Collection of manuscripts
Collection of nine manuscripts.
The Belbagi Collection
Every folio in this collection is written in Maghribi script, the family of Arabic scripts that developed across the Maghreb, Al-Andalus, and the West African Sahel following the Islamic conquests of North Africa.
North Africa or Spain, the Almohad dynasty
Sura At-tawbah, v. 70 – 71
The Maghribi script on this page is rounded and unhurried, with none of the sharp angles found in eastern Arabic hands. Small gold ornaments mark the verses, touched with blue and red, and the vowel markings, in brown, burgundy, blue, and yellow, sit lightly above and below the letters, giving the page a quiet warmth and rhythm even before it’s read.
Andalusia, the Nasrid dynasty of Granada
Sura Al Shu’ara, v. 109 – 114
Bold and confident, thick black strokes of Maghribi script standing in striking contrast against the soft pink of the paper, a rare and luxurious choice, said to have come from the paper mills near Valencia. Verses are marked by small gold roundels, while larger illuminated medallions in gold, blue, and white punctuate the margins. Together, script and ornament give this folio the quiet authority of something made for a patron who wanted their Qur’an to be as beautiful as it was sacred.
Andalusia or North Africa, late Almohad period (potentially early Merinid)
Surah Al Anbiya, v. 3 – 8
This folio carries verses from Surah Al Anbiya and Surah Saba, moving from a reminder that every prophet was simply a man who lived and died like others, to a call for proof from those who deny God’s oneness. Both pages are written in warm reddish-brown Maghribi script, rounded and unhurried, with vocalisation in blue, green, and gold, and small gold verse markers shaped like clustered petals marking the rhythm of recitation throughout.
Spain or Morocco, the Nasrid dynasty of Granada
Surah Al Anfal, v. 67 – 29
This folio carries verses from Surah Al Anfal, addressing the taking of spoils after battle: a reminder that a divine decree of mercy spared believers from being seized for what they had taken, followed by the command to eat what was rightfully gained, lawful and good, and to remain mindful of God. Written in a bold, rounded Maghribi hand in dark brown ink, the folio carries vocalisation in red and blue, with a small gold roundel marking the verse division, restrained, functional ornament on a page clearly meant for use rather than display.
Spain, the Nasrid dynasty of Granada
Surah Al Imran v.187–190
A single leaf from a Quran written in the distinctive Maghribi script of the Islamic West, seven lines of warm brown ink on cream paper, with polychrome vocalisation in red and a gilded teardrop marking the verse-end. The rounded hand, deep sublinear curves, brown ink, and near-square page are all hallmarks of Qur'an production across Al-Andalus and Marinid Morocco, whose manuscript culture moved freely across the Strait. The text is from Surah Al Imran, on the covenant to make the Scripture clear and not conceal it.
North Africa, the Marinid dynasty/the early Wattasid dynasty
Surah Al Baqara, v. 142, 150 –151
A conjoined pair of leaves on vellum, each page carrying six lines of linear sepia-brown Maghribī script, the rounded Western hand of North Africa and Al-Andalus. One page opens a surah with an elegant illuminated heading and a marginal medallion in gold, blue, and red, while a verse-end is marked by a gold lobed trefoil flecked with washed green and red dots, the diacritics and vocalisation in burgundy and blue. The gilded ornament, coloured pointing, brown ink, and near-square are all hallmarks of Quran production in the Maghrib during the Marinid period.
Al-Andalus, the Almoravid dynasty
Surat Al Ahzab, v. 41 – 44.
A single parchment leaf carrying nine lines of Maghribī script in dark brown ink with vocalisation picked out in orange, red, and blue and gilded roundels marking the verse-ends. The brown ink, polychrome pointing, and gold ornament are all hallmarks of Quran production across the Maghrib and Al-Andalus. The text is from Surat Al-Ahzab, opening with the celebrated verse naming Muhammad “the Messenger of God and the Seal of the Prophets.”
North Africa, the Idrisid dynasty
Surah Al Haaqqa v.11–52. Surah Al Maa’arij v.1–30.
At this early date, the Maghribi script had not yet settled into the rounded, fluent hand of its maturity. It still echoed the angular Kufic forms carried westward from the eastern Islamic lands and was itself only in the process of taking shape, a regional style still working out its conventions before crystallising into the distinctive Western hand of later centuries.
Morocco, the Saadian dynasty
Surah Al Fatiha, v.6–9
A beautiful example of a late medieval Moroccan Quran. The Saadian dynasty greatly developed the decorative arts, financed by their lucrative trade in sugar and salt. This example from the opening chapter of the Quran displays a highly developed and distinct Maghrebi script. The Kufic chapter heading however is notable in that despite centuries of development of the local style, the Eastern font was still considered prestigious for use in headings and titles.
Imam Abu Al Walid Al Baji
“Knowledge benefits only the one who acts upon it.” Abu Walid Al Baji
“He was the greatest Maliki scholar of al-Andalus after Imam Malik.” Shams Al Din Al Dhahabi
Sulayman Ibn Khalaf Ibn Saad Ibn Ayyub, known to history as the Qadi (Judge) Abu Al Walid Al Baji, was born in Beja, modern-day Portugal, in 1013, into an Arab family originally from Badajoz. The family later settled in Córdoba, then the intellectual capital of Al-Andalus, where he received his early education.
