Islamic Manuscripts

The Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University of Bonn is advertising two RA/TA positions which are attached to the Alexander von Humboldt-Chair for Islamic Studies (Prof. Dr. Judith Pfeiffer). Applicants should work towards a Ph.D. in a relevant field. For more information please visit
https://www.uni-bonn.de/de/universitaet/medien-universitaet/medien-arbeiten-an-der-uni/medien-personalmanagement/pdfs-stellenausschreibungen-wiss.ma/07-22-3-202.pdf

The Islamic manuscript collection has been acquired by Cambridge University Library from many sources over the period of the past four centuries. Most of these have been acquired from private donations and were originally closely allied with the start of Arabic teaching in the early seventeenth century. Many other collections followed and a chronology of significant donations is described with details of each donor and something of the contents of each collection. Major collections such as those of Erpenius, George Lewis, J.L. Burckhardt, E.H. Palmer and E.G. Browne are dealt with in more detail. Some important individual manuscripts are also described and examples are given of manuscripts with interesting codicology or illumination. A description of the collection's management within the Library and a history of its cataloguing is also given.

This paper provides updated digital images of four Qurʾān fragments from Chicago's Oriental Institute Museum (OIM) that appeared in Nabia Abbott’s Rise of the North Arabic Script, and calls attention to features of their paleography and vocalization which are not apparent from her original black-and-white plates. In doing so, it demonstrates that these four fragments all belong to the same copy of the Qurʾān, which is also the same Qurʾān as nineteen leaves in Paris’ Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) and two leaves in Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art (MIA). All twenty-five folios of this Qurʾān contain a unique vocalization system that represents /a/ and /u/ with miniature red forms of alif and wāw. This system of “letter-form” vocalization signs is unattested in other Qurʾān manuscripts and corresponds with a type of vocalization which medieval sources describe as shakl al-shiʿr: “the marking of poetry.” The subsequent discussion analyzes the features of this shakl al-shiʿr system and contextualizes it within the history of both this Qurʾān manuscript and Arabic writing as a whole.

Article is open access with full manuscript images available on the JNES site here: https://doi.org/10.1086/712876

The Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University of Bonn is advertising two Research Assistant/Teaching Assistant Positions which are attached to the Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Islamic Studies (Prof. Dr. Judith Pfeiffer). Applicants should work towards a Ph.D. in a relevant field (e.g., Islamicate intellectual history of the late medieval and/or early modern period, history of Oriental Studies, Islamic historiography, or similar subjects). For more information please visit https://www.uni-bonn.de/de/universitaet/medien-universitaet/medien-arbeiten-an-der-uni/medien-personalmanagement/pdfs-stellenausschreibungen-wiss.ma/07-22-3-202_en.pdf

In this blog post, I explore items within the British Library's Turkish and Turkic Collections connected to the Dukagjini family of norther Albania. I focus specifically on the content and provenance of manuscripts containing poetry by Dukaginzade Yahya Bey and a letter to Dukaginzade Osman Bey.

منجمین بلاد اسلامی، قبل از بحث در علم هیئت و نجوم به اصول موضوعه و تعاریف مقدماتی از هندسه و ریاضیات می پرداختند و سپس به مسائل مرتبط با علم نجوم توجه می دادند!
کتاب حل التقویم
تالیف ابالخیر محمد تقی الفارسی (قرن 7 قمری)
همین رویه در پیش گرفت!
لذا به دلیل تعاریف دقیق و زیبایی که از اصول موضوعه هندسه مانند نقطه -خط-... ارائه داده  است همه آنها را در یک فایل مجزا جمع آوری کردم و در این مقام منتشر میسازم
مصحح این کتاب: مرحوم تقی بینش بوده است!
به زبان فارسی

