New-style script ("eastern kufic")

Maryam Ekhtiar notes that the tenth century saw a move from kufic to more readable cursive scripts, and from horizontal to vertical page formats. One script that had emerged in the late ninth century was traditionally called "eastern kufic" or "broken kufic"; scholars now prefer "new Abbasid style" or "new style", since its variants were used in both the eastern and western reaches of the Islamic world. ¹

It is marked by the extreme verticality of the letter shafts, razor-sharp angularity, a marked contrast between thick and thin strokes, and the consistent use of diacritical and vowel marks. ¹ Its compactness, with the new vertical format, allowed many more lines a page and so the whole Qur'an in a single volume. It served secular and religious purposes, and decorative variants appeared on objects and buildings in Iran, Central Asia and Anatolia, such as the frieze of the minaret of Mas'ud III at Ghazna. By the thirteenth century rounded proportional scripts had supplanted it, and it was relegated to ornament such as sura headings and frontispieces. ²

The Met holds a folio from a monumental Qur'an in this script from eastern Iran or Afghanistan, about 1180, said to have had some 2,250 folios, which the author calls the most lavish Qur'an ever made in the new style: four lines on dense palmette scrolls, slender verticals, and lam-alif forming an oval. ³ A western variant appears in the Nurse's Qur'an of Qayrawan. ⁴