LONDON.- As part of the curated part of the fair, Shapero Rare Books will be staging an exhibition of Qur'ans on its stand, dating from the 7th to 19th Century examples.

Highlight of the selling exhibition is a relic of the early period in Islam, an important witness to the earliest Qur'anic Manuscripts that will have been copied only about 50 years after the Prophet Muhammad died in the 7th century AD. It has an asking price of Euro 1,000,000 (£850,000) and comes to the market from the library of a private UK collector.

This early Qur'an folio is written in Hijazi script, meaning it originated from the geographical region of the Hijaz in the Arabian Peninsula. This was the area in which the Prophet Muhammad unified the Arabian tribes with Islam in the early 7th century, and includes Mecca and Medina. The earliest examples of the Qur’an were written in Hijazi script and this period also marks a very important milestone in the evolution of the Arabic language and its development in written form.

This parchment is a fine early example and these manuscripts were instrumental in the birth of Islam and how the religion spread from Mecca across several continents. The majority of surviving Hijazi Qur’an fragments are in the form of single leaves currently housed in a small number of museums, libraries and private collections worldwide and they very rarely come to the open market.

Roxana Kashani, Shapero's Near East & Islamic specialist, stresses that "it is a real privilege to be able to offer one of these early manuscripts to the market in Abu Dhabi. The formalisation of the written Arabic language along with the developments in the aesthetics of manuscript production in the 8th century firmly places our manuscript in the 7th century making it one the very earliest examples of Qur'anic script".

Other highlights include a fine miniature Qur'an in the shape of a leaf, which is from the mid-19th Century and either of Iranian or Indian origin. It is truly enchanting in an unusual decoupé leaf-shaped style with jagged edges on dark green paper. Much of the Islamic book arts have focused on the decoration of the page of its most fundamental text, the Qur'an. Here the artisans went one step further and employed the physical shape of that page as part of the book's decoration and message. While the Tuba tree is not actually mentioned in the Qur'an, it is commonly believed to be that which grows in Janna, the Islamic understanding of Paradise, and its leaves stand behind the shape of the delicate leaves in this unusual codex. The use of silver and the presentation of the entire Qur'an in two tiny columns which mimic the veins of a real leaf, point to the quality of this manuscript and the wealth of the patron who commissioned it. Only three comparable Qur'ans have appeared on the open market in the last few years and it carries an asking price of £30,000.

Another fine example included in the selling exhibition is a South-East Asian Qur'an, probably from Indonesia and from the first half of the 19th Century. It is a rare complete example and copied on Dutch watermarked paper (£12,500).

Shapero Rare Books will also be bringing a selection of Western materials including a very rare, complete Richard Temple Sixteen Views of Places in the Persian Gulph (£300,000) as well as other works on Arabian travel, but also a selection of pillarstone texts of European Classics.