Rare Quran exhibition

WORKS OF ART: Chance for dialogue, says show’s deputy curator

AFIRST United States showing of rare old Qurans opens yesterday in museums here, highlighting a different side of Islam at a time when the religion’s image in America has been scarred by a divisive presidential campaign.

More than 60 Qurans and Quranic texts, dating from as far back as the late seventh century and considered works of art for their exceptionally fine calligraphy, will be featured in “The Art of the Qur’an”, running through Feb 20 next year at the Freer and Sackler museums, home to the Smithsonian Institution’s Asian art collection.

These majestic holy books were copied by hand for some of the richest and most powerful rulers of the Muslim world.

Most of them — 47 of 63 — are lent to Freer and Sackler from a single source: the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in Istanbul. The rest are already part of the Smithsonian collection.

The exhibition, contained in the intimate setting of a single room, tells the story of how the words and teachings of the Quran, traditionally passed on orally, came during the seventh century to be inscribed in fixed and permanent texts.

The exhibit touches lightly on the messages of the Quran.

“We are, above all, an art museum,” the show’s deputy curator, Simon Retting, said at a news briefing on Thursday.

“So we come at it more from the angle of explaining how the Quran took the form of a book, and how the arts of calligraphy and illumination — the decoration and illustration of manuscripts — developed around the book.”

“We wanted to really show the variety of manuscripts,” said the show’s chief curator, Massumeh Farhad.

The Qurans on display, she noted, came from all parts of the Muslim world, including Iraq, Afghanistan and Turkey.

“Today, when you look at a Quran, it always looks the same. It’s a printed copy in green, one basic size,” Farhad said.

“What is remarkable here is the incredible variety of them, the size, the scale, the scripts.”

The show’s opening comes just before the US presidential election on Nov 8, amid a polarising campaign in which Republican candidate Donald Trump stigmatised Muslims, saying at one point that he would ban all Muslims from the US.

The exhibit was in the works for six years and originally set to open in 2014. But it was delayed by construction, museum officials said.

“Now, it is true that the exhibit is opening just at the moment of the elections, with highly charged public rhetoric around Islam,” Retting said.

The show represented “a tremendous opportunity for dialogue between cultures” and an occasion to “build bridges”, he said.

“Hundreds of thousands of people will come to this exhibition and learn about the Islamic world, its art, its culture,” said Richard Kurin, under secretary for museums and research for the Smithsonian, which operates most of the museums in the US capital.

“If we can help bridge that gap through this museum... we will have done our job.” AFP