A parchment leaf of an Abbasid Qur'an in angular Kufic script, its verse endings touched with gold: the page as the supreme religious image of an aniconic faith.
Tagged: Calligraphy Manuscript Illumination Museum Medieval Devotional Aniconic (Calligraphic/Geometric) Extant Qur'an Manuscripts Muslim
Why It Stands Here
In a tradition where the figure is refused in sacred space, the written word takes the figure's place and its honor. The Kufic folio is that substitution in its purest form: revelation made visible as calligraphy, venerated as an object, and executed to the standard of an icon. Nothing on the page competes with the text, because the text is the image.
The great early Qur'ans were written on parchment in the angular script modern scholarship calls Kufic: horizontal in format, stretched letterforms, few diacritical marks, the verse divisions and sura headings picked out in gold. Such a book was a treasury object — hundreds of leaves for a single copy — commissioned by rulers and endowed to mosques, where its recitation and its presence were both acts of devotion.
Leaves from these manuscripts, dispersed in the twentieth century, now anchor Islamic collections worldwide. This entry's folio stands for the type: Abbasid, ninth or tenth century, the calligraphy itself the whole of the art.
References
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