The art of the Qur’an in the Indian Ocean world: a view from Southeast Asia
Map: The Indian Ocean world
When I first began exploring the art of the Qur’an in Southeast Asia, more than twenty years ago, the canvas was essentially blank. The art of the Islamic book had rarely attracted attention in the Malay world of ‘Nusantara’, and almost no photographs of illuminated Southeast Asian Qur’an manuscripts had ever been published.
This was because philological studies – and thus also university teaching programmes – on Indonesian and Malay manuscripts had traditionally focussed on texts in vernacular languages such as Malay, Acehnese, Javanese and Bugis. There was little interest in the codicology or materiality of manuscripts, or in books in Arabic from the region, as these were generally seen as poor relations of their counterparts in the central Islamic lands.
But once the hunt began, many beautiful Islamic manuscripts from Nusantara were found hiding in plain sight, in public libraries and museums, as well as in mosques and private collections that were increasingly brought to light by digitisation programmes such as the Endangered Archives Programme↗ and DREAMSEA ↗. To date, about 1,500 Qur’an manuscripts from Southeast Asia have been documented, many of them illuminated (see Ali Akbar’s blog↗ and the Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs online database of Qur’an manuscripts↗). The vast majority of these manuscripts are held in the region itself, with only around a hundred Qur’ans held elsewhere, mainly in Europe with a few in North America and the Middle East. A number of regional schools of Islamic manuscript art can be identified, including from Aceh on the tip of north Sumatra, and from Terengganu and Patani (Fig. 1) on the east coast of the Malay peninsula. Java is also home to large numbers of illuminated Qur’ans, but with such a variety of forms of decoration that it is not possible to talk of a single ‘Javanese style’ of manuscript art. Most of these illuminated Qur’ans date from the 19th century; from the earlier period of the 17th and 18th centuries far fewer manuscripts were known, although a distinctive ‘Sulawesi diaspora geometric style’ can be discerned (Gallop 2024), as well as a calligraphically-impressive small corpus linked to the court of Banten in west Java (Gallop and Akbar 2006).
Despite clear regional variations, it is still possible to talk about ‘Southeast Asian’ commonalities in Qur’anic illumination. Double decorated frames around the text nearly always have an arched outline on each of the three outer sides of a page, probably reflecting a profound and deeply-rooted attachment throughout the archipelago to the (cosmic) mountain motif, and indeed, in a manuscript source from Aceh, these illuminated arches on the page are labelled gunung-gunung, ‘mountains’. This contrasts with, for example, norms in Ottoman and Persian illumination, where the outline of the decorated frames across two facing pages is essentially rectangular, albeit scalloped or petalled.
Fig. 1. Opening illuminated frames of a Qur’an manuscript from Patani, Malay peninsula, 19th c. British Library, Or. 15227, ff. 2v-3r
When present in a Qur’an manuscript from Southeast Asia, decorated frames around the text are only found at certain key junctures: at the beginning, nearly always enclosing Surat al-Fatihah on the right-hand page and the first few verses of Surat al-Baqarah on the left-hand page; sometimes also at the end, and occasionally in the middle. If decorated frames are included in the middle of the Qur’an, their precise location is determined by regional origin: at the beginning of Surat al-Kahf (Q.18) in manuscripts from Java and linked to the Sulawesi diaspora; at the beginning of Surat al-Isra’ (Q.17) in Qur’ans from the east coast of the Malay peninsula; and at the beginning of juz’ 16 (Q.18:75), in Qur’ans from Aceh. All other pages of a Southeast Asian Qur’an are generally quite plain, although the text is usually set neatly within ruled ink frames of different colours, mainly red and black (the composition of which is again regionally determined), and there may be marginal ornaments marking textual divisions such as parts of a juz’, and the letter ‘ayn signifying ruku‘, thematic sections for recitation.
