscripts outlasted the community that made them. The wider western manuscript tradition continued uninterrupted across the Strait, and Maghribi script remains in ordinary use in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and further south to this day, which makes the Andalusi book a living tradition with a broken branch rather than a closed chapter.