The French architect Maurice Mantout (1886–1953), after a decade spent with the conservation of monuments in Morocco, played a leading role in the design and construction of the Great Mosque of Paris, which he completed in 1926. The building complex includes courtyards, a garden, a minaret, a prayer hall, a bathhouse and other annexes. Most of the structures replicate Moroccan precedents in terms of layout, elevation and even decorative details such as capitals, stuccowork, woodwork and zillīj (‘tile mosaic’), thereby creating a pastiche of historic landmarks. Mantout and his colleagues paid meticulous attention also to the epigraphic features of the mosque. For instance, the entrance to its prayer hall leads through a wooden screen surmounted by a square Kufic inscription that reads barakat Muḥammad, or ‘the blessing of Muḥammad’ [Figure 7.1]. This specific phrase and calligraphic form, as the architect presumably recognised, had been part of the repertoire of Moroccan craftsmen for centuries.

Contrary to their absence in scholarship on Islamic art and epigraphy, such barakat Muḥammad squares are rather widespread in Morocco. In the old cities of Fez, Meknes, Marrakesh and elsewhere, observant visitors may spot them on mosques, shrines, city gates, ramparts, palaces and fountains. The variety of media in which they are executed is also remarkable: brickwork inlaid with zillīj, carved or painted stucco and wood, glazed tiles, embroidered textiles, manuscripts and calligraphic panels. The earliest occurrences of the phrase, alongside other pious inscriptions in square Kufic, can be traced back to the Marinid dynasty (668/1269–869/1465). Ruling from their capital, New Fez, the Marinid sultans commissioned several mosques, madrasas, zāwiyas (‘hospices’), funerary complexes and other buildings throughout their realm in present-day Morocco and part of Algeria. Perhaps most renowned are the architectural landmarks established by Abū’l-Ḥasan (r. 731/1331–752/1351), some of which are indeed relevant to the present discussion.

The following chapter will primarily investigate the emergence of barakat Muḥammad squares in the Marinid period, proposing an interpretation for the meaning of this religious formula at the time. One may note that its use was virtually unparalleled in other parts of the Islamic world, which suggests that it was more than just one of many, routinely recited or inscribed, pious phrases. In other words, it is likely to have borne a local significance, one that cannot be generalised for other regions.

Geography and chronology

AMONG THE FEW key tenets of the still emergent field of Arabic palaeography lies the distinction between western (or Maghribī) scripts and eastern (or Mashriqī) scripts. This dichotomy between writing styles and practices at the two poles of the Islamic Mediterranean – the Maghrib and the Mashriq – is historically rooted in the traditional division of the Arab world into two main macro-regions, differing from one another in numerous respects: religious doctrine and practices, ethnic composition, vernacular languages and, of course, visual and material culture.

As far as scripts are concerned, the distinction between Maghribī and Mashriqī is attested in Arabic literary sources from an early date. The medieval treatise Shawq al-mustahām fī ma ʿrifat rumūz al-aqlūm (‘Yearning of the Besotted in the Knowledge of Written Symbols’), a work on cryptic alphabets and their talismanic properties, begins by introducing the reader to three basic alphabets known as ‘Kūfī’, ‘Maghribī’ and ‘Hindī’. The first is described as the primeval Arabic script; the second is the Arabic alphabet employed in the Muslim West, and more specifically in al-Andalus (‘al-qalam al-Maghribī wa-huwa al-Andalusī’); the third is the abjad or alpha-numeric system, where each Arabic letter corresponds to an Indian numeral. The earliest surviving manuscript of this work was copied in 1165/1751 from an exemplar dated 413/1022 that, in turn, reproduced an autograph allegedly from the year 241/856. Despite the alterations that may have occurred during the two subsequent transcriptions, the chart presenting each Maghribī letter captioned by its Mashriqī equivalent (Figure 1.1) is a precious indicator of the differences arisen between the two writing systems already in the Abbasid period.

The distinct aspect and special nature of Maghribī scripts was well known to medieval Arabic authors in the Mashriq, who occasionally even showed a certain appreciation for them. The Ayyubid historian and administrator Jamāl al-Dīn al-Qifṭī (568/1172–646/1248), for instance, in his biographical dictionary and anthology of poets named Muhammad, includes the Malagan Muhammad Ibn al-Fakhkhār (d. 539/1145) and describes him as having ‘a beautiful handwriting, of the kind used by the people of al-Andalus [la-hu khatt hasan min khutū t ahl al-Andalus]’. Al-Qifṭī claims to have personally seen a book copied by Ibn al-Fakhkhār and confirms that his calligraphy was indeed ‘exceedingly handsome and precise’.