The primary colour used in Qur’anic manuscript illumination throughout the archipelago is red, always combined with black ink outlines, while the reserved white of the background paper is manipulated by the artist as an essential third element of the palette (for white pigment is never used). Yellow is the next more prominent colour, followed to a lesser extent by others including blue, brown and green. Gold is found only in certain areas: it is applied intensely and lavishly in Terengganu and some other parts of the east coast of the peninsula, and in some Qur’ans from Java and Madura, but never in Aceh and hardly ever in other parts of Sumatra or Sulawesi. Calligraphy ranges from competent to poor, but is rarely remarkable for discipline or elegance. Terengganu stands out as a beacon of excellence for both calligraphy and illumination, to an extent hardly matched anywhere else in the archipelago (Gallop 2005).
Yet even as the picture of Southeast Asian Qur’anic illumination was becoming clearer, I was surprised to find almost no resonances with any of the well-known and much-published styles of Qur’anic art from the broader Islamic world, from the Maghreb through to the Ottoman realm, or even compared to Mughal Qur’ans from India, despite the long and close ties between the subcontinent and the Malay archipelago. Early tombstone evidence suggests China played a major role in the development of Islam in Sulu and Brunei, but a forensic examination of Qur’an manuscripts from China – which started flooding the international Islamic art market from the late 1980s onwards – in search of links with Southeast Asian Islamic manuscript art revealed few real similarities, and felt like an exercise in grasping at straws (Gallop 2009). Admittedly, it is important to compare like with like, and many of these above-mentioned manuscript cultures were much older than the predominantly 18th and 19th century illuminated Qur’ans of Southeast Asia.
The last great unknown – in terms of Islamic manuscript art – ironically, was not some arid landlocked region far off the beaten track, but the lands surrounding what were the most cosmopolitan and oft-traversed maritime trade routes in history: the Indian Ocean littoral, stretching in the west from the Cape upwards along the eastern coast of Africa, across the southern shores of the Arabian Peninsula, through the scattered islands of the Indian Ocean, and along both southern coasts of India, up to Bengal and down via coastal Burma to the Malay peninsula and the archipelago. Fortuitously, over the past decade, a range of academic and community activities taking place separately and coincidentally across these sites have meant that for the first time we are able to see what Qur’an manuscripts from these regions look like. In almost every case glimpses of artistic affinities with the art of the Islamic book in Southeast Asia are revealed, as will be traced in the case studies below.
South Africa
Starting in the far south, in South Africa at the Cape, Southeast Asian references in Islamic manuscripts are only to be expected because Islam was brought to the Cape by exiles from Java, Sulawesi, Maluku and other parts of present-day Indonesia, banished thence from the 17th century onwards by the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The most famous such personage was Syaikh Yusuf of Makassar, sent first to Sri Lanka but still perceived as such a threat by the Dutch that he was then removed to their furthest outpost in the Cape, where he died in 1699. Perhaps the oldest Qur’an known from South Africa is a manuscript, in a recognizably Javanese style and hand, now held in Utrecht University Library, Or. 27 (Fig. 2). It was presented in 1749 on behalf of Hendrik Swellengrebel (1700-1760), who was born at the Cape and served as Govenor from 1739-1751, as part of his campaign to win burghership for his son who had settled in Utrecht (pers. comm., Prof.em.dr. G.J. Schutte, 20.1.2026; cf. Gosselink 2017: 98-99).
Fig. 2. Qur’an, in early Javanese style script and layout, brought from the Cape and presented to the City of Utrecht by Hendrik Swellengrebel, 1749. Utrecht University Library, Or. 27.
Another notable exile from Indonesia, Tuan Guru Abdullah from Tidore, was sent to the Cape in 1780, where he died in 1807 (cf. Laffan 2022). He was responsible for copying some of the most important Islamic manuscripts still held in South Africa today, including three copies of the Qur’an (with the word Allah always written in red ink) and several other religious texts in Malay and Arabic (cf. Gosselink 2017: 142-143). One of his Qur’an manuscripts has geometrical and foliate patterns in red and black on the first pages (Fig. 3).
