"Kulliyаt Jami"

The diagonal lines across the broad margins turn this opening into a complex calligraphic map: the central text is surrounded by additional verses and commentary. This is how the “Kulliyat-i Jami” is arranged – a collected body of works by Abd al-Rahman Jami, poet, thinker, and guide of the Naqshbandi milieu, closely associated with Alisher Navoi.
The manuscript belongs to the fifteenth century, that is, to Jami’s own lifetime or to the period shortly after his death. Such collections brought together divans, philosophical and Sufi texts, and poems that shaped the ethical and literary language of Timurid Herat and Central Asia.
Unlike many poetic manuscripts associated with nasta‘liq, this copy is written in naskh – a stricter and clearer script, convenient for scholarly reading. The margins filled with oblique lines allowed a large corpus of texts to fit into a compact volume. The two-colour binding with burgundy medallions and a reinforced spine shows that the book was valued, read, and carefully preserved as a working compendium of spiritual and poetic heritage within the library culture of the Islamic East, where an author’s text was accompanied by reading, copying, and interpretation from generation to generation.