Qatar National Library, which opened in 2017 in Doha, is one of the cultural centres of the Islamic world. It houses around 4000 manuscripts in the Arabic language, a quarter of which are Quranic manuscripts.
The oldest of these dates from the I-II centuries of the Islamic calendar (VII and VIII centuries AD).
Tan Huism, Executive Director of Qatar National Library, told the International Quran News Agency (IQNA) in an interview that the Quran manuscripts were collected all over the Islamic world. The library features artifacts from Africa, China, India and South East Asia.
Qatar National Library holds a manuscript of the Quran called ‘Al Zubarah’, which is one of the most ancient mushafs written in Qatar.
The collection of Quranic manuscripts in Hijazi is called Qubbat al-Khazna (The Dome of the Treasury).
It is known that the first Quran was written in Kufic script, which was used until the XIX century AD. Then the Hijazi script began to spread, which was originally older than the Kufic script and existed in two variants: Medina and Mecca. Orientalists generalize these two types into one – ‘hijazi’.
The Qatar Library also holds hundreds of manuscripts of the Quran, written by Chinese Muslims in the XVII and XX centuries.
To date, between 700 and 800 manuscripts from Southern Asia have been registered, some from the XVII century and the vast majority from the XIX century. Qatar National Library has the privilege of keeping a magnificent manuscript of the Quran of the XIX century from Terengganu, Malaysia.
“Bihari” is the best known script used during the development of Islam in the Indian subcontinent. This tradition of writing the Quran was widespread between the XIV and the XVII centuries. Qatar Library has many manuscripts of this style of writing.
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