Fig. 3. Detail from a decorated page containing the start of Surat al-Baqarah, in a Qur’an copied in the Cape by Tuan Guru Abdullah from Tidore, Maluku, late 18th century. Image source: Allie 2023↗
Coastal East Africa
For the Swahili coast of East Africa, since 2019 Zulfikar Hirji, of York University, Toronto, has published a series of detailed and increasingly insightful studies of a small corpus of Qur’ans. These manuscripts were produced between about 1750 and 1850 in the historical Muslim city-states of Pate, Siyu, and Faza on Pate Island in the Lamu Archipelago in present-day Kenya. Although to date only 12 Qur’an manuscripts have been documented, they reflect an extraordinarily rich theological and graphically-striking manuscript tradition, with a bold palette centred on red, yellow and black. The surah headings in red are followed by a detailed text extolling the values of that particular surah, and the initial basmalah is presented in large stylised calligraphy within an ornate cartouche. Located alongside is a bold colourful marginal ornament indicating the start of a new surah, while textual annotations in the margin are set within carefully demarcated ruled frames (Fig. 4).
While the palette preferences in these Swahili coast Qur’ans are similar to those in Southeast Asia, many of the other artistic choices are very different. So too are the theologically detailed additions, for most Qur’ans in the Malay world have relatively clean margins save for juz’ (and parts thereof) markers, with no extra-Qur’anic texts in the volume. However, a Terengganu Qur’an manuscript, which was evidently created as a typically sparse and ‘clean’ copy, appears to have had an overlay of annotations on almost every page. Particularly striking are the colourful sajdah markers added in the margin, completely alien to any Malay-world aesthetic, but which are not dissimilar in graphic impact from those in Qur’ans from coastal East Africa (Figs 5-7). These textual and ornamental additions, and the unusual red ruled outer page frame, may indicate an afterlife for this manuscript outside Southeast Asia, until it was purchased at auction in London in 2012 and brought back to Malaysia, where it is now held in the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur.
Fig. 4. Qur’an manuscript, copied by Qadi ‘Abd al-Karim al-Nawfali, ca. 1859, Faza, Pate Island. Maalim Muhammad Idris Collection, Zanzibar, Tanzania. EAP1114/1/123↗, image 176. , see Hirji 2022.
Fig. 5. Qur’an manuscript, Terengganu, 19th century, with marginal annotations in coloured inks and colourful sajdah markers in a graphic style unusual for Southeast Asia. Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, 2012.13.6
Figs 6 and 7. Two further unusual sajdah marginal markers in the Terengganu Qur’an, 19th c. Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, 2012.13.6.
Ethiopia
Continuing northwards up the coast of East Africa, since 2017 Sana Mirza has been publishing results from her doctoral study (completed in 2021) of a large corpus of Qur’an manuscripts from the city of Harar in eastern Ethiopia. The manuscripts were copied between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and in her publications Mirza contextualises their production and use within their Red Sea and Indian Ocean milieus. Similarly to the Swahili coast Qur’ans, the Harar Qur’ans are theologically impressive, with dense textual annotations and additions, and are equally graphically striking, albeit in a more sombre palette dominated by red, black, ochre and earthy brown (Fig. 8).
As noted above, such copious annotation is rarely found in Southeast Asian Qur’ans, but one particular feature of the illumination of Ethiopian Qur’ans has particular resonance for Qur’an manuscripts from Aceh: the twisted or plaited rope motif, picked out in reserved white on a coloured ground (Fig. 9). The plaited rope motif is of course common in many artistic manifestations all over the world from Roman times onward, yet is definitely more prominent in some cultures than in others. In the Malay world, twisted (two ropes) or plaited (three interwoven ropes) rope motifs play a major role in Acehnese illumination, but are is not found in illuminated Qur’ans from any other region in Southeast Asia.
Fig. 8. Qur’an manuscript, with a twisted rope border, late 18th c., Harar, Ethiopia, endowed by Hasan ibn Adojo. Princeton University Library, Islamic Manuscripts, Third Series no.900q. Mirza 2025.
Fig. 9. Qur’an manuscript, with twisted and plaited rope borders, 19th c., Aceh. Yayasan Ali Hasjmy, Banda Aceh. Photograph by A.Gallop, 1993.
