Folio from a Tenth-Century Qur˒an
Qur˒an leaf, in Arabic
Gift of Belle da Costa Greene, 1941
The text is written in Kufic, named after al-Kufah, the Iraqi town where the script supposedly originated. Red dots mark vowels, and each tenth verse is marked by a small, gold rectangle. On this leaf a thin gold band indicates the end of sura 24 (al-Nūr, or "Light") and the beginning of sura 25 (al-Furqān, or "The Criterion"). The Criterion is Allah's great gift to humanity, allowing it to judge between right and wrong. Each sura (except the ninth) begins with a call to piety, the bismillah, In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.
The Qur˒an, the Holy Book of Islam
From a monumental volume used in an Istanbul mosque to a miniature Persian version that served as a talisman, this section features examples of illuminated pages from the holy book of Islam. The Qur˒an (to recite) represents the codification of the words of God that were revealed and transmitted through the angel Gabriel to the prophet Muḥammad (ca. 570–632) over a period of twenty-three years. The visions began in 610 in a cave on Mount Hira near Mecca, his birthplace, and continued after his 622 flight to Medina, until his death. His flight—the Hijra—marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar.
The revelations were arranged into 114 suras (chapters), each named after its theme. The first and shortest ones, at the end of the book, from the Meccan period, establish Muḥammad as the final prophet in a line of monotheists, including Abraham and Jesus. The longest suras, placed at the beginning, are Medinan and deal more with social and political issues.
For centuries, Qur˒ans were written in Arabic, the language of transmission. After Muḥammad's death, his cousin ˓Alī and others compiled the revelations into a text. About twenty years later, under Uthman, the third caliph (644–656) succeeding Muḥammad, a standard version of the Qur˒an —essentially the one used today—was produced. Thereafter Islam (which means "surrender to God") spread from the Arabian Peninsula throughout the Middle East, to northern Africa and southern Spain, and eventually the world.