Qur'anic Matters

In <i>Qur'anic Matters </i>Natalia Suit explores the materiality of books focusing on the <i>mushaf</i>. With its paper binding ink and script the <i>mushaf</i> is not simply a carrier of the Qur'anic text but by the virtue of its material body it also has the ability to engender reformulations of religious knowledge and practice. Reading the Qur'an on a screen of a phone for example does not require the same forms of ritual ablutions as reading a printed text. The rules of purity limiting the access to the Qur'anic text for menstruating woman change when the Qur'anic text is mediated by digital bytes instead of paper.<br/><br/><i>Qur'anic Matters</i> spans the time between two important technological shifts-the introduction of printed Qur'anic books in Egypt in the early nineteenth century and the digitization of the Qur'an almost two centuries later. Throughout Natalia Suit weaves together the theological legal economic and social presences of the Qur'anic books into a single account. She argues that the message and the materiality of the object are not separate from each other nor are they separate from the human bodies with which they come in contact.