Yemen
Yemen is home to some of the most famous Qur’anic manuscripts in history: the cache discovered in the Great Mosque of Sana’a during restoration in 1972 includes the Sana’a palimpsest, which has been dated to the 7th century. But almost no studies have been published about the art and materiality of later Yemeni manuscripts, dating from the 16th centuries onwards, as most academic interest during this period has focused on theological and textual issues, especially relating to Zaydi thought. Large digitisation programmes of Yemeni manuscripts have been carried out, including of collections held at Princeton↗ and Leiden↗ university libraries, and of manuscripts in Yemen through HMML↗, and so the material is at least now accessible for study. Yemen was closely integrated into Hajj maritime networks, and many scholars from Southeast Asia sojourned for long periods in study centres such as Zabid en route to the Holy Cities of the Hijaz (cf. Gallop and Regourd 2024). Yet visual congruences between Yemeni and Southeast Asian manuscripts are more evident in smaller elements such as the scalloped edges of triangular colophons and the shadowing in red of elements of letters, than in larger illuminated frames (Figs 10-11).
Fig. 10. Scalloped tapered frame, with red pigment shadowing of certain letters, at end of a Yemeni Qur’an manuscript, 19th c. Leiden University Library, Or. 25.180↗
Fig. 11. Colophon with scalloped frame, with red ink shadowing of letters in the supplication at the end of a Sulawesi diaspora geometric style Qur’an, copied by a scribe from Yemen, Ibrahim of Zabid, dated 1740. Museum Sang Nila Utama, Pekanbaru, Riau, 07-15.
Oman
A richly varied manuscript culture is evident in collections in Oman reflecting its pivotal position in the Indian Ocean world, as the Sultans of Oman ruled Zanzibar from the late 17th to the early 20th centuries. Omani manuscript collections were first brought to wider attention with the publication in 2008 of a book on the Islamic art of Oman, which included a chapter on Omani Qur’anic manuscripts (al-Salimi and al-Hafiyan 2008). Since then there have been other important publications, and a valuable government website of Omani manuscripts.
Rather than manifesting any one distinctive artistic style, the Qur’anic manuscript art of Oman – or rather, of manuscripts now found in Oman – reflects myriad networks and connections, with echoes of Yemeni, Ethiopian and Swahili coast illumination, as well as Ottoman, Persian and Indian influences. In relation to Southeast Asia, one truly hybrid Qur’an manuscript in the Omani national collection is of particular interest. The opening pages, with double decorated headpiece frames, have red hatching within the cloudbands surrounding the text; this red hatching is a feature common to many Omani Qur’ans, but is never found in Southeast Asia. On the other hand, the illuminated headpiece with red and yellow arched forms around a domed base, and with floral rays and tendrils reaching upwards, bears a remarkably strong resemblance in shape and palette to Terengganu-style illumination (Fig. 12). For comparative purposes, shown alongside the Omani Qur’an below is not a Malay Qur’an but a kitab mawlid manuscript with decorated headpieces in the Terengganu style, containing prayers and praises for the prophet and telling of his birth and life (Fig. 13). This is because in Southeast Asia, Qur’an manuscripts are nearly always adorned with full double illuminated frames, arched on all three outer sides, and hardly ever with headpieces, which tend to be found in manuscripts of a less elevated stature, such as mawlid texts or copies of the Dala’il al-khayrat, another text in praise of the prophet.
Fig. 12. Left-hand initial page of a Qur’an manuscript, with decorated double headpiece. Image source: Omani manuscripts.↗
Fig. 13. Right-hand page of a manuscript of Mawlid sharaf al-anam, illuminated in the Terengganu style, copied by Abdul Wahab ibn Ibrahim Ambon of Pulau Pinang in 1855 and illuminated by Haji Ahmad for Pangeran Ratu Anum of Kotaringin, now held in the palace of the Pangeran Adipati Mangkubumi in Pangkalan Bun, Kotawaringin, Kalimantan. Dreamsea DS 0136 00002.↗
Maldives
Since 2020 the Maritime Asia Heritage Survey↗ has been making accessible online images of the manuscript traditions of the Maldives, one of the least-known areas of the world in the terms of its Islamic cultural heritage. Historically the Maldives was of great importance to trade networks of the Malay archipelago and of Aceh in particular. This is evidenced by references in the Adat Aceh, the 17th-century compendium of Aceh port and harbour laws, to special taxes for kembal emas or ‘stockfish’, dried mackeral or tuna from the Maldives, which was a staple of the Acehnese diet. A considerable number of Maldives Qur’an manuscripts – many in multi-volume sets, dating from the 17th to 19th centuries – have been digitised by MAHS, and show a fine calligraphic capability. Not many manuscripts are illuminated, but those that are show a marked preference for complex square knot motifs (Fig. 14). These examples immediately shed light on one of the most enigmatic illuminated manuscripts from Aceh: an 18th century kitab mawlid, a copy of Mawlid sharaf al-anam in Arabic with interlinear Malay translation, with decorative frames completely unrelated to any other illuminated manuscripts in Aceh, but which can now be recognized as linked to the Maldivian style (Fig. 15).
