Engaged by the Qur’anic Tablet: Love, Magic, and Healing

Dr. Anastasia Grib, General Editor, A Guide to Islamic Calligraphy (www.khatt.ru, collaborative project with the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia) and former Postdoctoral fellow at the Material Text Cultures Centre, will present her current project “Engaged by the Qur’anic Tablet: Love, Magic, and Healing.”

The project investigates the Qur’anic tablet lawh as a key artefact of the Islamic culture. The main focus is iconography, historical evolution, and visual interpretations of the tablet in various media, past to present.

With likely origin in the Hijaz during the early period of the Islamic era, the Qur’anic tablet spread to Seljuk Iran, Timurid Central Asia, Mughal India, and Ottoman Turkey. Later it came to Egypt, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Africa. Thus, the tradition is over thousand years old. The tablet is a striking example of trans-cultural influence and continuation. On the one hand, it maintains the language of the Judeo-Christian artistic milieu; on the other hand, it incorporates this language into classic Islamic as well as local contexts.

The Qur’anic tablet has been a primary tool through which the calligraphers formulate the rules of their craft. Therefore, the very formation of the Islamic calligraphy is intertwined with the tablet. The image of the tablet appears in the miniatures illustrating the famous “Makamat” of Al-Hariri and “Gulistan” of Saadi. One also finds it in mystical love stories, such as “Layla and Majnun,” “Yusuf and Zulaykha,” “Varqa and Gulshah,” etc. Al-Jazari incorporated the tablet into mechanical healing devices.  

A living practice in the Islamic Africa today, the Qur’anic tablet continues to be organised around the same set of themes: traditional calligraphic education, healing, and gender.