Seven-part Qur'an of Baybars al-Jashankir

A seven-part Qur'an transcribed by Ibn al-Wahid, probably at Cairo, for the Mamluk amir Baybars al-Jashankir in 704–5/1304–6. Blair calls it a tour de force: each volume has some 155 large folios (47 × 32 cm), so more than five hundred bifolios of about 50 × 70 cm were needed. Each page has six lines of a thick round script in gold outlined in black, with chapter headings, pointing and vocalisation in red and other markings in blue. All seven volumes are intact, except for a single folio replaced near the end of the last. ^{1 2}

It differs from its early fourteenth-century Mamluk contemporaries, which are almost all single volumes on quarter-baghdadi sheets with eleven to fifteen lines: this one is in seven parts on half-baghdadi sheets and in gold, and so bigger, more spacious and more expensive. ²

It is first mentioned in the endowment deed of Shawwal 707/April 1308 for Baybars's complex, which included his tomb and a khanqah for four hundred Sufis; among the tomb staff is a "reader of the large Qur'an manuscript", a seven-part copy in gold that the founder endowed for Friday readings in the Mosque of al-Hakim, which Baybars had restored after the earthquake of 1303. Blair notes that the sections were not meant to be read daily but were paraded weekly to the mosque. ^{2 3}

Dated colophons show that the second section was finished in Jumada II 704 and the seventh in 705 — about two months a volume — and that the outlining of the gold letters by Aydughdi ibn Abdallah al-Badri is dated 705; illumination by Abu Bakr, known as Sandal, and Muhammad ibn Mubadir and the binding followed before the endowment date, so the whole project took about three and a half years. ³