Fig. 14. Illuminated frames with knots enclosing prayers and supplications, in a manuscript of Qur’anic excerpts, copied by 'Abd Allah Khāṭib Muḥammad b. Khāṭib, and dated 1723GD. MAHS-MDV-COL-001-O-0028-59 ↗
Fig. 15. Illuminated frames with knots in a Kitab mawlid, with Malay interlinear translation, Aceh, 18th century. British Library, Or. 16769, ff. 2v-3r.
Southern India
With the clouds lifting on the manuscript culture of so much of the Indian Ocean littoral, there remain conspicuous and surprising exceptions, of areas stubbornly shrouded in mists. After all, these seas are not named the ‘Indian’ Ocean without good reason, reflecting the crucial role that the subcontinent has played throughout history as a staging post for maritime trade. And yet astonishingly little is known of the manuscript cultures of the Muslim communities of coastal southern India, both on the westward-facing Malabari coast, and the eastern Coromandel coast fronting the Bay of Bengal. These lacunae contrast with the wealth of studies and publications on Islamic manuscripts from more northern regions of the subcontinent: from the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal empire, from Kashmir, and even from the fabled library of Tipu Sultan in Mysore.
In 2011, Elaine Wright – then curator of Islamic manuscripts at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin – sent me some photographs of a Qur’an manuscript (Fig. 16), and asked me if it was Southeast Asian. I immediately answered ‘yes’, as the palette was certainly consistent with a Nusantaran origin, and I had seen a Javanese Qur’an in the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia with an almost identical zig-zag frame picked out in reserved white on a red ground (Fig. 18). But almost immediately I began to have doubts: the writing of the apposite Qur’anic verse from Surat al-Waqi‘ah (Q.56:79), in varying orientations in the semi-circles around the frame, was not typical for Southeast Asia, and the calligraphy was, dare I say, too fine. And when I went over to Dublin to inspect the Qur’an with Elaine, we found inside a note stating that the Qur’an had been found by a Gurkha officer in a mosque in Malabar in 1919 during the ‘Moplah’ rebellion (Fig. 17).
Figs 16 and 17. Qur’an with white zig-zag frames, Malabar, Kerala, 18th-19th c., with note on its provenance. Chester Beatty Library, Is 1603.
Fig. 18. Qur’an, Java, 19th c., with a very similar white zig-zag frame on a red ground. Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, 2004.2.1
Through pestering kind colleagues who were working in Malabari regions – Mahmood Kooria, Teren Sevea and Ophira Gamleil – to send me photographs of Qur’an manuscripts, I began to get a glimpse of a fascinating manuscript culture with some very distinctive characteristics already suggested by the Chester Beatty Qur’an: very accomplished, angular, calligraphy for the Qur’anic text, and in the illumination a propensity for inscriptions on a ground of coloured dots within semi-circular cartouches. Within the illuminated frames, the inscribed decorated panels above and below the Qur’anic text (usually containing the surah heading) are often composed of two semicircles flanking a central circle or oval cartouche, with the inscription in the semicircles oriented at right angles to the main text (see left-hand page in Fig. 16). For his doctoral research, Muhammad Salih Cholakkalakath has assembled a fascinating small corpus of illuminated Malabari Qur’ans, which promises exciting insights into the writing and artistic traditions of the region. And it is Salih I thank for sharing with me a photograph of a Qur’an from the famed Mishkal Mosque in Calicut which can be linked with a key school of Southeast Asian Qur’anic art.
