Qur'an Leaf in Kufic Script - PF.6323, Origin: Iraq or North Africa, Circa: 700 AD to 900 AD, Collection: Islamic Art, Style: Ancient Writing, Medium: Ink on, Parchment, Calligraphy has never been challenged as the supreme art of the Islamic world, reflecting the centrality of the Qur’anic revelation to Islamic faith and culture. In Islam, the Qur’an is held to be God’s actual revelation. The establishment of the “Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258), with its capital in Baghdad, marked a new stage in the cultural and economic integration of the Mediterranean and Asia. Among the new cultural forms that emerged in the cosmopolitan early ‘Abbasid period were illuminated Qur’ans in horizontal format, written in angular scripts frequently called “Kufic”, after the city of Kufa in Iraq; where the style is said to have originated. The crisp elegance of many of these scripts and the luxurious sophistication of illumination in the first centuries of the ‘Abbasid period have contributed to the notion that this was a “classical” age in the Qur’an production. The diffusion of Kufic styles throughout the Near East and the Mediterranean is visual testimony to the Dynasty, which stretched at its height from the Atlantic to the borders of China.

Antiquities
Ancient Near East