Cover for a Qur'an

This Qur’an case pendant is made of bronze, silver, and copper, measuring 9.2 by 9.2 centimeters. It was purchased in Morocco in 1999 by Labelle Prussin (Ph.D., Yale, 1973), an architect and Africanist scholar, and donated to the Yale University Art Gallery in 2011. The case consists of two decorated faces—one bronze, one silver—joined by a metal strip and sealed with a removable lid. Two copper-ring lugs on the sides allowed the case to hang from a cord across the shoulder or chest. The bronze face features a diagonal grid with four-petaled floral motifs characteristic of Imazighen ornamental traditions, while the silver face displays flowing arabesques and vegetal scrollwork influenced by Arab and Andalusian decorative vocabularies. Its square format corresponds to the dimensions of miniature Qur’ans produced in North Africa and Andalusia from the eleventh through sixteenth centuries, suggesting that it was designed to hold and provide access to a pocket-sized sacred text.

Most closely associated with the Ida Ou Nadif peoples of the Souss-Massa region, where Imazighen, Arab, and Jewish communities sustained relationships of exchange and craft production, this pendant embeds cross-cultural synthesis within a single wearable object. In nineteenth-century Morocco, Sufism was deeply woven into daily religious life, and central to this world was the concept of baraka, a divine blessing that could pass from sacred texts to those who held them. A Qur’an sealed in a metal case and worn against the body transferred its baraka through contact, enacting what Heather Coffey has termed “textual intimacy,” the maintenance of physical closeness to the sacred text as an act of devotion.

Sources:

Berthold, Cornelius. “The Word of God in One’s Hand: Touching and Holding Pendant Koran Manuscripts.” Das Mittelalter 25, no. 2 (2020): 338–357.

Coffey, Heather. “Between Amulet and Devotion: Islamic Miniature Books in the Lilly Library.” In The Islamic Manuscript Tradition, edited by Christiane Gruber, 78–115. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

“Northern Africa and the Sahel.” In Speaking of Objects: African Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, edited by Constantine Petridis. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2020.