A Revision of the Date of the Khayqānī Qurʾān along with an Introduction of Its Newly Found Fragments

For over sixty years, the manuscript known as the “Khayqānī Qurʾān” has attracted the attention of codicologists and scholars of Qurʾānic manuscript production and Islamic calligraphy due to its possession of dated colophons. At the end of certain sections of this codex (now dispersed across various collections worldwide), there is a note in Persian and Arabic by Aḥmad ibn Abū l-Qāsim al-Khayqānī, according to which the Qurʾān was provided with dotting and vowel marks in Sha‛bān 292 AH (June–July 905 CE). Previous scholarship has generally assumed the authenticity of this date, citing this Qurʾān as the earliest example of the Eastern Kūfic style or the "new style" in Qurʾānic writing, and consequently as a turning point in the history of Qurʾānic scripts. For several decades, the Khayqānī Qurʾān has thus been used as a "benchmark" for determining the origin and dating of this Qurʾānic script style and the development of Qurʾānic calligraphy. Furthermore, the Persian portion of these colophons has been introduced as the earliest textual evidence of New Persian written in the Arabic script.
The authors of the present article, through a detailed examination of all extant colophons from various codicological perspectives, as well as by citing the results of multispectral imaging of the colophon from one of the volumes of this Qurʾān, have demonstrated that the date 292 AH is a later interpolation and forged. By introducing a newly discovered fragment of this Qurʾān and relying on its colophon, they propose the correct date to be 492 AH (1098–1099 CE). This discovery shifts the dating of the Khayqānī Qurʾān by two centuries and demonstrates the necessity of revising previous citations of this manuscript in the history of the development of Qurʾānic scripts.