Even more, the text employs a diversity of literary forms and rhetorical devices to create an intensity of expression that reinforces its sanctified nature. The oneness of God, the finality of the revelations, and a self-conscious awareness of its place vis-à-vis other scriptural traditions are themes that run throughout the Qur’anic corpus, but the individual suras take up many other issues that have little or no connecting thread between them. The Qur’an lacks a clear narrative arc, and each of its suras functions in effect as a standalone text unit.

If the arrangement of the Qur’anic corpus aids recitation and memorization, it also amplifies the text’s nonlinear qualities. The practice of committing the Qur’an to memory, considered to be a pious act, continues to this day. This organizational scheme likely served to facilitate recitation and memorization of the divine text and thus ensure its preservation. The text is also often divided into thirty roughly equal parts ( azja’). Barring the first sura (al-Fatiha, “the opening”), the Qur’an proceeds from the longest to the shortest sura. When the Qur’anic text was compiled as a single corpus, following the Prophet’s passing, its 114 suras (chapters) were arranged not in chronological, geographical, or thematic order, but according to length. Muhammad received the revelations over a period of twenty-two years, and in two different locales (Mecca and Medina). 570–632), via the Archangel Jibra’il (Gabriel). It is in this state that, according to Islamic tradition, the Qur’an was transmitted from God to the Prophet Muhammad (c. Although the Qur’an is often characterized as a book, it is better understood as an orally proclaimed text. institutions, which were years in the making, could have easily derailed.Īnother challenge the curators faced was the task of contextualizing a scripture whose unusual format resists facile explication. Negotiations between the Turkish and U.S. (The remaining manuscripts drew from the Freer|Sackler’s own collections.) To coordinate a loan show of this scale is no small feat, not least when you take into account the failed military coup that took place in Turkey in July 2016, and the purge of civil servants that followed. The exhibition showcased over sixty manuscripts, two-thirds of which were borrowed from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, Istanbul. The curators of the show, Massumeh Farhad and Simon Rettig (both of the Freer|Sackler), had their work cut out for them.

Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, Istanbul, TIEM 531 (Photograph: Freer|Sackler staff) A view of the introductory galleries of the exhibition, with a massive, single-volume Qur’an from Safavid Iran, dated June 1599, in the foreground. Given the rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric and Islamophobic attacks, some might say an exhibition like this one was timely. It is worth letting that point sink in: the very first large–scale exhibition of Qur’an manuscripts in the United States was mounted in 2016–17 at a governmentally administered museum. “ The Art of the Qur’an: Treasures From the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts,” which closed on February 20, was the most ambitious exhibition of Qur’an manuscripts ever undertaken in the United States. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., a few blocks from the White House. In October 2016, during the final month of a fractious presidential election that saw the GOP contender (now President of the United States) campaign on a promise to temporarily ban all Muslims from entering the country, an exhibition of Qur’an manuscripts opened at the Arthur M.

You can see more marginal scenes of the rabbit’s revenge at Sexy Codicology, Colossal, and Kaneko-James’ blog.Yael Rice on Islamic Book and Manuscript Arts in America Given how often we denizens of the 21st century have trouble getting humor from less than a century ago, it feels satisfying indeed to laugh just as hard at these drolleries as our medieval forebears must have - though many more of us surely get to see them today, circulating as rapidly on social media as they didn’t when confined to the pages of illuminated manuscripts owned only by wealthy individuals and institutions. Then, of course, we have the bunnies making their attacks while mounted on snails, snail combats being “another popular staple of Drolleries, with groups of peasants seen fighting snails with sticks, or saddling them and attempting to ride them.” We see this in the Middle English nickname Stickhare, a name for cowards” - and in all the drawings of “tough hunters cowering in the face of rabbits with big sticks.” This enjoyment of the “world turned upside down” produced the drollery genre of “the rabbit’s revenge,” one “often used to show the cowardice or stupidity of the person illustrated.

Illuminated manuscript marginalia