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 or Nusantara, and almost no photographs of illuminated Southeast Asian Qur’an manuscripts had ever been published.

This was because philological studies, and therefore university teaching programmes, focused on Indonesian and Malay manuscripts containing traditionally focused 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. They 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, as seen in Ali Akbar’s blog and the Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs online database. The vast majority of these manuscripts are held in the region itself, with only around one 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, from Terengganu and Patani on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, and from Java. Java is also home to large numbers of illuminated Qur’ans, but with such a variety of decorative forms that it is not possible to speak of a single Javanese style of manuscript art.

Most of these illuminated Qur’ans date from the nineteenth century. From the earlier period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, far fewer manuscripts are known, although a distinctive Sulawesi diaspora geometric style can be discerned, as well as a calligraphically impressive small corpus linked to the court of Banten in west Java.

Despite clear regional variations, it is still possible to talk about Southeast Asian commonalities in Qur’anic illumination. Double-decorated frames around the text generally have an arched outline on each of the three outer sides of a page, in contrast to, for example, Ottoman illumination, where the outline of the decorated frames across two facing pages is essentially rectangular, although scalloped or petalled.

When present in a Qur’an manuscript from Southeast Asia, decorated frames around the text are found only at certain key junctures. At the beginning, they nearly always enclose Surat al-Fatihah on the right-hand page and the first few verses of Surat al-Baqarah on the left-hand page. Sometimes they also appear at the end and occasionally in the middle.

When decorated frames are included in the middle of the Qur’an, their precise location is determined by regional origin. They appear at the beginning of Surat al-Kahf in manuscripts from Java and linked to the Sulawesi diaspora, at the beginning of Surat al-Isra in Qur’ans from the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, and at the beginning of juz 16 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. The composition of these frames is regionally determined and may be marginal ornaments marking textual divisions, such as parts of a juz.

The primary colour 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 element of the palette. White pigment is never used.

Yellow is also widely encountered, followed to a lesser extent by other colours, including blue, brown, and green. Gold is found only in certain areas. It is used intensely and lavishly in Terengganu and sometimes in other locations on the east coast of the peninsula, as well as in some Qur’ans from Java and Madura. It is never found in Aceh or other parts of Sumatra.

Calligraphy ranges from competent to poor, but it 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.



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 Empire, or even compared with Mughal Qur’ans from India.

Despite the long and close ties between the subcontinent and the Malay Archipelago, early tombstone evidence suggests that China played a major role in the development of Islam in Sulu and Brunei. However, a forensic examination of Qur’an manuscripts from China, which began flooding the Islamic art market from the late 1980s onwards, revealed few real similarities with Southeast Asian Qur’ans and felt like grasping at straws.

Admittedly, it is important to compare like with like, and many of the manuscripts discussed above and in many cultures were much older than the predominantly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century illuminated Southeast Asian Qur’ans.

The last great unknown in terms of Islamic manuscript art was, ironically, not some arid landlocked region far off the beaten track, but the lands surrounding what were the most cosmopolitan and frequently travelled 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.



Fortuitously, over the past decade, a range of academic activities conducted separately and coincidentally across these sites have meant that, for the first time, it is possible 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.

South Africa

Starting in the far south, at the Cape in South Africa, 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 there by the Dutch East India Company.

The most famous such personage was Syaikh Yusuf of Makassar, who was first sent to Sri Lanka but still perceived as such a threat by the Dutch that he was 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 hand and style, now held in Utrecht University Library as Or. 27. It was presented in 1749 on behalf of Hendrik Swellengrebel, who was born at the Cape and served as Governor from 1739 to 1751, as part of his campaign to win burghership for his son, who had settled in Utrecht.


Another notable exile from Indonesia, Tuan Guru Abdullah from Tidore, was sent to the Cape in 1780. 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.

One of his Qur’ans has geometrical and foliate patterns in red and black on the first pages.


Coastal East Africa

From 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 only twelve 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 explaining the values of that particular surah, and the initial basmalah is presented in stylised calligraphy within an ornate cartouche. Alongside this 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.



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. In the Malay world, theologically detailed additions were generally absent.

Most Qur’ans in the Malay world have relatively clean margins, except for juz markers and parts thereof, 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 added on almost every page.

Particularly striking are the colourful sajdah markers added in the margin, which differ from the main manuscript in graphic impact. These unusual red round outer-page frames 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. It is now held in the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur.