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Stylistically our Qur’an juz’ is extremely close to those from the Ya’qub Beg Qur’an but both the folios and the text
panels of ours are slightly smaller in size indicating that it was part of another similar commission by the same
scribe. As in the Ya’qub Beg Qur’an, here Zayn al-‘Abidin juxtaposes large and small scripts, a practice which
was occasionally used in the twelfth century and became much more common in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, especially in Central Asia. Zayn al-‘Abidin has been referred to as the master of this technique, and
copied both this manuscript and the Ya’qub Beg example with large lines of elegant muhaqqaq and thuluth
sandwiching smaller panels of naskh. Blair argues that such a format was not to all tastes and this mixture of
scripts was not popular in Egypt or Syria, where a change in script indicated a change in text (Sheila Blair, Islamic
Calligraphy, 2008, pp.268-70). This format seems to have been especially appealing in Iran and adjacent lands
at this time as part of the taste for calligraphic specimens, which often juxtaposed different scripts written at
different angles in different colours. A remarkable example of this is in the Al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait (inv.
no.LNS 84 MS).
Another Qur’an completed as a single-volume by Zayn al-‘Abidin is in the Astan Quds Razavi Library, in Mashhad.
That manuscript is dated AH 876/1471 AD, and was copied for the Royal Library of Abu’l-Fath Muzaffar al-Din
Hasan Bahadur Khan, which must be Uzun Hasan (Sultan Ya’qub Beg’s father), and donated to the Shrine of
Imam Reza by Jahangir (Sahra-Gard, 1393). He was also a teacher of calligraphy - a copy of the Mathnavi of Rumi
dated AH 869/1464-65 AD signed Ahmad al-Katib al-Shirazi, student of Zayn al-‘Abidin bin Muhammad al-
Katib, sold in these Rooms, 21 April 2016, lot 80). The Qur’an juz’ offered here presents an important addition to
the known corpus of this celebrated scribe’s work.

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