Illuminated and ordinary: Exhibition explores the world of Islamic manuscripts
Text by Mike Cummings, YaleNews
In 1807, Omar ibn Said, an itinerant Islamic scholar in West Africa, was taken prisoner during a military conflict and enslaved. About 37 years old at the time of his enslavement, he survived the Middle Passage to the United States and subsequently escaped enslavement in Charleston, South Carolina. He was recaptured in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and sold to James Owen, a prominent planter and businessman.
Ibn Said’s learnedness — the fact that he could read and write Arabic — impressed his new enslaver, who provided him with an Arabic translation of the Bible in hopes of converting him to Christianity.
In 1863, elderly and still enslaved, ibn Said wrote a letter in Arabic to John Owen, James’s brother, in which he quoted the Qur’an and expressed an intense desire to return home. The enslaved scholar drew an ornamental band across the middle of the page that resembles decorations often found in West African Qur’an manuscripts. His enslaver’s name, “Jim,” is centered within the band.
Ibn Said’s letter is displayed in “Taught by the Pen: The World of Islamic Manuscripts,” a new exhibition on view through Aug. 10 at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library that features about 150 objects largely drawn from Yale University Library’s collection of nearly 5,000 manuscripts and other materials produced in the Islamic world.
The collection is one of the oldest and largest such assemblages in the United States.
The exhibition’s title references a Qur’anic verse — “For your Lord is most generous, who taught by the pen, taught humankind what it did not know” — that is among the inscriptions carved over the main entrance of Sterling Memorial Library.
The objects on display — many of which are being exhibited publicly for the first time — range from the 9th to the 20th centuries, feature several languages, and demonstrate how Islamic scholars contributed to and expanded fields of knowledge for more than 1,000 years. They offer insight into how Muslim people lived in places across the world, from the Middle East to Indonesia, West Africa to North Carolina.
“We highlight the ways in which Islamic civilization and its interconnected artistic, religious, and scholarly traditions have created and shared knowledge, influencing cultures and societies worldwide,” said Özgen Felek, lector of Ottoman Turkish in the Department of Near Eastern Languages Civilizations in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a curator of the exhibition. “The objects on view include the luxurious and the quotidian. They represent the height of aesthetic beauty but also offer a glimpse into the everyday reality of people stretching across vast expanses of time, geography, and subject matter.”
Felek curated the exhibit with Agnieszka Rec, a curator at the Beinecke Library, and Roberta Dougherty, librarian for Middle East studies at Yale Library.
The materials on display are organized around 10 general themes: literature, epics, history, philosophy, science and medicine, classifying the world, the Qur’an, expressions of faith, everyday life, and art of the book.
The themes roughly correspond to classifications of human knowledge used by classical Muslim scholars, Dougherty said. The exhibition also explores the steady exchange of knowledge and ideas between the Muslim and European worlds, including the preservation and interpretation of classical works by Islamic scholars.
“The exhibition is meant to be the start of a conversation, which is why it covers so much ground,” Rec said. “We’re hoping to provide an avenue to become interested in these materials with the hope that it leads to more detailed research, courses, and exhibitions in the future.”
The objects on view include exquisitely illuminated manuscripts featuring gold leaf and finely detailed illustrations.
An 18th-century Qur’an on view is open to beautifully decorated pages bearing the sacred text’s first verses, which compose the Surat al-Fatihah, a chapter recited at every prayer. There is a richly embellished commentaries on the Qur’an, including a 1467 copy of Abd Allah ibn Umar al Baydawi’s “The lights of revelation and the secrets of interpretation,” one of the most widely studied interpretations of the holy book. The calligrapher’s embellishments reflect the esteem with which the work is held, Felek said.
Luxurious manuscripts on view include epic works of literature. A mid-16th century copy of the “Khamsah” by Nizami of Ganjah, a master of Persian romantic epics, is open to a double spread illustration of scenes from one of the five romances included in the volume. The pages of a copy of the Bustan, a masterpiece of the classical Persian poetic tradition, are covered in lavish decorations. One of five miniatures is centered on a page surrounded by an ornate border featuring illustrations of different animals. Small clouds of gold leaf fill spaces between the text.
“I’m trained as a Western medievalist and, for me, it’s extremely interesting to compare traditions,” Rec said. “The gold cloud bands between the lines of text are not something you see in Western manuscripts, but it is very common in expensive Islamic productions.”
Not all the books displayed are awash in gold. The exhibition also includes books, produced by skilled calligraphers, that were more affordable than the lavishly illuminated showpieces on view.
“We didn’t want it to be all about the gold,” Dougherty said. “We wanted to include texts that were created and used by ordinary peopleoutside of the wealthy elite.”
The exhibition also includes everyday items, such as prayer books, primers of instruction and etiquette, and a set of playing cards from Iran used to play “As Nas,” a card game similar to poker that was popular in Persian households 200 years ago.
A small prayer book copied in the 18th century contains prayers, Qur’anic verses, and incantations in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish. The book concludes with a crude sketch of a book-stealing demon along with the spell needed to keep her at bay.
The exhibition also features a pair of 18th-century maps produced by İbrahim Müteferrika, a Hungarian-born convert to Islam who served the Ottoman court as a diplomat, geographer, historian, and official printer. He established a printing press in Istanbul. Its first publications were two maps: one of the Black Sea and the other of the Persian Empire. Both — the first printed maps in the Islamic world — are on display. (Yale’s copy of the map of the Persian Empire is the only known copy to reside in the United States, according to the exhibit label.)
Some of the objects on view offer insight into the art of the book — the differing methods used in creating physical books. A copy of the “Mukhtasar,” a manual of the Sunni Maliki school of legal thought in North and West Africa, has a backless binding with no spine. Its cover is not attached to the stack of loose pages that were held together with string. Cords threaded through the cover were used to line paper for notetaking. The well-used book is covered in notes that cram its margins and between the lines of text. Other notes are written on pieces of paper and attached to the pages with thread.
The interplay between the Islamic and western worlds is a prominent theme in the exhibition. “The Elements,” the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid’s hugely influential 13-book treatise, was first translated into Arabic in about 800 C.E. and into Latin about 350 years later. The first printed Latin translation of the seminal work of geometry in Latin, published in 1482, is on display.
Another example of intellectual exchange is an Ottoman Turkish translation of “Herbario Novo,” a popular description of medicinal plants written by Italian botanist and physician Castore Durante in 1585.
Cultural exchange also figures into the story of Omar ibn Said. His 1863 letter to John Owen is displayed alongside an Arabic translation of the Bible published in 1811 by English printer Sarah Hodgson. Ibn Said was given a copy of the same edition by James Owen, his enslaver.
The display also includes a 19th-century copy of the Dala’il al-khayrat (one of the most popular prayer books among Sunni Muslims) that originated in West Africa along with its leather carrying case.
“My speculation is that Omar probably knew this prayer book very well,” Dougherty said. “The idea behind including it here was to provide him something familiar that he would have recalled from before he was taken from his home and enslaved.”