Summary

Over the past six centuries, the way believers, theologians, and scholars in Europe have produced, received, and studied copies of the Qurʾanic text has evolved alongside changes in how the text is accessed, moving from manuscripts to replicas, and now to online platforms where the Qurʾanic text and related artifacts are digitally available. The investigation of the role and understanding of the Qurʾan—as an artifact—in Europe requires careful attention to its material form and significance during each specific period, from the Renaissance to the modern period.

The Qurʾan has been part of the religious culture of the Western Muslim territories since the beginnings of Islam, as it is expressed, for example, in the manuscript of the Qurʾan copied in the Muslim Palermo in 982–983 ce or the several Qurʾans in Kufic and round scripts written, for example, in Valencia, Seville, or Cordova. Then, it continued to be an object of religious faith copied among the last Muslim communities in modern Spain during the Moriscos periods from the 15th to the 17th century. As a Counter-Reformation measure, the Qurʾan was listed in the Catholic Indices of Prohibited Books in 1559, leading to a ban on both printed and manuscript versions in the Christian West. Similarly, Ottoman authorities banned the importation of printed books in Arabic script until 1588, and the printing and trade of the Qurʾan text in Muslim lands were considered illicit until the end of the 19th century.

In Europe, the Qurʾan was used as the basis for the study of the Arabic grammar by scholars in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The text was approached in its manuscript form with a paleographic and philological interest that was used mainly at the service of theology in a polemical context. In European history, it was only in the 17th to 18th century that the polemic discourse and philological interest were distinguished as two distinct disciplines. In institutions and private libraries, the presence of the Qurʾan as an artifact went hand in hand with the availability of Qurʾanic manuscripts, resulting from the fruit of collectors to war booty, with its richest period in the 19th and then 20th centuries, thanks to scholars and merchants who traveled to the Middle East. Europe as part of the World Wide Web has reached the peak of its connection with the Qurʾan as a material object in its cultural and artistic value thorough digital images and text since the 2010s.