Early Islamic Manuscript Art in Southeast Asia

An Illuminated Qur’an Section from Java

Abstract

The subject of this article is a small manuscript in Leiden University Library (UBL Acad. 19), written on
dluwang or Javanese treebark paper. The volume contains parts of the Qur’an and various supplications,
with decorated frames around the Qur’anic text and drawings of Burāq and other creatures on the
first page. As first noted by Petrus Voorhoeve in 1980, Acad. 19 looks and feels like a ‘rather old’
manuscript, and recent radiocarbon dating (Gallop, Scheper, and Dee 2025) has confirmed with 95%
certainty that the dluwang was made before 1634. This article has attempted to hone the date estimate
further through a detailed palaeographical, paratextual and codicological study. The manuscript bears
annotations probably in the hand of Willem Leyel of Denmark, who served in the Dutch East India
Company in Batavia. Leyel most likely acquired the manuscript in Java by the early 1620s, when it
was already old enough for some of the double-thickness dluwang folios to have separated into two
thin leaves, with subsequent losses of text. This suggests that the manuscript may have been written
several decades earlier, perhaps around 1600. As such, the illuminated frames around the text and the
polychrome drawings on the first page may be some of the earliest known examples of manuscript
illumination in maritime Southeast Asia, and valuable witnesses to early Islamic art in Java.