Arabic Forgeries (1 results)

Soft cover. Condition: Fine. ARABIC MANUSCRIPT] An early Arabic manuscript forgery in Ku!"c script, reminiscent of a letter purportedly sent by the Prophet to the ruler of Bahrain, currently preserved in the Topkapi Palace. Manuscript on vellum. oblong 21 by 14 cm and comprising nine bound leaves. Provenance: purchased in the 1920s in Egypt.Professor Ahmad Al-Jallad, a well-known scholar in the !"eld, told us that the text is written in Classical Arabic a language variant prevalent in the Arabian Peninsula during the 7th century and delves into the topic of alcohol usage, employing characters that mimic early Ku!"c Arabic. C-14 suggests a date back to the 17th century. Egypt has produced famous forgeries. In 1854, a French diplomat named François Alphonse Belin made a bombshell announcement: the discovery of an original letter sent by Muhammad to the governor of Egypt, complete with the Prophet's personal seal. This letter had been purportedly found in the library of a Coptic monastery in Egypt. Soon other letters were discovered and sold to the Ottoman sultans for large amounts of money. Four such letters are kept in the collection of sacred relics in the Topkapi Palace. Questions were not raised until 1904, when an article in the Egyptian journal al-Hilal argued that the letters script like ours betrayed a crude attempt to imitate early Islamic writing. But the history of forgeries goes much further back than the 19th century. It has also been suggested that they were made from the medieval period onwards. Christian (Coptic) and Jewish communities are known to have forged letters where Muhammad supposedly exempts the recipients from taxation. Our manuscript might be older (as the C-14 date suggests) than the 19th century. We do not even know if the knowledge was intended to deceive. Could it be a copy in a crude hand of an already existing early manuscript?However, according to Professor Gerd R. Puin, a leading expert in Arabic orthography and Koranic paleography, it is a forgery and a special one. He suggests a possible link to a letter attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, currently housed in the Topkapi Palace. According to Puin our MS displays the same distinctive paleographic errors as the one found in a letter attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, sent to the ruler of Bahrain, Munzir Bin Sawa. Gerd R. Puin'analysis of the letter of the Prophet can be found in his article titled "Das Siegel des Propheten" (The Seal of the Prophet), with speci)*c reference to Figure 11 in that article. Carbon-14 dating places its creation within several probable time frames, the most signi)*cant probabilities being between 1646 1681 and 1792 1803. Codex specialists have pointed out that the way it is bound looks old.