The Center for Digital Scholarship is pleased to announce the publication of The Minassian Collection of Quranic Manuscripts.
The collection, published out of the Brown Digital Repository (BDR), features 200 Quranic manuscript folios dating from the 9th to the 16th centuries. The flowering of Arabic calligraphy has its origins in the efforts of Muslim societies to preserve and disseminate the scriptural verses of the Qur’an. It is possible to browse the folios according to the name of the Quranic chapter represented, as well as by the date attributed to the item based on stylistic considerations. You may search these items by keywords that could include calligraphic style, techniques of illumination, materials, size, number of lines, and known parallels in other collections.
Several of the items in this collection have been identified as belonging to manuscripts with folios to be found in other prominent collections. Consequently, a major impetus for the undertaking of this project is to foster the possibility for other such identification, a process of reuniting these manuscripts currently physically scattered around the world virtually through the digital medium.
The digitization of this collection also opens up some alternative possibilities for the visual and intellectual engagement with the objects. The high resolution of these scans allows the viewer to inspect the pen stroke and the way in which it manages to ink the page and leave its traces. Projects await students to cut up these images, overlay them, make them transparent and otherwise engage in creative juxtapositions and rearrangements. While the learning and studying of the Quran has been at the forefront of Muslim engagements with digital technology, what we hope to offer here is a way to reflect on a history of technology as it intersects with that foundational text as part of Islamic spiritual and cultural life.
The Center would like to offer it’s congratulations to Evelyn Ansel ‘11.5, who worked on the project in a variety of capacities, after receiving a 2009-10 UTRA (Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award) to conduct research on this project alongside Dr. Ian Straughn. For her efforts on the project, Evie was recently presented with a Library Undergraduate Research Award. Research projects considered for this award must make creative and extensive use of the Brown University Library’s collections.
Evie also co-curated the exhibit Sacred Script: Qur’anic Manuscripts from the 8th to 16th centuries in the Minassian Collection, which is Currently on view in the John Hay Library, Bopp Seminar Room.
Please enjoy this most recent addition to Brown University Library’s Digital Collections, and please stop in to see the exhibit, on view through May 31st.