Im Folgenden behandle ich Manifestationen von Heiligkeit anhand eines arabischen Textes aus dem östlichen Nildelta, der auf eine in etwa vier Meter lange Papierrolle geschrieben wurde. Da der Text mehrmals kopiert wurde, kann kein genaues Verfassungsdatum angegeben werden. Es wird zwar das Jahr 647 islamischer Zeitrechnung genannt, was 1249-50 n.Chr. entspricht, das Datum dürfte aber auf Grund der Ehrfurcht, die der Schreiber vor dem Text hatte, einfach mitkopiert worden sein. 1249-50 n.Chr. ist also der terminus post quem für die aktuellste Version des Textes.
Heiligkeit wird im Narrativ des erwähnten Dokuments parallel zu genealogischen, stammesgeschichtlichen und pseudohistoriographischen Berichten zur Legitimierung einer Gruppe verwendet. Den Nachkommen eines gewissen Saʿd b. ʿUbāda wird zuerst über genealogische Aspekte, dann zusätzlich noch über Erscheinungsformen von Heiligkeit ein verdientes, ehrenvolles und hohes Prestige zugeschrieben.
„Heiligkeit,“ oder anders ausgedrückt außergewöhnliche Ereignisse, die auf eine spirituelle Begabung der Beteiligten schließen lassen, finden sich im Narrativ der Schriftrolle in Form von Männern, die in Träume von anderen einsteigen können, die posthum Wunder an ihrem Grab bewirken und Bittstellern im Traum erscheinen und deren Bittgebete von Gott augenblicklich erhört werden. Diese Manifestationen übernatürlicher Ereignisse entsprechen mehr oder weniger klassischen Topoi, wie man sie in mündlich weitergegebenen Erzählungen zu islamischen „Heiligen“ in Ägypten findet. Eine andere Form von „Heiligkeit,“ von spiritueller Höhe, wie sie im Text aufscheint, ist mit der islamischen Mystik, dem Sufismus, verbunden. Da der Text vermutlich im Umfeld eines Sufiordens entstanden ist, sind in den Text auch aus diesem Bereich spezielle Manifestationen von außergewöhnlicher, spiritueller Begabung eingeflossen.

The manuscript AKM518 at the Toronto Aga Khan Museum contains one hundred Arabic sayings attributed to the fourth caliph of Islam, ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, with each saying accompanied by a two-verse paraphrase in Persian. The text begins with a decorated heading and is embellished with gold rulings throughout. It was transcribed by the prominent scribe Shaykh Mahmud in 1464–65 and was very probably commissioned by the bibliophile Qara Quyunlu ruler, Pir Budaq, in Baghdad just a year before the latter’s demise. It is one of the two last manuscripts transcribed by Shaykh Mahmud.

La bibliothèque municipale Jacques Prévert de Cherbourg-Octeville conserve dans son fonds manuscrit plusieurs écrits en langue arabe. Absents des catalogues usuels, ils sont inconnus des orientalistes familiers des manuscrits arabes, et n'ont pas davantage attiré l'attention des érudits connaisseurs de l'histoire du Cotentin. L'objectif de la présente recherche était donc double : identifier, avec précision, le contenu de ces mystérieux manuscrits et rassembler le maximum d'éléments sur leur histoire, avant et après leur arrivée en Normandie.

In this piece, I explore the portraits of Ottoman Sultans found in the British Library's manuscript Or 9505. I contextualize the work within the broader tradition of Ottoman historiography, and then compare the illustrations - which are unique in their aesthetics - with those found in other British Library manuscripts.

قصص انبیاء صلوات الله و سلام الله علیهم بر اساس آیات و روایات شیعه دوازده امامی! به زبان فارسی!  کتابت مرحوم ناد علی، قرن 13 ق
Stories of prophets
peace be upon them
Based on the verses and traditions of Shiite twelve Imams!
In Persian! The Book of the late Nad Ali, 13th Century AH
full the manuscript: https://t.me/alhojjah/6056

لقد كرّست اهتمامي في السنين الأخيرة لمطالعة وتصحيح تفسير الوزير المغربي المسمّى بـ: المصابيح في تفسير القرآن، وكتبت بعض المقالات في هذا الخصوص، وقد تطرّقت في مقالتي هذه إلى وصف النسخ الثلاث الموجودة منه، ومناقشة الأخطاء والنواقص التي وردت في تصحيح نسخ هذا الكتاب والتي جاءت في إطار رسالة الدكتوراه المقدّمة من قبل الدكتور عبدالكريم بن صالح الزهراني والتي تمّ الدفاع عنها في جامعة أمِّ القرى في مكّة المكرّمة سنة (2000 ميلادي)، علماً بأنّ هذه الرسالة موجودة على صفحات الشبكة المعلوماتية (الإنترنيت) بالرغم من أنّه لم يتمّ نشرها رسميّاً ولم تطبع بعد.

