The Qur'an from the Red Sea

Just over one hundred years ago, in 1897, the British steamship Egypt was proceeding homewards from India with a complement of British military officers and men. The ship lay off the treacherous shoals near the island of Perim, in the region called Bab al-Mandeb, the "Gate of Lamentation", at the southern entrance to the Red Sea. The officers and men aboard the Egypt had just completed a successful military expedition, having been sent out to punish a rebel attack in the perennially turbulent Northwest Frontier District of Britain's Indian Empire. But on the high seas their luck was out. Like so many ships before her - and like other famous SS. Egypts after her - the Egypt went astray in these difficult waters. She was wrecked and sent to the bottom in this most inhospitable corner of the world's seas.

The Egypt was not, however, wrecked in waters so deep that salvage was impossible. After six months, the project was undertaken, and some of her contents were raised. Among the objects saved was an old Qur'an, miraculously preserved in almost perfect condition after its lengthy sojourn at the bottom of the Red Sea.

Library Image / CPA

Qur'an from the Red sea.

Its history, as far as it is known, is as follows. In that same year of 1897, the local British Political officer, with Colonel Bonny and the officers and men of his escort, was riding through the Tachi Valley in the Northwest Frontier district of India (now Pakistan), west of Punjab and close to the Afghan border. It was a time of extensive frontier unrest, later solved by the British uniting the region into a single province in 1902. Suddenly, at the village of Maisar, they rode into an ambush. The result was that the British, taken by surprise, were overwhelmed. Colonel Bonny perished in the fight, as did most of his officers.

In the Imperial scheme of British India, such incidents could not go unnoticed and unpunished; the theory - probably not too wide of the mark - was that if any sign of weakness or indulgence were shown, the entire frontier could break out into rebellion, perhaps supported from the west by the Amir of Afghanistan. A punitive expedition was promptly assembled, with the village of Maisar as its target.

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The inscription in the Qur'an.

Inevitably, given the time and the circumstances, victory went to the British, this time in control of events. The village was sacked and plundered, the Qur'an ending up among the spoils in the hands of a certain Mr. A. P. Poe. Nevertheless, when it was retrieved from the wreck of the SS. Egypt, the Koran was treated with great respect. Its damaged leaves, the edges attacked by the water, were carefully re-mounted where necessary. The manuscript was rebound in leather boards, with marbled fly-sheets. It remained in Mr. Poe's hands until he presented it to Worthing Public Library. Thence in 1968 it was withdrawn, and passed into private hands. Today it belongs to a British Islamicist, in whose hands it is treasured as it must have been a century ago in Maisar.

The Qur'an from the Red Sea is interesting in several respects, quite apart from its remarkable history. Its three hundred and seventeen folios, about 11.5 x 19 cm in size, are written on paper in black ink in several different hands, one cramped and unskilled, full of erased errors, another sweeping and confident, a third exceptionally fine and elegant. One copyist outlined each page with red ink frames, and others added marginalia in several places. The end result is impressive. Together these copyists of the eighteenth-nineteenth century produced a Qur'an which, even after its immersion in the Red Sea and its long journeyings, still retains an elegance worthy of its revered content. The centenary of such a manuscript, with so unique a history, is well worth remarking.

Dr S.C. Munro-Hay is the author (with G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville) of the Historical Atlas of Islam and has written widely on the Middle East and Muslim World.

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