Society, 1993); William C. Chittick, Ibn Arabi: Heir to
Religion, Press, and Politics in Sadat’s Egypt.”
Middle
East Journal 40, no. 3 (Summer, 1986): 462–477; Ibn
al-Arabi, The Bezels of Wisdom. Translated by R. W. J.
Austin (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1980); Annemarie
Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 259–286.
Ibn al-Bawwab, Abu al-Hasan Ali
(unknown–1022)
copyist of the earliest extant
Quran manuscript using all elements of 10th-century
calligraphic reforms
Ibn al-Bawwab worked as librarian for the Shii
Buyid rulers in Shiraz (in i
ran
) and was later bur-
ied in b
aghdad
, the city that gave rise to the calli-
graphic khatt (Arabic script) reforms and the girih
mode of geometric ornamentation that in the 11th
century suppressed variant readings of the q
Uran
.
He produced a copy of the Quran in 1000–01 that
is now preserved at the Chester Beatty Library in
Dublin. Ibn al-Bawwab’s use of the proportioned
scripts and accompanying geometric designs soon
after their creation indicates that he was loyal to
the Sunni Abbasids (r. 750–1258) as opposed to
the Buyid dynasty (932–1062).
Ibn al-Bawwab occupies a special place among
medieval commentators on khatt as the person
who perfected, through the elegance of his writ-
ing, the proportioned script invented by a
bU
a
li
m
Uhammad
i
bn
m
Uqla
(d. 940). His is the first
surviving copy (and one of the very first such
copies) of a Quran in cursive scripts, or what were
originally considered secular scripts (the six pens
of Ibn Muqla). His signed and dated manuscript
provides a rare instance of a preserved work that
exemplifies major shifts in the processes of copy-
ing and producing these manuscripts.
Earlier, making copies of the Quran was the
domain of specialists who used gold ink on vel-
lum, often employing brushes to fill in the out-
lines of stylized, extended, and difficult to read
letters. Each horizontally disposed page carried a
few lines of about seven to nine words, resulting
in expensive, multivolume products of limited
circulation. In contrast, Ibn al-Bawwab’s copy is
a small volume (ca. 13.5 × 17.8 cm) in a vertical
paper format in which the text is written with
pen. The body of the text is entirely vocalized and
written in a clear, rounded naskhi script, while
chapter headings, verse counts, and other statis-
tics are in thuluth script. The text itself follows
the approved Abbasid version, while the use of
reform scripts and geometric (girih) decoration
in the frontispieces similarly expresses Abbasid
dogma on the accessibility of the divine message
and eternity of universal order.
See also a
bbasid
c
aliphate
;
arabesqUe
;
books
and
bookmaking
;
calligraphy
; F
atimid
dynasty
;
madrasa
.
Nuha N. N. Khoury
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