The Sulawesi diaspora geometric style is represented by a small number of manuscripts, dating from the late 17th and 18th century, associated with royal and courtly patronage throughout the Malay archipelago in areas of Bugis/Makassar influence and migration (Gallop 2024). This artistic school can be most easily recognized by the geometrical outlines of the decorated frames, made up of straight lines and circles, including a pair of distinctive pyramidal clusters of three part-circles on each of the vertical outer borders, flanking a triangular arch (Fig. 19). However in addition to the few ‘core’ manuscripts in the Sulawesi diaspora geometric style, a much larger number of Qur’ans, found in all parts of the Malay archipelago from Sumatra through to Mindanao, and dating well into the 19th century, display ‘localised’ or ‘diffused’ forms of this artistic school (Gallop Forthcoming), testifying to the widespread influence of the prestige Qur’ans of the earlier period. In these later manuscripts the pyramidal cluster is often deconstructed, with the part-circles strung out in a line, or piled up in different ways, as shown in an example from Mindanao (Fig. 20), and as can be seen in the Mishkal Mosque Qur’an (Fig. 21).
Fig. 19. ‘Core’ example of the Sulawesi diaspora geometric style Qur’an, with rigorous outlines of straight lines and circles, and with pyramidal clusters of three part-circles on the verticals sides, flanking triangular arches; dated 1740. Museum Sang Nila Utama, Pekanbaru, Riau, 07-15.
Fig. 20. Mindanao Qur’an, in a ‘localised’ take on the Sulawesi diaspora geometric style, with the pyramidal cluster of small circles now with a finialed beam in the middle. Princeton University Library, Garrett 26G.
Fig. 21. Qur’an, referencing the localised influence of the Sulawesi diaspora geometric style in its decoration, early 19th century. Mishkal Mosque, Calicut, Kerala. Photograph courtesy of Mohammed Salih Cholakkalakath.
Yet just as the mists begin to clear from Malabari regions, the art of the Qur’an in the Tamil areas of the Coromandel coast remains almost completely hidden from sight, although it was most likely an illuminated Tamil Qur’an that initially alerted me to the importance of the manuscript art of this region, and its congruences with Southeast Asian aesthetics and palette preferences. This is a very beautiful Qur’an manuscript which I first saw in 2000 on display in the Penang Museum. The Qur’an belonged to Muhammad Noordin Merican from Nagapattinam in Tamilnadu, who came to Penang around 1820, and in 1834 succeeded his older brother as Kapitan Kling or leader of the Indian Chulia community in Penang. The Noordin family ran a fleet of ships trading between the Malay archipelago and Europe, and also transporting Hajj pilgrims and migrants (Gallop 2017). The Qur’an has three pairs of illuminated frames marking the beginning and end of the Holy Book, and in the centre at the start of juz’ 16 (Fig. 22). These middle frames are especially significant as this is the only known illuminated Qur’an manuscript, outside of Aceh, where the start of juz’ 16 – which can be regarded as the mid-point of the Qur’an – is marked with double decorated frames. In this manuscript, each new juz’ is also marked with a colourful rectangular double decorated frame (Fig. 23). It would be interesting to find out if any similar illuminated Qur’an manuscripts can be traced in Tamilnadu today.
Fig. 22. Decorated frames at the start of juz’ 16 in the middle of the Qur’an of Muhammad Noordin Merican, from Tamilnadu, early 19th century. Penang Museum.
Fig. 23. Rectangular decorated frames marking the start of juz’ 6, in the Merican Family Qur’an from Tamilnadu, early 19th century. Penang Museum.