The manuscript of al-Ṣaḥīfa al-sajjādiyya that forms the basis of this facsimile edition was written by the Twelver scholar Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī al-Kafʿamī (d. 905/ 1499-1500). The manuscript was kept in India for about three centuries and is now in the private library in Qum. It was written on Saturday, 29 Shawwāl 867/17 July 1463 and contains 192 folios. In the lengthy introduction to this edition (around 250 pages), all of the features of the manuscript and the text of the book are addressed in detail. The introduction has four parts.
The first part deals with the history of research on the Ṣaḥīfa up to the eleventh/seventeenth century as well as the transmission of the text and its various versions.
The second part focuses on Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Jubaʿī (d. 886/1481) and his copy of the Ṣaḥīfa.
The third part is dedicated to Kafʿamī and the manuscripts copied by him.
The fourth part deals in detail with the codicology of this copy, exploring issues such as the date of copying, the calligraphy, the decorations, the transfer history of the manuscript, notes and corrections to it, and it's cover and paper.
After the introduction, the text of the Ṣaḥīfa’s fifty-eight prayers has been printed in excellent quality and in colour. It is worth mentioning that this copy has four more prayers than does the famous version of the Ṣaḥīfa, i.e. the Bahāʾ al-Sharaf version.

This article aims at examining one of the most splendid anthologies produced for the Timurid ruler, Iskandar b. Umar Shaykh. The three separated parts of this anthology are kept in the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, the Istanbul University Library, and the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London. It contains prose and poetry texts collected, and even sometimes authored, by the scholars and learned men at Iskandar’s court.
Based on the size, page layout, contents and calligraphic styles of the book, this article provides evidence indicating that the afore-mentioned manuscripts originally belonged to a two-volume anthology. The portions in the Istanbul University and the Wellcome Institute help us gain a better understanding of the styles and functions of illuminations and paintings in the water damaged and repaired Lisbon Anthology.
In preparing this anthology, which is of particular importance among the Timurid manuscripts, there participated artisans who had earlier worked for Sultan Ahmad Jalayer in Baghdad and Tabrizi and later had remarkable impact on the art of book production in Herat.

In this blog post, published on the British Library's Asian and African Studies blog on 12 November 2019. In it, I look at the reasons for which a large corpus of manuscript material did not develop, as it did for the Ottoman Turkish, Persian, Syriac or Arabic, and how this is reflected in the manuscript holdings of the British Library.

This talk focuses on an ancient Qur’ānic manuscript, discovered in the ‘Amr Mosque in Fustat (Old-Cairo), in the early 19th century. The manuscript is today fragmentary and dispersed around the world. It is nevertheless remarkable in its monumental size and composite structure, as well as in its fascinating history over centuries. I will present the main achievements of my multidisciplinary research carried in 2020-21, that shed light on the contexts of production, use and preservation of this exceptional artifact until our days

تقدّم هذه المقالة نظرات في مفهوم الـ(كتاب) في العصور الوسطى بين القرنين (5هـ/11م – بداية 10هـ/16م). فهي تناقش، استناداً إلى فهرس لمكتبة دمشقية تعود إلى القرن السابع الهجري/ القرن
الثالث عشر الميلادي، الكيفية التي واجه فيها المعاصرون آنذاك، التحدي المتمثّل بتحديد ما هو المقصود بالكتاب. ويقودنا التركيز على القسم المتعلّق بالمخطوطات المركبّة (أيْ: المجاميع) إلى مسألة أن صاحب هذا الفهرس التوثيقي قد استخدم تعريفين للكتاب لا يمكن التوفيق بينهما البتّة: الكتاب بوصفه وحدة نصيّة قائمة بذاتها (متّخذاً من العنوان معياراً رئيساً)، والكتاب وفقاً لشكله المادي. وتوضّح عمليات الفهرسة التي التجأ إليها هذا الكاتب، الطبيعة الفضفاضة لما كان يعرف بالـ(كتاب) في المرحلة الزمنية الوسيطة، التي تنحصر بين حقبة التكوين الإسلامي (القرون: من الأوّل إلى الرابع للهجرة/ السابع إلى  العاشر للميلاد) والعصور الحديثة.

