In May 2023, the CallFront team had the pleasure of welcoming two specialists of Malay and Indonesian manuscripts: Annabel Teh Gallop, head of the Southeast Asia section of the British Library; and Ali Akbar, calligrapher and a researcher at the National Research and Innovation Agency in Indonesia (BRIN), former head of collection at the Bayt Al-Qur’an & Museum in Jakarta.
This time, our focus was drawn to a corpus of manuscripts, more precisely Qur’ans copied in Southeast Asia during the 17th to the 19th Centuries. These manuscripts were produced in the Malay Archipelago, covering the current nations of Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and Indonesia, of which the major islands are Sumatra, Java, Borneo and Sulawesi (Celebes).
Thanks to the extensive research of Annabel Teh Gallop and Ali Akbar in this field,[1] we started our study with a selection of Sulawesi Qur’ans. This corpus allowed us to make observations about the local traditions of copying the Qur’an, as well as the calligraphy displayed in these manuscripts.
Incorporating praxis to this study is especially necessary as the calligraphies studied in this corpus are no longer practiced by professional calligraphers today. However, even in this region, the copy of the Quranic text was extremely codified. Thus, the recreation of the writing process and techniques can potentially lead to interesting conclusions about its context of use. Furthermore, as one of the purposes of the project is to find connections between other calligraphies at the frontiers of the Islamicate world, these experiments can allow us to draw connections between corpora from different regions.
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