London, Jan. 18: A rare early manuscript from a copy of the Qur’an is set to go on sale later this year in the Netherlands, Arab News reported on Wednesday.
The parchment, written in Hijazi script, will appear at the TEFAF Maastricht fine art fair in March with an asking price of €1 million ($1.0883 million). It was previously part of a private collection in the UK.
The seller, Shapero Rare Books, said the folio’s Hijazi script, used before the standardization of Arabic, places the manuscript in the 7th century C.E., around 50 years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, and means it was written in the Hijaz region, which includes the cities of Makkah and Madinah.
“The earliest examples of the Qur’an were written in Hijazi script and this period also marks a very important milestone in the evolution of the Arabic language and its development in written form,” Shapero Rare Books said in a statement.
“This parchment is a fine early example and these manuscripts were instrumental in the birth of Islam and how the religion spread from Mecca (Makkah) across several continents.”
Shapero Rare Books said the survival of such a manuscript from the period is “extraordinary,” noting the rarity with which such items come up for sale.
The statement said: “The small cache of comparable folios from this early chapter in Islamic studies and Arabic calligraphy still require much in the way of academic research and therefore the addition of this leaf to the other known manuscript fragments is important.
“Furthermore, opportunities to acquire such early Qur’anic material are very infrequent with the majority of other examples already housed in museums and libraries.”
The seller added that only four examples of early 7th century Hijazi Qur’ans have been positively identified, including the Codex Parisino-petropolitanus, which is predominantly housed at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in 36 folios, with other single folios in the Vatican, Khalili Collections and the National Library of Russia.
Other examples are housed at the University of Birmingham in the UK, the Dar Al-Makhtutat Library in Yemen, and the Universitatsbibliothek Tubingen in Germany.
Roxana Kashani, Shapero Rare Books’ Near East and Islamic specialist, said: “It is a real privilege to be able to offer one of these early manuscripts to the market. The formalisation of the written Arabic language along with the developments in the aesthetics of manuscript production in the 8th century firmly places our manuscript in the 7th century making it one the very earliest examples of Qur’anic script.”