العلم المشهور في فوائد فضل الأيام والشهور، لابن دحية (ت633هـ): كتاب في بيان فضائل الشهور وما تخللته واشتهرت به من أحداث. ضمّ فوائد حديثية وفقهية وأصولية وتفسيرية ولغوية ...مع كثرة الاستدلال بالأحاديث النبوية والاعتناء بتراجم الرواة وذكر حالهم جرحا وتعديلا، والحرص على الحكم على مختلف الروايات ...تحقيق غزلان بن التوزر، ود.طارق طاطمي، د.بوشعيب شبون، ونجاة زنيزن

The scribing of Qur’ānic codices today has special artistic features. One of the most important features is the systematic and organized writing of Qur’ānic verses in each part (juz’), and page. Today’s most famous name is the Qur’ān written by Uthmān Ṭāhā, a Syrian scribe whose work has been distributed in recent decades in various Islamic countries under the title “Muṣḥaf al-Madina al-Nabawiyya” by the King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Qur’ān. The pages of this Qur’ān contain 15 lines, and each page ends with the conclusion of a verse. Also, each of the thirty parts of this Qur’ān has been carefully designed and written in 20 pages, beginning every part at the beginning of the page and ending it at the bottom of the page. But in fact, this style of Qur’ān transcribing, which is tied to the name of Uthmān Ṭāhā, has had many examples among the scribes of the Qur’ān during the Ottoman period, and after that, during the last hundred years. This article, by reviewing the history of this style of transcribing the Qur’ān, shows that the Ottoman scribes did not invent this artistic style during the 10th/16th to 14th/20th centuries, but the history of this type of systematic and organized Qur’ān writing dates back to much older times, and in Iran to the 5th/11th century. The Muṣḥaf of Muḥammad al-Zanjānī (dated 531/1137), and the Muṣḥaf of Zarrīn Qalam (dated 582/1186), are two very advanced examples of this art in the 6th/12th century. In the beginning, the number of rules and patterns of Iranian scribes for the systematic and organized writing of the Qur’ān was about 30, but gradually before the 10th/16th century, it was expanded to about 470 cases. Almost all Ottoman scribes in recent centuries have paid attention to only two things: first, ending each page at the conclusion of the verse, and second, starting each part (juz’) of the Qur’ān from the beginning of the page and ending it at the bottom of the page.

There has been a lot of media attention devoted to the Islamic prohibition of interest and how this affects financial transactions such as mortgages. Other key Islamic principles that could have a bearing on business include social justice and inclusion, honesty, protection of the weak, and a strong sense of fair play. What are the key influences on marketing ethics and what distinguishes "Islamic" marketing?

This book consists of fifteen letters by Shaikh ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani. Articulated in a sublime mystical language, the letters describe spiritual experiences that are attained through striving against one’s base desires and committed devotion to Allah. They are written in a peculiar style whereby each sentence or group of sentences is followed by a related Qur’anic text, which is often a part of a verse.

The text is effectively a Sufi experiential interpretation of the quoted Qur’anic verses. This peculiar style of the systematic pairing of mystical words of the Shaikh with a Qur’anic verse has produced an immensely beautiful text with a highly poetic tone.

This translation of the book is based on three manuscripts. The first is in King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, the second is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, UK, and the third is kept in the Special Collections Library at Michigan University, USA.

This book provides primary sources of the Shaṭṭārīyah silsilah in Southeast Asia as developed in Aceh, Java, and Mindanao. It examines the networks of the Order between the 17th and 19th centuries, arguably the most important formative periods of the Islamic history in these regions.

In this philological study, the author scrutinizes thirty three digitized Islamic manuscripts to show the complexity of Shaṭṭārīyah Order and its great influence over Javanese Muslim elites, including three female Sufis of Javanese aristocratic background, namely Ratu Raja Fatimah and Nyimas Ayu Alimah of Cirebon Palace; and, last but not least Kanjeng Ratu Kadipaten, the influential wife of Pangeran Mangkubumi of Yogyakarta Palace, who played a prominent role in shaping the spirituality of a Javanese mystic and leader of the ‘holy war’ against European colonialism, Prince Dipanagara.

Contrary to previous studies, this book emphasizes the role of local networks of “commoners” in the Shaṭṭārīyah in spreading it into a wider context, some of whom had to live in exile during the Dutch colonialism, such as Kyai Hasan Maolani, the most influential local ulama from Lengkong, Kuningan, West Java, who was banished to Manado, North Sulawesi.