At twenty-three, he left for the Middle East and stayed away for thirteen years. Three of those years were spent in Mecca, studying under Abu Dharr al-Harawi. He returned to Andalusia in 1047 already recognised as a scholar of the first rank, a Maliki jurist, a hadith master, a theologian, and a poet, all at once. His command of disputation became legendary.
In 1048, in a public debate in Majorca, he defeated the celebrated polymath Ibn Hazm so thoroughly that it contributed to Ibn Hazm’s exile from the island. Ibn Hazm himself is said to have remarked that the Malikis needed no one but Al Baji and 'Abd al-Wahhab to hold their own against any opponent. Historians of the period rank Al Baji and Ibn Hazm together as the two most consequential literary minds of eleventh century Al-Andalus.
His later years took him through Murcia, Dénia, Orihuela, Valencia, and Lleida, before he settled in Zaragoza following the fall of Barbastro in 1065. Under the patronage of Ahmad al-Muqtadir, he produced his most important work, including al-Minhaj fi Tartib al-Hijaj, the first treatise written in the Islamic west on the science of juristic disputation, and al-Muntaqa, his abridged commentary on Imam Malik’s Muwatta', still studied today. He died in Almería in 1081.
Zaid M. Belbagi
The surname Belbagi carries al-Baji’s name forward almost unchanged, a nisba to Beja, the town of his birth, passed down through the family across nine centuries. His modern-day descendant Zaid M. Belbagi has spoken of this inheritance himself: visiting Beja in recent years, he noted that he was likely the first member of the family to set foot there in several hundred years and pointed directly to al-Baji’s own memory as the reason the name, and the town, still matter to him and others across the Arab world.
It is this thread, a family history running from a Maliki jurist and disputant in eleventh-century Zaragoza to a collector today, that the Quran folios in this collection have an intellectual weight as well as a strong Islamic legacy behind them.
They represent a certain physical continuity: pages produced in the same Andalusi and Maghribi milieu that shaped al-Baji’s own world, held today within a family that still carries his name.
Today, Zaid M. Belbagi is a trusted adviser to governments and heads of state, work that, in its own way, continues a much older family occupation: moving fluently between the Arab world and its neighbours, and being trusted to explain one to the other.
The Maghribi Script
Every folio in this collection is written in Maghribi script, the family of Arabic scripts that developed across the Maghreb, Al-Andalus, and the West African Sahel following the Islamic conquests of North Africa. It descends directly from Kufic, but from an older form of Kufic, one that predates the standardisation reforms the calligrapher Ibn Muqla later imposed on the scripts of the Islamic East. That separation is why Maghribi script still looks so distinct from Naskh or Thuluth: rounder letterforms, longer horizontal strokes, and open curves that dip below the baseline.
The script travelled west with the Arab conquest itself, carried by scholars and copyists working out of Fes, Córdoba, and Qayrawan, and split early into two related traditions: the Ifriqi (African) school, centred on Qayrawan, and the Andalusi school, which developed its own rounder, more cursive character in Córdoba and the cities that followed it. A scholar working from Beja and Córdoba, as al-Baji did, would have grown up reading and writing within this tradition as a matter of course.
Within the Maghribi family, several distinct sub-scripts developed for different purposes. Maghribi Kufic and the ornamental Almoravid Kufic were reserved largely for coinage and architectural inscription, the Almoravid minbar of the Kutubiyya Mosque in Marrakesh is one of the finest surviving examples.
For the Qur’an itself, and for other continuous body text, scribes used Mabsout script, the Maghribi equivalent of eastern Naskh: legible, evenly weighted, written with a pointed pen that produces a line of consistent thickness rather than the swelling strokes of a chiselled nib. Vowel markings were typically picked out in colour red, blue, or gold, against brown ink, both for beauty and to make recitation easier to follow.
This is the tradition the folios in this collection belong to: Qur’an pages produced in Morocco and Islamic Spain, Portugal and Sicily between the tenth and sixteenth centuries, in a script that Andalusi and Maghribi scribes had already made their own by al-Baji’s lifetime, and one that Morocco continues to teach, preserve, and honour today through initiatives like the Mohamed VI Prize for the Art of Maghrebi Script.
It is in this spirit of preservation of the sacred arts of the Islamic West, that the Belbagi Collection exists today.
Events
The sharing of knowledge and providing a platform for scholars and the public to connect with the history of the Islamic West is central to the collection’s purpose.
March 2025
Exhibits from the Belbagi Collection were exhibited at an event hosted by the Embassy of the Kingdom of Morocco. Alongside the Benedict Carter, Head of Islamic and Indian Art at Sotheby’s Zaid M. Belbagi presented select works. The event was opened by HE Ambassador Hakim Hajoui and attended by Christie’s, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Agha Khan Centre.
Taskhent, Uzbekistan, July 2025
The Belbagi Collected bequeathed the first gift to the Centre for Islamic Civilisation in the form of a rare Almohad folio containing a Quranic verse urging cooperation between mankind During the presentation Mr. Zaid M. Belbagi reminded the Director Mr. Firdavs Abdulkhalikov of the 14th century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta who visited Bukhara, in whose honour the gift was made. The presentation of the gift was broadcast on CNN and Euronews
“Keep the company of the people of knowledge, for every person is known by those with whom he sits.” Abu Walid Al Baji
