Blue Qur’an (North Africa)

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

The Blue Qur’an, with its golden Kufic script set against indigo-dyed parchment, is not merely a sacred manuscript but a radiant technology of visibility and silence. From Foucault’s lens—particularly The History of Sexuality Vol. 3: The Care of the Self and his later writings on aesthetics and subjectivity—the Blue Qur’an emerges as a profound dispositif of ethical formation, where the relationship between self, text, and divinity is refracted through form, color, and calligraphic restraint.

In its visual austerity—angular Kufic script devoid of illustrative embellishment—the manuscript participates in what Foucault would call a regime of ethical stylization, a deliberate crafting of the self through spiritual practice. Here, reading becomes contemplation; recitation becomes cultivation. The gold script, materially reflective and cosmologically resonant, is an inscription not merely on vellum, but upon the soul. The indigo background suggests depth, infinity, the hidden—the ghayb, as Islam terms the unseen. This chromatic silence reflects Foucault’s notion of the ethics of distance, of not dominating but cultivating space for transformation.

The Blue Qur’an also embodies a Foucauldian aesthetics of existence—a visual practice by which the self becomes artwork. By restraining figuration, it does not impose imagery upon the believer but invites internal visualization, a sovereign intimacy between Word and Witness. It displaces visual consumption and instead constructs the Qur’an as an event of spiritual attention.

In Foucault’s terms, the Blue Qur’an can be interpreted as a heterotopia of purity—a sacred counter-site where the ordinary function of text (to communicate) is transfigured into a slow, sensorial technology of presence. The gold glyphs, mathematically spaced, render divine speech into the architecture of light and silence. In doing so, it enables the Muslim reader to participate in ethical parrhesia—truth-telling as a care for the self—through the visual rhythm of revelation.