Were the Moriscos in Touch with Contemporary Ottoman Developments? Twin Qurʾānic Copies from the End of the Sixteenth Century

Abstract

Among the diverse and usually rather carelessly produced Morisco handwritten manuscripts we find twin copies of the “Morisco Qurʾān”, dating from the end of the sixteenth century. Each is made up of a series of gatherings, the remains of two larger yet unbound codices, which contained the usual Morisco selection of Qurʾānic extracts. To date, these are the only examples from the Morisco period of two exactly similar copies of a text. Although this fact might seem exceptional in the Iberian Peninsular Islamic context, it is by no means isolated: the beginning of the seventeenth century witnessed the development of what has come to be called the “standard Ottoman Qurʾān”, with fifteen lines of text to the page. Are these parallel developments or resulting from the influence of one production on the other?