Places of Copying

Book culture and production in Almoravid and Almohad Iberia

STARTING FROM 483/1090, the gradual Almoravid conquest led by Yūsuf b. Tāshifīn resulted in major political changes for al-Andalus. The ruler was again one, boasting the pseudo-caliphal title of amār al-muslimīn (‘commander of the Muslims’), and under his authority all the Muslim territories of the peninsula were eventually reunited. However, as Berber leaders with their capital in Marrakesh, the Almoravid emirs were only occasionally present on Andalusī soil, to receive the allegiance of the local administrators and wage jihād against the armies of the Christian kings in the North. This meant that the new political centralisation was not matched by a cultural one, and different Iberian cities continued to act and rival each other as thriving intellectual and artistic centres. From the former capitals of the ṭāifa kingdoms, now run by military governors drawn from the Almoravid clan, came the vast majority of the viziers, chief judges, imams and court functionaries appointed by the new rulers, and in particular their chancery secretaries, who were selected from among the same urban elites favoured by the previous kings.

The important intellectual centre of Zaragoza was lost to the Christians in 512/1118, only eight years after ʿAlī b. Yūsuf had seized it from the emirs of the Banū Hūd. On the other hand, Seville, Cordova, Valencia, Granada and Almería continued to represent the main cultural poles of Almoravid Iberia, as suggested among other things by the number of scholars mentioned in Ibn al-Abbār's Takmila who died in these cities between 540/1145 and 599/1203, or who visited them during the first half of the sixth/twelfth century. This continuity also embraces the period of the so-called ‘second ṭāifa kingdoms’ and of the Almohad takeover of al-Andalus in the second half of the century, with the sole exception of Almería, which entered a phase of decline after its capture and occupation by the troops of Alfonso VII between 542/1147–552/1157 and only seems to have flourished again during the seventh/thirteenth century. Under the Almohad caliphs, also of Berber origin and also ruling from Marrakesh, the cities of al-Andalus continued to prosper as centres for learning and manuscript production.

Copyists of Dated Manuscripts

Book culture and production in Umayyad Iberia

IT HAS LONG since become commonplace to acknowledge that, already in the fourth/tenth century, al-Andalus had equalled, and perhaps even surpassed, Iraq as a flourishing centre of Arabic written culture, a land of passionate bibliophiles and great libraries, a paramount hub for the making and marketing of books. Ibn Khaldūn was among the first historians to draw this comparison, in the chapter of his Muqaddima dedicated to the craft of wirāqa, a blanket term referring to all phases of book production, from the nibbing of the pen to the binding of a codex. ‘In earlier times,’ remarked Ibn Khaldūn, ‘great consideration was given to scholarly writings and official records, and to the way they were copied, bound, and corrected through [a sound] transmission technique and accuracy. […] In the Islamic world, this phenomenon reached tremendous proportions in Iraq and al-Andalus.’ Four centuries before Ibn Khaldūn, as we have seen, the geographer al-Muqaddasī already praised the unmatched skills of the Andalusis in the field of wirāqa. Though he never visited Iberia, al-Muqaddasī must have had access to Andalusī manuscripts, and his remark seems particularly trustworthy in view of his first-hand knowledge of the binder's craft, an activity that he exercised occasionally to raise money for his travels. However, if one excludes this important testimony from the Muslim East, contemporary sources are generally silent on the activity of the Andalusī copyists and bookbinders who lived under the Umayyads of Cordova. To shed some light on the matter, modern scholars have relied mostly on the work of later historiographers: authors such as Ibn Ḥazm (384/994–456/1064), Ibn Ḥayyān (377/987–469/1076), ʿAbd al-Wāḥid al-Marrākushī (581/1185–625/1228), Ibn ʿIdhārī (d. after 712/1312) and al-Maqqarī (d. 1041/1632), who based extensive parts of his compilation on the works of Ibn Ghālib al-Gharnāṭiī (sixth/twelfth century) and Ibn Saʿīd al-Maghribī (seventh/thirteenth century).

Libraries and penmanship

In the wake of Julián Ribera's seminal article Bibliófilos y bibliotecas en la España musulmana (1896), a remarkable number of studies have been published in the past fifty years on the book culture of Umayyad Iberia, and yet none of them has managed to add substantial new elements to our knowledge of the subject.

THE DATE was Sunday, the 9th of Rajab 533, corresponding to 12 March 1139. Spring was about to begin in Almería, a thriving mercantile seaport and manufacturing city in what was then Almoravid Iberia. Those were the years of Almería's economic and cultural apogee, abruptly ended in 542/1147 with the sack and occupation of the city at the hands of Alfonso VII of León. The last chief judge of Almoravid Almería, Abd al-Ḥaqq Ibn ʿAṭiyya (481/1088–541/1147), had been appointed to this prestigious position a few years before, on account of his immaculate reputation: a learned and highly esteemed notable from nearby Granada, Ibn ʿAṭiyya was a distinguished scholar of Quranic exegesis, but also a grammarian and a poet. During his tenure, he promoted the heightening of the minaret attached to the congregational mosque of Almería, as well as the erection of a fountain for ritual ablutions: these works are attested by two commemorative inscriptions on white marble that have survived the destruction of the buildings they once adorned.

