Seventh-century Quranic manuscript to go on sale in Netherlands
A rare Quranic manuscript, which may have been written just 20 years after the death of the Prophet Mohammed, will go on sale at the European Fine Art Fair this week.
The parchment – from a cache of the earliest known written forms of the Quran – comes from the library of a private collector in Britain.
The “extraordinary” single leaf folio is written in Hijazi script, proof it originated in the region of the Hijaz in the Arabian Peninsula, where the Prophet Mohammed unified Arabian tribes with Islam.
The manuscript will go on sale for €1 million ($1.08 million).
Shapero Rare Books, the New Bond Street London shop selling the early Islamic relic, called it a “fine early example” of a Quranic manuscript.
Roxana Kashani, Shapero’s Near East and Islamic specialist, told The National that after extensive research, she believes the folio was produced near the time that the first leaves of the Quran were written.
“It’s really important to associate this with its tangible connection to history,” she said. “It was literally one of the first times that the Quran was ever put into writing, and that is huge.
“This is not just another copy of a text that is now in billions of households across the world. This is one of the first instances in which this text was put into writing. That is incredible.”
Most surviving Hijazi Quran fragments are kept in museums, libraries and private collections, and very rarely come to the open market.
“It is a real privilege to be able to offer one of these early manuscripts to the market,” said Ms Kashani, who said the manuscript has been “firmly” placed in the seventh century.
Experts say inconsistencies in orthography and line spacing often make it difficult to identify when Quranic fragments were copied.
To date, just four other seventh-century Hijazi Qurans have been found.
They include the Codex Parisino-petropolitanus, parts of which are held in the Bibliotheque nationale de France, the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg, the Vatican
Library, and the Khalili Collection in London. Another, the Birmingham manuscript, comprises two folios held at the University of Birmingham.
The Sanaa manuscript is made up of 82 folios, 38 of which are held at the Dar Al Makhtutat library in Yemen.
Finally, the Codex M a VI 165, comprising 77 folios, is held at Eberhard Karls University of Tubingen in Germany.
Experts say the survival of a fragment from this extremely early period in Islamic manuscript production is “extraordinary”. The small cache of comparable folios still require much in the way of academic research, so the addition of this leaf to the other known fragments is important.
The manuscript on sale was written more than 100 years before the Book of Kells, which contains the four gospels of the New Testament. It is assumed to be from about 800 AD.
The European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht, the Netherlands, will be open by invitation tomorrow and Friday, and to the general public from Saturday to March 14.