No 63

‘While I was an undergraduate at university, we often worked on academic paintings. I found it a bit dull to use the same techniques that painters had already been employing for centuries, so I started painting on silk instead – I wanted to create a style that was new and my own. My work was well received, and since I enjoyed doing it, I just carried on.’

‘I wouldn’t have wanted to do the same thing again if someone had already done it’.

‘The Qur’an project was the most important thing for me at the time, but even so, I didn’t neglect my education, of course; I worked on architectural projects as well.’

‘If a woman wishes to make a copy of the Qur’an herself, then she usually has to cover her head first. I also covered mine this way as it’s customary here. Apart from that, you need to wash yourself in a specific religious ritual.’

‘I didn’t have to learn it again as I use it in my pictures. I can read Arabic, but I don’t understand what the words actually mean’.

‘Obtaining all the material I needed turned out to be very costly, so I decided to make a smaller version of it instead.’

‘When I started producing pictures on silk, I discovered that gold and silver look perfect on a black silk background. I wrote the text in golden letters and used silver to number the suras and draw the ornamental elements on each page. The colours I use are special ones designed especially for fabric. Since I’ve been using these paints in my pictures for a long time now, I know they won’t cause any problems or damage to the material.’

‘The silk is stretched in a frame, and the lettering or pictures are then applied with brushes made of natural materials. Sometimes the text is sketched lightly on the silk first, but not always. To make the Qur’an, the pages were each cut to size by hand and then the edges of them were unravelled carefully, painted and ornamented. Once that was done, I wrote the suras on the silk sheets, but without stretching them in a frame this time.’

‘I made mistakes on three pages, so I had to write those again. I didn’t have any other slip-ups apart from that, though. If you make a mistake as you write, you have to do the whole thing again on a new page because you can’t just wipe paint off silk. It’s the same with all my pictures on silk, too. Silk isn’t very forgiving when it comes to writing and drawing on it.’

‘In Diyanet’s edition, all the marks are there, but I decided not to copy them because I wanted to rule out the possibility of getting the vowel characters mixed up in the very small handwriting. I didn’t think there was any issue there as the very first Qur’ans we know of didn’t use any marks or dots either.’

‘I decorated the titles of the suras and the numbers of the ǧuzʾ, which are the thirty equally long sections into which the Qur’an is divided. I didn’t just copy all the decorative elements completely, but made some changes to some of them.’

‘[The silk Qur’an] can be read, of course, and it has actually been read a number of times already. After being read and approved by Diyanet in Azerbaijan, I was given official permission to show it to the general public. First of all, it was exhibited in Azerbaijan, which is my home country. But we also received requests to display the manuscript in other countries as well.’

‘Of course I get criticised. You can’t please everyone, can you? It’s perfectly normal to be criticised. But silk is a material that’s actually mentioned in the Qur’an. Once I found that out, I didn’t have any reservations about doing the project.’