Eid al Fitr, or the Festival of Breaking the Fast, is when Muslims around Aotearoa and the world celebrate the end of Ramadan, the month of dawn-to-sunset fasting. The Ramadan festival honours the revealing of the Qu’ran to the prophet Muhammad.
In the Museum’s collections, we hold this leather satchel and unbound Qu’ran, with handwritten calligraphic and illustrated pages in black, red, and yellow. This innovative style of Qu’ran is commonly associated with the Hausa people of Northern Nigeria, designed with accompanying satchel (gafaka in Hausa language) for ease when travelling. The lack of binding means that the elaborately decorated pages can be studied individually, and also shared with others for memorising. Still made today by calligrapher scholars, this Qu’ran is an early 20th Century example of the manuscript culture of North East Nigeria in Muslim Africa. A description of the contemporary making of this type of manuscript is detailed in The Arts and Crafts of Literacy: Islamic Manuscript Cultures in Sub-Saharan Africa (2017).
This particular Qu’ran was donated to the Museum in 1928 by J R Adams-Wilkes, a New Zealander who worked as a colonial administrator in Nigeria. If you have any information about the history of this type of Qu’ran, we’d love to hear from you.