The National Heritage Institute (INP), originally founded in AH 1377/1957 CE as the National Institute of Antiquities and Arts, is a national scientific institution under the supervision of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Located in the old city of Tunis, its mission is to catalog, maintain, highlight, preserve and promote the country’s archaeological, historical and artistic heritage. Its purview includes management of more than thirty public museums, including the National Museum of Bardo, the Carthage National Museum, and the National Museum of Arab-Islamic History and Arts in Raqqada, Qayrawan.

The INP maintains collaborative relationships with global organizations dedicated to heritage preservation, such as UNESCO, ALECSO, ISESCO, ICOM, the International Council on Monuments and Sites, and the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, among others. Through these partnerships, various projects have been undertaken. These include the international campaign to preserve Carthage, the restoration program for the Great Mosque of Qayrawan, the preservation of traditional museum collections, the documentation of African museum collections, and the Tunisian training program for architects specializing in heritage.

The INP returns to AlMadar with a presentation on the significant contributions of Muslim women to pious, charitable works in Tunisia, including a Qur’an commissioned in the Aghlabid period, royal Qur’ans of the Zirid period, and a 13th-century AH/19th-century CE royal waqf for the provision of water. In addition, tombstones of two sisters of the well-known 8th-century AH/14th-century CE historian Ibn Khaldun highlight the history of erudite women in Tunisian society.

Bi-folio from the Nurse’s Qur’an (7:72–73)

The “Nurse’s Qur’an” is one of the most spectacular manuscripts of the 5th century AH/11th century CE. Its innovative format is vertical, following the precedents of contemporary Baghdad, unlike other examples produced in the Zirid scriptorium that follow the older horizontal style, while its artistic interpretation of the New Style Abbasid script relied on brushstrokes, later refined with a reed pen. This was an ambitious project given the size of its parchment folios and its extent: 60 volumes, each a hizb, bound in leather covered with silk, and stored in a bespoke wooden box. The project was commissioned by a woman, Fatimah, governess of the deceased Zirid ruler Badis, and supervised by another woman Durrah al-Katibah (the Scribe), whose note describing the project has survived. She attributes the copying, vocalization, illuminations binding, and gilding of the manuscript to the scribe ‘Ali bin Ahmad al-Warraq. Given the 2,000 folios that survive in Tunis, and an additional 1,200, now dispersed or lost, he must have had help, and research has shown the intervention of various hands.

The “Nurse’s Qur’an” appears to have inspired other pious endowments of mushafs at the Zirid court. The ruler Al-Mu‘izz bin Badis (r. AH 406–54/1016–62 CE) endowed a Qur’an in the older, Abbasid horizontal format, as did female members of the royal family. None, however, were as splendid, nor as innovative as the Nurse’s Qur’an.