TEHRAN – Tehran’s Malek Museum and Library showcased pages of a rare manuscript folio of the Holy Quran known as the Baysunqur Quran in an exhibition on Monday evening.

Calligraphy and illumination for this edition of the Quran was commissioned by Baysunqur Mirza (1399-1433), the grandson of Timur (1336-1405), the Turkic ruler of Central Asia.

According to a study published by Columbia University in New York City, the Quran was first seen in modern times by the traveler James Baillie Fraser in Quchan during a tour of Khorasan in 1821-2.

The pages had been taken to Quchan from Samarkand at the time of Nadir Shah’s occupation of the city in the 18th century. Part of the Quran had been placed in an imamzadeh in Quchan by a local Kurdish ruler who had participated in the campaign against Samarkand.

This imamzadeh was destroyed by an earthquake in 1895, but before this time, Qajar king Nasser ad-Din Shah had visited it and removed some of the pages to be placed in the library of the Golestan Palace in Tehran.

In 1912 Prince Mohammad Hashem Afshar visited Quchan and retrieved the remaining pages from the ruins, bringing some to Mashhad. Other pages and fragments are in Iranian and foreign collections, either brought from Samarkand at the time of its capture by Nadir Shah, taken from Quchan or brought back as souvenirs before Nadir Shah looted the city.

The last complete page to appear at auction was at Sotheby’s in London on October 10, 1988.
 
Other pages are kept at the Astan Qods Library in Mashhad, the National Museum of Iran and the Malek Museum and Library. The Reza Abbasi Museum in Tehran and the National Library and Archives of Iran has also fragments of the Quran.
 
Several pages of the rare manuscript are also kept at in some foreign collections.

The Shahnameh of Baysunqur, one of three ancient copies of Ferdowsi’s epic masterpiece from Iran was registered on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register list in 2007.

Photo: Pages of the Baysunqur Quran are on display at Tehran’s Malek Museum and Library on November 14, 2016. (Honaronline/Sharareh Samei)

MMS/YAW