Bayān al-Ḥaq Maḥmūd b. Abū al-Ḥassan b. Ḥusayn Nayshābūrī Ghaznavī (d. 521/1127) was a celebrated scholar and judge of his time and a Ghaznavid statesman, importantly during the reign of Sultan Yamīn al-Dawlah Bahrāmshāh (511-552/1117-1157) and the father of Abū Jaʽfar Muʽīn al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Maḥmūd Nayshābūrī, the author of Tafsīr Baṣāʽir Yamīnī. His extant works include Ījāz al-Bayān ʽan Maʽānī al-Qurʽān, Bāhir al-Bayān fī Maʽānī Mushkilāt al-Qurʽān, and Jumal al-Gharāʽib fī Tafsīr Gharīb al-Ḥadīth wa Khalq al-Insān. In the present article, a detailed study of Jumal al-Gharāʽib will follow a brief biography of Nayshābūrī, and then Persian verse quotations in the commentary will be dealt with.
Khalq al-Insān (Creation of the Human Being) is a detailed commentary on the Quranic verse “and within your souls [are signs for those possessing certainty] Do you not then behold?” (al-Dhārīyāt, verse 21). The commentary is arranged in 100 sessions, the first fifty sessions dealing with human organs (khalq al-Insān) and the second fifty sessions dealing with human temperament and character. Writing books of the khalq al-Insān type and enumerating different names of human organs were commonplace among early writers who used the word khalq as an equivalent of human or animal organs. However, the commentary Khalq al-Insān by Bayān al-Ḥaq, despite the title, cannot belong to this literary (and sometimes medical) genre. Although based on the same tradition, the book goes beyond the limits of the genre and begins to take on a life of its own. The author fuses this literary type with majlis nevīsī (session writing) into a new genre. We know that session writing was popular in the greater Khurāsān and other parts of the Islamic world in the middle centuries, and many literary, mystical, and exegetical sessions were written at the time.
Every session consists of a literary essay with its own taḥmīdīyah (conventional invocation and praise of God) and ṣalawātīyah (conventional salutation upon the prophet of Islam). In each session, the author first discusses generalities and theoretical considerations of the matter at hand followed by relevant hadiths, traditions, anecdotes, verses and sayings of Prophets, Companions, Sufis, philosophers, kings, viziers and literary scholars. The book is thus turned into a rich source of sayings from Sufis, mystics, pious men, together with Arabic verse quotations and anecdotes. Verse quotations are so numerous that they can form an important thematic collection in their own right.
Although no poetry has come down to us from Bayān al-Ḥaq, his writings testify to the fact that he was a man of letters and a literary scholar. That is perhaps why a great part of Khalq al-Insān is dedicated to poetry written by Arabic-language poets on different subjects. The author does not, however, limit himself to Arabic verses and avails himself of Persian verses as well when the occasion arises. The Persian verses, amounting to 97 bayts, were all written before 521/1127 which make them significant as literary fragments. Several of the verse lines have not been recorded in other sources, and different readings of verses already extant in other sources are sometimes provided or their writers identified. Bayān al-Ḥaq does not seem to be bound to mention the name of the poets from whom he quotes, but the few names he mentions indicate the importance of the verse lines, namely lines from Manṣūr b. ʽAlī Mantiqī Rāzī (d. around 367/978 to 380/990), Qāz̤ī Ṣāʽid (d. 431/1040) and Abu al-Qāsim Aḥmad b. Ḥasan Maymandī the Vizier (d. 424/1033). There are also 54 moral and wisdom verse quotations from the Shahnameh which shows Bayān al-Ḥaq’s mastery of the work. There are five other contemporary or earlier works in which verse lines from the Shahnameh are quoted (while quotations in Khalq al-Insān are much more significant). Khalq al-Insān is, however, the oldest Arabic source in which verse quotations from the Shahnameh can be found. The quotation of two lāsacawī bayts is also important because no lāscuwī verse has been available till now. Lāsacawī, like khusravānī, was a kind of syllabic poem or a musical mode.
Access to lost books and quotes from them is another feature of Khalq al-Insān, quotes from lost books like Ibn Muqaffa’s Khudāynāmah, Sallāmī’s Akhbār Wulāti Khurāsān, and Abūzayd
Aḥmad b. Sahl Balkhī’s Al-Baḥth ʽan al-Taʽwīlāt.
Despite the importance of Khalq al-Insān, the book was not widely circulated and after around 900 years since its writing, except the author’s son, only three other writers have had access to the text and have quoted from it with citations: Sadīd al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Muḥammad ‘Ufī (alive in 630/1233) in two of his books namely Nuzhah al-ʽUqūl fī Laṭāʽif al-Fuṣūl and Jawāmiʽ al-Ḥikāyāt wa Lawāmiʽ al-Riwāyāt, Siyyid ʽAlī Khān b. Aḥmad Madanī Shīrāzī (d. 1120/1708), with an interval of 5 centuries, and 2 centuries later Muḥammad b. ʽAlī Showkānī Yamanī (d. 1250/1834).
In the present article, Persian verses quoted in Khalq al-Insān are collected, edited, and collated with other sources. Persian phrases are also extracted from the book and reported at the end of the article.
Three extant copies of Khalq al-Insān are available: MS no. 10136 of the Islamic Consultative Assembly Library, MS no. 3526 kept in the Central Library of Astan Guds Razavi, and MS no. 2445 possessed by Dar al-Kutub of Cairo. The three copies consist, unfortunately, of the second book of Khalq al-Insān only, so the first fifty sessions of the book are not yet available.