Although I have talked above about ‘Malabari’ and ‘Tamil’ illuminated Qur’an manuscripts, I may have been using these terms prematurely. At this very early stage of our knowledge it is important not to close any doors, and to see and document as many decorated Qur’an manuscripts as possible from southern India, in order to be able to delineate more clearly any notable regional traditions, and their borderlands. Learning lessons from Southeast Asia, in the course of my long study it came as a surprise to find that the regional schools of Qur’anic illumination did not map easily onto either the known centres of Islamic scholarship in the archipelago, or even the most illustrious Malay kingdoms. For example, on the great island of Sumatra, only Aceh can boast a truly recognizable ‘school’ of Islamic manuscript art, and even this is only attested from the late 18th into the 19th centuries. After browsing through very many volumes of manuscripts, I think it is now possible to say something about the art the Qur’an in the Minangkabau regions in west Sumatra (of which the most distinctive artistic features are in fact the decorated leather covers), but Palembang – which was a renowned centre of Muslim scholarship in the 18th century, and home to a substantial Hadhrami Arab community – does not appear to be associated with any particular artistic style, and is associated with very few illuminated Qur’ans. Similarly, on the Malay peninsula, the only the centres for the production of finely illuminated Qur’an manuscripts were the north-east coast states of Patani, Kelantan and Terengganu, and indeed, Qur’ans from Terengganu were exported all over archipelago, but almost no illuminated Qur’ans are known to have been produced in the historic west coast states of Selangor, Perak and Kedah. Thus, while so little is still known about Islamic manuscript art in southern India, all examples of illuminated manuscripts should be taken into consideration, including prayer books and other religious and literary texts as well as Qur’ans, to help construct the bigger picture. Neighbouring regions should also be scrutinized, for a fine Qur’an manuscript now held in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, with a colophon giving the date of completion of 1754 in Karnataka (کرناتک), has two pairs of illuminated frames at the beginning and end of the book in a very similar palette to that found in Malabari and Tamil Qur’ans (Fig. 24).
Fig. 24. Qur’an, Karnataka, dated AH 1168 (1754/5). Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Ms. or. fol. 618, ff. 406v-407r ↗
Qur’anic manuscript art: from blue and gold to red and yellow
Think ‘Qur’an manuscript’, think ‘blue and gold’. This was certainly the traditional view of Islamic art, formed by familiarity with royal Qur’ans from the courts of the great Islamic empires. In Martin Lings’ study of The Quranic Art of Calligraphy and Illumination, published in London for the World of Islam Festival in 1976, two colours are highlighted: gold, ‘a symbol of the Spirit’, has supremacy, while blue, ‘the colour of the infinite,’comes second. ‘The importance of these two colours can be gauged by the fact that whatever extra pigments might be added, it was nearly always in a subordinate capacity. Moreover, in almost every style and age one is likely to find a Qur’an in which the illuminations consist exclusively of blue and gold’ (Lings 1976: 76). Page after page in Ling’s book showcase exquisite combinations of blue and gold, from some of the most sumptuous Qur’an manuscripts known from the Mamluks (Fig. 25) and Mongols through the Timurids, Ottomans and Safavids, up to the 16th century. Ling’s analysis is echoed in the title Lapis and Gold of the forensic study by Elaine Wright (2018) of one of the finest Qur’an manuscripts surviving today, copied by Ruzbihan in 16th-century Shiraz. Even later Qajar and Ottoman Qur’ans dating up to the 19th century bear out these prescriptions: a much more variegated palette is indeed found, yet gold and blue remain supreme (see publications by Bayani et al in the bibliography below).
Fig. 25. Mamluk Qur’an in blue and gold, copied for Sultan Baybars, Cairo, 1304-06, showing the first of seven volumes. British Library, Add MS 22406
The illustrations to this article tell a different story: the art of the Qur’an across the Indian Ocean world is a symphony in red and yellow (Fig. 26), with a wide supporting cast of pigments in which blue is only one amongst many equally-visible others, including orange, ochre, green and brown. Decorative elements tend to be outlined in black ink, and the main motifs are usually picked out in the reserved white of the background paper. Gold is notable by its absence save, as noted above, in Terengganu and in parts of Java. Even here the exception can help to prove the rule: the Omani Qur’an with a Terengganu-style headpiece mentioned above renders the ornamentation on the red ground of the arch not in gold, as in the Terengganu exemplar, but in yellow.
