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After capturing the city of Mosul in December 2014, the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) burned the university library destroying hundreds of thousands of books and manuscripts. The collections included Qur’ans, one of which was from the ninth century. Like other episodes of our times, this performance reflects a certain engagement with the Qur’an that revives historically rooted debates related to the materiality of scripture. The relation of the sacred text to its material form has always been shaped by the ways in which people have dealt with the text’s physical manifestations. If burning the Qur’an meant extracting sacrality out of the manuscript, the act certainly recalls the formation of a secular sphere in the museum context. A form of dematerialisation, the act also resonates with contemporary moments in which the sacredness of an object is transposed onto different realms and in which the meanings of artworks are negotiated, in and beyond Islamic communities.
This event is in collaboration with Middle Eastern Studies, Art History and Visual Culture, and Medieval Studies.
Alya Karame specialises in Islamic art and material culture. She is currently a research associate at the Orient-Institut Beirut and a fellow of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University. She is supported by the Paris Region award and will be pursuing her research at the Institut des civilisations at the Collège de France (2023-2024). Her book project (forthcoming 2024) on a forgotten corpus of medieval Qur’ans has been supported by numerous grants, including the Arab Funds for Arts and Culture. Karame was a Mellon Postdoctoral fellow at the American University of Beirut (2019-2020) where she also taught. 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.