What defines a work of art as a masterpiece? What elements make it appreciated as an artistic achievement? And who decides which manuscripts stand the test of time? In Arabic, the term tuḥfa connotes an ideal object, the complete, unique and skilful craftsmanship, a rare gift, signifying a difficult and accomplished artistic achievement. These notions seem to be essential for both the creation and the selection of distinguished Qur'an manuscripts (maṣāḥif, sing. muṣḥaf). Art historians specialised in the Qur'an narrate stories of these manuscripts through their palaeographic, codicological and art historical research. The choices of which manuscripts to study have been limited by their survival and accessibility but are often justified based on the basis of the historical and aesthetic significance of the chosen manuscripts including their high patronage. As their path to fame is paved, these are nominated as masterpieces; they become immortal, a development with implications not only for current scholarship but also for their perceived status, economic value in the art market, and related collecting practices.
Research on individual Qur'anic manuscripts and their recognition as masterpieces - either as dispersed leaves or bound folios - have been on the rise, with numerous articles identifying their styles of script and illumination while contextualising them within their milieu of production often including the religious, devotional or aesthetic ideas that helped shape them. More recently, there has been interest in bringing together scholars with different specialisations to study one single Qur'an manuscript in order to offer a more holistic understanding of an individual Qur'an, while also framing its production within transregional or transtemporal artistic networks.
This conference aims at exploring what has been gained and what may have been lost in the process of producing Qur'an manuscript stardom. It is an invitation to rethink the writing of the history of the Qur'an through the phenomenon of 'star' manuscript creation. To reevaluate the modes of cultural and artistic production that permitted such judgment, in history and in modern scholarship, is to open space for examining the constitutive elements that made, and makes one Qur'an manuscript recognised more than another. As much as this conference is concerned with what established the manuscript as tuḥfa, it suggests a need to broaden the discussion beyond questions of aesthetic styles - their continuities and ruptures, their contextualisation and circulation - towards different enquiries that may inform our modern understanding of artistic or cultural value, and associated concepts such as original, forgery, appropriation and the construction of myth. It is equally a call to complicate the narratives we tell of Qur'ans in ways that may reverberate with the writing of Islamic art history more generally.
