The discovery, among the manuscripts held by the University of Birmingham, of some of the oldest surviving fragments of the Qur’an – perhaps made within 20 years of the prophet Muhammad’s death – is a cause for celebration. From 2 October they will be on public view in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, seen in the context of everything from early Arab-Byzantine coins to masterpieces of western art: Rubens and Renoir; Roubiliac and Reynolds.
The pages are part of the Mingana collection. Alphonse Mingana, who was born in what is now northern Iraq in 1878, was a member of an Assyrian Christian community that uses Aramaic, the language of Christ – a people that has suffered many reversals, from killings by Turkish soldiers in 1915 to the recent onslaught of Islamic State. He came to Birmingham’s Woodbrooke, the Quaker college, in 1913, and was later sponsored by the philanthropist (and scion of chocolatiers) Edward Cadbury to visit the Middle East. He returned with treasures including a text on symbolism for Sufi poets, Indian animal fables, an Ottoman astrological calendar, bilingual Coptic and Arabic texts from Egypt, medieval Syrian versions of the gospels and a 17th-century Persian Life of the Prophet. The point was to amass a collection that, from the myriad histories woven through its pages, would foster understanding between faiths. When complexity is at risk from blunt and simplistic narratives on all sides, the legacy of Mingana’s collection, these Qur’anic pages included, is especially precious.