On the 9th of Rajab 533 a handsome manuscript was finally completed, containing a text that held great personal and sentimental value for Ibn ʿAṭiyya: his Fahrasa (‘Index’), a detailed record of his thirty teachers – starting from his own father – and of the religious and secular texts he had received and transmitted from them. In the medieval Islamic West it was not unusual for famed scholars who had reached a certain age to compile such bio-bibliographical works, which represented in many ways a summation of their knowledge and a testament to their scholarly achievements. What is extraordinary about Ibn ʿAṭiyya's Fahrasa, however, is that its original manuscript (Figure I.1) has miraculously survived in the Royal Library of San Lorenzo de El Escorial and can reveal so much more about the milieu in which it was written than any later copy.

Very much like Ibn ʿAṭiyya's Fahrasa, this is a book about books; and yet, the following pages will not be concerned with the lives and works of medieval Arabic authors and literati. What will be discussed instead is the activity of copyists and calligraphers – the individuals who physically transcribed the manuscripts owned and read by scholars such as Ibn ʿAṭiyya – through a comprehensive survey of what survives of their work.

Book culture and production in the Ṭāʾifa kingdoms

ACCORDING TO THE astronomer and judge of Toledo Ṣāʿid b. Aḥmad al-Taghlibī (d. 462/1070), it was the dispersal of the books of the caliphal library of Cordova that caused the intellectual flourishing of al-Andalus in the period of the so-called ‘petty kingdoms’ (tawāʾif, sing. ṭāʾifa, roughly 402/1013–487/1094). In the winter of 401/1011, during the siege of the Umayyad capital by the Berber troops of the anti-caliph Sulaymān al-Mustaʿīn, the chamberlain Wāḍiḥ sold most of the palace's books to raise money for the defence of the city; the remainder was plundered when the besiegers finally entered Cordova two years later. In his Ṭabaqāt al-umam (‘Categories of Nations’), written in 460/1068, Ṣʿid reflects on the consequences of the collapse the Umayyad caliphate in these terms:

‘Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Art’ is a venture that offers readers easy access to the most up-to-date research across the whole range of Islamic art. Building on the long and distinguished tradition of Edinburgh University Press in publishing books on the Islamic world, it is a forum for studies that, while closely focused, also opens wide horizons. Books in the series, for example, concentrate in an accessible way and in accessible, clear, plain English, on the art of a single century, dynasty or geographical area; on the meaning of works of art; on a given medium in a restricted time frame; or on analysis of key works in their wider contexts. A balance is maintained as far as possible between successive titles so that various parts of the Islamic world and various media and approaches are represented. Books in the series are academic monographs of intellectual distinction that mark a significant advance in the field. While they are naturally aimed at an advanced and graduate academic audience, a complementary target readership is the worldwide community of specialists in Islamic art – professionals who work in universities, research institutes, auction houses and museums – as well as that elusive character, the interested general reader.

Professor Robert Hillenbrand

IT IS THANKS to the early modern historian al-Maqqarī – once again – that the memory of a telling episode that occurred in Almohad Seville at the beginning of the seventh/thirteenth century has been preserved and transmitted. The protagonist of this anecdote is a scholar and member of an aristocratic family from nearby Niebla, Abū al-Khaṭṭāb Ibn al-Khalīl al-SakËnÈ (d. 652/1254). The setting is the old Umayyad mosque of Ibn ʿAdabbas, the first congregational mosque of Seville. Here, Ibn al-Khalīl reports to have seen a multi-volume copy of the Qurʾān, ‘written in a style resembling the scripts of Kufa, but better, clearer, more splendid, and more skilful’. Noticing Ibn al-Khalīl's wonderment, a Sevillian Quranic reader apparently employed in the mosque, Abū al-Ḥasan Ibn ʿAẓīma, revealed to him that that was the script of Ibn Muqla. He then recited from memory a staple verse in praise of the ʿIrāqī calligrapher, featuring a pun on the word muqla (‘eyeball’):

Finally, Ibn al-Khalīl and Ibn ʿAẓīma proceeded to examine each and every letter of Ibn Muqla's script, measuring them with a small compass (‘bi-l-ḍābiṭ’). As a result, they could ascertain that ‘all letter shapes were consistent in proportion and execution, so that all the alifs tallied exactly with each other, and so did all the lāms, the kāfs, the wāws, and all the other letters’.

There are several reasons why this anecdote can be taken to epitomise the manuscript culture of al-Andalus. Firstly, the two men involved were both religious scholars from important AndalusÈ families, who, like so many of their peers, showed a keen interest in penmanship and, in this particular case, a profound appreciation of the Qurʾān as an artefact. Secondly, it is evident that their education presupposed more than a passing acquaintance with Abbasid culture and its leading exponents, such as the legendary vizier Ibn Muqla, even though neither of them seem to have ever travelled outside the Maghrib. Thirdly, their understanding of the eastern principles of proportioned calligraphy, as well as their confident and successful attempt to prove them empirically, are especially surprising given that the calligraphic tradition of their homeland had developed in a completely different direction from the canons established by Ibn Muqla.