Three seudo-facsimile copies of the Quran among the Moriscos (16th century Islamic Spain)

What is it about?

Three copies of the ‘Morisco Qur’an’, RESC/101D.2, RESC/39E and RESC/58B.1, are an exceptional testimony for the study of the text transmission within the Morisco communities, since they lead us to think that the copyists working for these communities knew and used a systematic methodology when they had to transcribe a text we could call a commented (or translated) Qur’an with 13 lines to the page. In these three cases, the text has been written at the beginning of the 16th century, if not in parallel at least in a short time span, by the same hand, with an identical layout, on a paper of the same type and size, with the same portions of text on the same page. They are clearly an exception, since no similar examples have been found in all the Islamic production of the Western Islamic world known to date. We are dealing here with a careful process of standardization that will be found later in the Islamic world –more precisely in the Ottoman Empire- from 1620 onwards and will become widespread in the 18th and 19th centuries.

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Why is it important?

Up to know, we thought that all the translations of the Qur'an among the Morisco communities were different. This is the first example we have which states that this idea was not completely right. We can offer, then, new clues about the Morisco workshops, as well as about the uses of the Qur'an in the 16th century in Spain.