The Forgotten Qur'ans of the Eastern Islamic WorldManuscripts of the Ghaznavid and Ghurid Dynasties, 11th-12th Centuries CE

The first in-depth examination of the earliest corpus of Qur’ans copied at the beginning of a transformative phase in the history of Qur’an production, at the eastern frontiers of the Islamic world

• Presents the first detailed study of a group of Qur’ans produced under the Ghaznavid and Ghurid dynasties
• Offers the first study towards understanding a transformative phase in the history of Qur’an production
• Examines Qur’ans at the eastern frontiers within the fluid transregional landscape in which their aesthetic was shaped, reclaiming ‘peripheries’ as centres of cultural production
• Narrates the conception, use and role of the Qur’an manuscript across time by contextualising them, setting out a new approach, beyond codicology, for the study of manuscripts
• Attributes mostly dispersed manuscripts of unknown date and origin to the medieval eastern Islamic world (950s-1250s CE) and lists them in an appendix

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.