‘Printed Manuscripts’: Tradition and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Nigerian Qur’anic Printing

This chapter provides a chronology of the printed editions of the Qur’an published in Nigeria, in the form of offset lithography, from the 1950s onwards. Reconstructing the history of these publications alongside an anthropological description of Qur’anic reading practices in Nigeria, the chapter raises questions related both to the aesthetics and to the economy of Qur’anic calligraphy. In answering these questions, the chapter stresses how a set of cultural and historical factors shaped the Nigerian Islamic book market to enable an old calligraphic art to thrive in the age of print. The flamboyant aesthetics of the Qur’anic ‘printed manuscripts’ of twentieth-century Nigeria is, rather than a simple residual legacy of an ‘ancient art’, the fruit of the encounter of the latter with a modern economy.