Fig. 26. Illuminated frames in red and yellow in a Qur’an manuscript from Kenya. British Library, Or 16053
This avoidance of the use of gold in many areas of the Indian Ocean littoral otherwise famed for the lavish use of gold on certain material accoutrements – such as gold-woven songket textiles and gold-embellished weaponry in Aceh, and south Indian gold jewellery – suggests a consensus linked not to cost but perhaps to a theological sense of disquiet about adorning the Holy Book with the precious metal. And indeed such a scruple is articulated obliquely in a 16th century Shafi’i fatwa collection compiled by a Malabari jurist, Zayn al-Din Ahmad al-Malaybari (d. 1583), al-Ajwibat al-‘Ajibat ‘an al-as’ilat al-gharibat, or ‘Marvelous Answers to Uncommon Questions’, studied by Mahmood Kooria for its prescriptions on the etiquette of writing and preserving manuscripts on the Malabar coast (Kooria 2025). On the question of the mingling of the Qur’an with gold and silver, and having considered Meccan authorities, Zayn al-Din’s opinion is gendered: men can ornament their personal mushaf with silver, but not with gold, while women can ornament their personal mushaf with gold. However, it is recommended (ḥasan) that even men should write the Qur’an with gold, but they should not ornament other manuscripts, not even with silver (Kooria 2025: 294). While the term used here for ornamentation is taḥliya, the broad general term used by jurists to discuss the legality of ornamentation in various different material forms (pers. comm., Andrew Peacock, 3.4.2026) rather than tadhhīb, the standard term for ‘illumination’ within manuscript sources, the extension of this juristic ruling to the bibliographic realm may have had a profound impact.
At the same time, Kooria notes the presence in the local Tanur mosque library of a gold-illuminated manuscript of a Hanafi fatwa collection commissioned by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, illustrating the accomodative attitudes of local scholars (Kooria 2025: 295). This was certainly also the case throughout Southeast Asia, where lavishly gilded Terengganu Qur’ans were evidently ordered as deluxe copies by royal courts throughout the archipelago – including in Palembang, Pontianak, Tidore, Surakarta in Java, and Bima on the island of Sumbawa – and it is also not uncommon to find Ottoman copies of the Qur’an or prayerbooks illuminated with gold, brought back from the Hajj as precious souvenirs. The understanding to be drawn from these scenarios is probably, on the one hand, a deeply engrained and conservative approach within communities along the shores of the Indian Ocean of how the Holy Book should be copied and adorned, coexisting on the other hand with a pragmatic acceptance of differing choices in other regions. The crucible for exposure to these very different artistic ethoses was likely the Hajj pilgrimage, which, during the whole of the time span currently under consideration, from the 16th through to the end of the 19th century, was under the aegis of Ottoman authorities and thus in itself a showcase for the Ottoman art of the book with its copious use of gold.
In 1870, a Qur’an manuscript held in the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge (R.14.59), was described by Palmer (1870: 174) as ‘A carelessly written copy in a Malay hand, with tawdry coloured borders’, and half a century later in the updated catalogue by Edward Browne (1922: 153) as ‘carelessly written in what appears to me a Malay hand’. What the Victorians deemed ‘tawdry’ and ‘careless’ can now be best described as a rare example of vernacular decoration in a Qur’an most probably originating from Oman or Yemen (Figs 27-28). Indeed, that a southern Arabian Qur’an manuscript could be misattributed to the Malay world confirms the very premise of this essay: that the Indian Ocean world was linked by shared tastes in bibliographic palette, motifs and propieties, along with a cognition of other cultures linked by centuries of maritime trade, but with each still secure and confident in their own regional identities, and their preferred artistic forms for honouring and exalting the Word of God.
Fig. 27. Opening pages of a Qur’an, probably from Oman or Yemen. Trinity College, Cambridge, R.14.59
Fig. 28. Final pages of the Qur’an. Trinity College, Cambridge, R.14.59
Acknowledgements
This article is partly based on a paper on ‘The art of the Qur’an in the Indian Ocean World’ presented at the 1st IOW-Arch Conference, Exeter University, 10-11 January 2020; I would particularly like to thank Mahmood Kooria for advice and input. Images are reproduced courtesy of the holding institutions and individuals acknowledged in the captions.
References on the art of the Qur’an in the Indian Ocean world
(Listed by region, in the general order discussed in this article.)
South Africa
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Coastal East Africa
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Ethiopia
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Yemen
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Oman
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Maldives
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Southern India
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Southeast Asia
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