The Forgotten Qur'ans of the Eastern Islamic World

The Ghaznavid and Ghurid Qur’ans (c. eleventh–Twelfth centuries CE), studied for the first time as a corpus, inform of how the Qur’an was copied at the beginning of a transformative period in the history of its production when paper, new scripts and the vertical format were adopted. As the book illustrates the ways in which local visual trends were shaped out of diachronic and synchronic multidirectional movement within a medieval landscape that was continuously in flux, it shifts the focus to the eastern frontiers of the Islamic world, reclaiming them as centres of cultural production. It is by contextualising the Qur’an’s materiality within the religious, social and political context that the book ‘rehumanises’ them offering an understanding of how the manuscripts were conceived, produced and used, up until our day.

The Ghaznavid and Ghurid Qur’ans (c. eleventh–Twelfth centuries CE), studied for the first time as a corpus, inform of how the Qur’an was copied at the beginning of a transformative period in the history of its production when paper, new scripts and the vertical format were adopted. As the book illustrates the ways in which local visual trends were shaped out of diachronic and synchronic multidirectional movement within a medieval landscape that was continuously in flux, it shifts the focus to the eastern frontiers of the Islamic world, reclaiming them as centres of cultural production. It is by contextualising the Qur’an’s materiality within the religious, social and political context that the book ‘rehumanises’ them offering an understanding of how the manuscripts were conceived, produced and used, up until our day.