As the years go by, I have come to humbly accept the powerful lesson that
Professor Francois Déroche insisted on teaching the participants who attended the
‘Specialist Course in Arabic Manuscript Conservation’ organised by Fundación
Empresa-Universidad de Granada during the 2008–9 academic year and directed by Dr
Teresa Espejo2 (notable not least for being the first of its kind in Spain): that
cataloguing a manuscript requires both time and patience. A ‘definitive’ codicological
description of a manuscript copy is, to paraphrase Borges’s adage about translation,3
more often than not the result of exhaustion, if not our own scholarly limitations. As
such, all academic work must necessarily be subject to constant revision, as the only
possible means whereby scholarship can truly move forward. It is in this constructive
spirit that I would like to situate the present contribution.
New data presented in an exceptional doctoral thesis by Sonsoles González-García on
the formal, material, and technical aspects of the dated manuscripts in the collection of
the Escuela de Estudios Árabes de Granada,4 as well as Xavier Casassas’ ongoing
research into the so-called ‘Qur’an of Bellús’,
5 which have traits in common with each
other and the MS examined here, as will be addressed below, have pushed me to revisit
one of the most peculiar volumes in this collection: MS 2, olim A-5–2. Information
included in the catalogue entry for this manuscript6 describes it as an incomplete copy
of the Qur’an (suras 1–18), copied, as indicated in the colophon, in Cordova between
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century by Ibrāhīm b. ʿAshir al-Gharīb in
Maghribi script with vowel markings. It contains notes in Latin above the sura titles,
and is decorated with multiple circular vignettes, as well as a striking medallion at the
beginning that contains an upside-down inscription.My goal in the present article is twofold. Firstly, I wish to revise the information given
about the copyist and date. Secondly, I would like to expand upon any remaining
information that might improve both the codicological description of this manuscript
and its content, on the basis that this might cast new light on the history of how the
Qur’an was transmitted in the Islamic West.