The Art of the Qur’an: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts

Description:

Thousands of sumptuous Qur’an manuscripts and loose pages, penned by celebrated calligraphers and embellished by skilled illuminators and bookbinders over the centuries, are now housed in the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts (TIEM) in Istanbul, Turkey. The formation of this one-of-a-kind collection and the history of TIEM are explored in this companion publication to the groundbreaking exhibition The Art of the Qur’an.

The book introduces the Qur’an and traces its transformation from a fleeting, orally transmitted Message into a fixed, written Text that has played a central role in the artistic culture of the Islamic world. Particular attention is given to the formal development of Qur’anic manuscripts over a thousand years and the concurrent evolution of calligraphy and illumination, two distinct features of the arts of the book in the region. Volumes were completed in Herat, Tabriz, Cairo, Baghdad, Mosul, Damascus, and Istanbul. Over the centuries they were created in the Umayyad and Abbasid Near East, Seljuq Iran and Anatolia, the Mongol Il-Khanid and Timurid empires, Mamluk Cairo, and the Safavid and Ottoman empires. Members of the Ottoman elite acquired these fine manuscripts and offered them as gifts to cement political and military relationships or as rewards for loyalty and service. Many Qur’ans were donated to public and religious institutions to express personal piety and to secure power and prestige.

With approximately 260 color and black-and-white illustrations, many of them full page in size. Includes in-depth descriptions of almost seventy works from TIEM and the Smithsonian’s Freer|Sackler. Published in conjunction with the exhibition The Art of the Qur’an: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, on view at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian, from October 15, 2016, through February 20, 2017.

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