This paper would identify further references to Jami in Malay Sufi sources of the 17th – 19th century. The paper would begin by utilizing recently found manuscripts ascribed to Shams al-Din al-Sumatra’i and Nur al-Din al-Raniri. It is found that a number of hitherto unknown manuscripts also contain references to Nur al-Din Abd al-Rahman al-Jami. These references tell us how utilization of Jami’s writings by the Malay Sufi scholars is used to justify their own teachings of Sufi metaphysics. They also tell us the richness of the library at the Achehnese court of Sultan Iskandar Muda (d.1636) and subsequently Sultan Iskandar Thani (d.1641). However most scholars of the 17th century tend to just incorporate Jami’s writings into their own Malay text instead of directly translating Jami’s own writings into Malay. Mainly based on unedited manuscripts of Jawi Malay, this paper will also further identify the many instances of direct quotations from Jami being incorporated into the writings of famous Malay Sufi scholars from the 17th to the 19th century. As we progress further into the 19th and early 20th century we find the quotations from Jami almost non-existent in the writings of Malay Sufis of this era. How are we to explain this state of affairs? Full direct translations from Jami are non-existent or are they? Utilizing a recently found manuscript titled Durrah al-Fakhirah it seems that Jami’s own writings have been translated into Jawi Malay making it accessible to not only the people of that particular era but also to the contemporary Malay world. Nuances, differences, similarities and Sufi ontology are the main elements in this paper on a brief review of Jami’s influence in the Malay world.

At the beginning of the 15th century, the rich tradition of manuscript production, which was a legacy of the Jalayirids and Iskandar Sultan, continued to develop under the Timurid bibliophile Prince Baysunghur (1397-1433). During this period the newly formed Persian calligraphic script, nastaʿlīq, became very popular and evolved under calligraphy masters, such as Jaʿfar Tabrīzī, the head of Prince Baysunghur’s library and atelier. His students Aẓhar Tabrīzī, and Shaykh Maḥmūd were his most prominent descendants in the tutelage lineage.
Among the most significant figures in the development of nastaʿlīq, Aẓhar Tabrīzī was one of the most prolific scribes in the 15th century. He started his training in Bāysunghur’s atelier at the beginning of the 830s, and by his final years in the 880s he had copied numerous manuscripts under various patrons, including a copy of the Khusrau u Shirin, now housed in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, Persian MS. 6.
This introduction investigates Aẓhar’s career and professional life in a period of around 50 years. After a survey of his works through decades and at different courts, it concentrates on the aesthetic and textual features of the illustrated copy of Khusrau u Shirin, which Azhar copied in his mature years in an elegant nastaʿlīq.

وفی شرقی، یا کوفی ایرانی، شیوه ای از کتابت است که از حدود سده چهارم از کوفی نخستین استخراج شد و تا سده هفتم در کتابت قرآن در ایران کاربردی گسترده داشت. تاریخ تحولات،  تنوع شیوه های کتابت، و شناخت هنرمندان آن از جنبه های مغفول مانده تاریخ خوشنویسی ایران است. کتاب حاضر کوششی است در شناخت تاریخ این خط از طریق طبقه بندی نسخه ها برپایه سبک شناسی. حاصل این تحقیق بر حدود ۱۶۰ نسخه به شناسایی دوازده سبک اصلی و ۲۲ سبک فرعی در این خط منجر شده است. تاریخ خط کوفی، مبانی این طبقه بندی و نکاتی درباب هنرمندان هرسبک در بخش نخست کتاب آمده است. بخش دوم حاوی اطلاعات و تصویر ۸۳ نسخه مهم کوفی شرقی است که بر پایه سبک های یادشده نظام یافته  است