The historic Quran used to swear in Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s first Muslim mayor went on display this week at the New York Public Library.
Copied in Ottoman Syria during the late 18th or early 19th century, the Quran later belonged to Arturo Schomburg, a leading intellectual of the Harlem Renaissance and bibliophile whose extensive collection of African diasporic literature went on to become the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the NYPL’s Harlem branch. Exhibited as “the People’s Quran,” the book features no images, and script set down in black and, where structural divisions occur, red ink.
“The absence of opulent illumination suggests it belonged to an ordinary reader,” the library wrote.