Ibn al-Wahid (Sharaf al-Din Muhammad ibn Sharif)

Sharaf al-Din Muhammad ibn Sharif ibn Yusuf, known as Ibn al-Wahid, was born in or around Damascus, perhaps at Zar'a in the Hawran, as his epithet al-Zar'i suggests. He travelled to Baalbek and then to Baghdad, where he learned all six round scripts from Yaqut, then moved to Cairo, entered the service of the amir and later sultan Baybars al-Jashankir and became legal secretary (katib al-shari'a) at the Mosque of al-Hakim, earning the epithet al-Misri. Besides his skill with the pen he was a good linguist and a poet; he died in 1311 aged 61. ^{2 1}

His most famous work is the seven-part Qur'an written in gold for Baybars al-Jashankir. Blair notes that he followed in many respects the traditions of Yaqut's followers in Iran and Iraq — using half-baghdadi sheets as Ahmad al-Suhrawardi had — but departed from them in the seven-part division and the even number of lines (six), perhaps following a Syrian tradition such as the four-line Qur'an made for Nur al-Din ibn Zangi at Damascus in 562/1166–7. His team was larger than those of his Baghdad contemporaries: the illuminators Abu Bakr, known as Sandal, and Muhammad ibn Mubadir, and the outliner Aydughdi ibn Abdallah al-Badri. ^{1 3}

His hand is rounded, with many upturned and sometimes reversed tails; words are crowded without spaces and do not sit on a baseline; alif has a triangular projection at the top and a foot below, final ha' is left open, and there are many unauthorised connections. Mamluk sources call this hand thuluth ash'ar or ash'ar, a hybrid said to combine muhaqqaq, thuluth and naskh, which makes the manuscript one of the rare examples of a hand labelled by contemporaries. ^{2 1 3 4}