15.10.2024 - 30.06.2025
Islamic Culture MuseumOn Friday, there is a break from 11:30 to 13:15.
The ticket office closes 30 minutes before the museum’s scheduled closing time.
Admission ticket | free of charge |
The exhibition centres on a gallery of 19th-20th century Qurans from Kazan, drawn from the collections of the Kazan Kremlin Museum-Reserve and the Scientific Library of Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University. These manuscripts showcase the remarkable diversity of artistic decoration and Arabic calligraphic styles in Quranic texts.
The second section presents unique rare objects from the collections of the Kazan Kremlin Museum-Reserve. Among them: a children’s Quran from Kazan (1803), a 1796 Quran printed in the final year of Catherine II’s reign, and antique Qurans produced by Kazan printing houses between 1803 and 1919.
A dedicated section explores scholarly research on Kazan’s Quran publications. The foundational research in this field was pioneered by Tatar theologians and educators Shihabuddin Marjani, Rizaetdin Fakhretdinov, and Musa Bigiev. Contemporary scholarship is represented by monographs from Russian Arabists Efim Rezvan and Nuriya Garayeva, Tatarstan’s Mufti Kamil Samigullin, and Iraqi professor Ghanim Kadhdhuri.
The final section traces the history of Kazan Qurans from 1930 to 2020. This includes the printing of Qurans by Tatar diasporas using Kazan’s typeset in Japan, Finland, and Turkey; the publication of Qurans in Soviet Russia; and the efforts of the Muslim Spiritual Board of Tatarstan to revive traditional Quran printing in Kazan during the 21st century.