The Forgotten Qur'ans of the Eastern Islamic World

The Ghaznavid and Ghurid Qur'ans (c. eleventh-Twelfth centuries CE), studied for the first time as a corpus, inform of how the Qur'an was copied at the beginning of a transformative period in the history of its production when paper, new scripts and the vertical format were adopted. As the book illustrates the ways in which local visual trends were shaped out of diachronic and synchronic multidirectional movement within a medieval landscape that was continuously in flux, it shifts the focus to the eastern frontiers of the Islamic world, reclaiming them as centres of cultural production. It is by contextualising the Qur'an's materiality within the religious, social and political context that the book 'rehumanises' them offering an understanding of how the manuscripts were conceived, produced and used, up until our day.

Alya Karame is a Research Associate at the Orient-Institut Beirut. She specialises in Islamic art and material culture, with a focus on manuscript studies. In 2023, she was a fellow of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University to be later supported by the Paris Région award to pursue her research at the Institut des civilisations at the Collège de France. Her work has been supported by numerous grants, including the Arab Funds for Arts and Culture and the Andrew Mellon foundation (2019-2020). She was at the Khalili Research Centre at the University of Oxford, the recipient of the Barakat Trust award (2018-2019) and prior to that she joined the Kunsthistorisches Institut research program in Florence Connecting Art Histories in the Museum and was based at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin (2017-2019). Karame obtained her PhD in 2018 in Islamic Art History from the University of Edinburgh and her MA in History of Art & Archaeology from the School of Oriental and African Studies.