Bahmanid Qur'an, Archaeological Museum, Bijapur

This Qur'an belongs to the Archaeological Museum at Bijapur (no. 912); the catalogue dates it AH 888 and assigns it to the Deccan in the Sultanate period. ¹ Welch thinks it was copied for a patron of high rank at one of the princely courts, and that it is apparently the only manuscript to survive from the Bahmanid period, which began about 1350, although it was written in the late fifteenth century, long after the peak of Bahmanid power. ¹

The catalogue recalls that the finest surviving inscriptions at Bidar, the Bahmanid capital from 1424 to 1538, were composed in Arabic by a Persian calligrapher in the 1430s and cut in stone by craftsmen who spoke only Telugu, and that they are in thuluth. ¹ The Qur'an itself is in Bihari, a script used by calligraphers in India since the early Middle Ages: its letters are wedge-shaped and more angular than the classical rounded forms, and its writer treats each word as a single entity rather than a carefully built sum of letters, as writers of Maghribi script did at the other end of the Islamic world. ¹ In Welch's view, what might look like a lack of classical perfection is often more than offset by the vigour of the writing and its daring coloured decoration. ¹

Lines of large script alternate with three lines of small script, a design taken from classical texts that became popular in Ottoman Turkey for single pages of religious poetry or hadith and seems to have originated in the early fifteenth century. ² The catalogue relates it to the takhmis of Arab poets, in which two lines of original verse in large script were followed by three lines enlarging on them in small script; designers usually paired thuluth for the large lines with naskh for the small, and rarely muhaqqaq with rihani. ² The Deccani copyist of this Qur'an used the same layout, perhaps learnt from a Persian or Turkish colleague, but wrote both sizes in his accustomed Bihari. ²