Description: 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.
Brief description: Alya Karame is a Research Associate at the Orient-Institut Beirut. She specialises in Islamic art and material culture, with a focus on manuscript studies. In 2023, she was a fellow of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University to be later supported by the Paris Région award to pursue her research at the Institut des civilisations at the Collège de France. Her work has been supported by numerous grants, including the Arab Funds for Arts and Culture and the Andrew Mellon foundation (2019-2020). She was at the Khalili Research Centre at the University of Oxford, the recipient of the Barakat Trust award (2018-2019) and prior to that she joined the Kunsthistorisches Institut research program in Florence Connecting Art Histories in the Museum and was based at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin (2017-2019). Karame obtained her PhD in 2018 in Islamic Art History from the University of Edinburgh and her MA in History of Art & Archaeology from the School of Oriental and African Studies.
Review Quotes: The Forgotten Qur'ans is a compelling survey of aesthetics in the service of piety that offers a transformative perspective on calligraphy and the material Qur'an. It illuminates a neglected tradition of artistic creativity in the book arts of the Ghaznavid and Ghurid sultanates of Afghanistan, no less dynamic and innovative than that witnessed in their spectacular architectural projects. Challenging the hegemony enjoyed by a few select cities in standard histories of Islamic art, the book questions established notions of centre and periphery, inviting us to reconsider their legacies to the field.--Finbar Barry Flood, New York University