Topkapi Qur’an (Baghdad)

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

The Topkapi Qur’an, often identified as one of the oldest surviving complete Qur’anic manuscripts from the Abbasid era, exudes an aesthetic of restraint, precision, and contemplative detachment. It is neither flamboyant nor embellished with figural richness like later Persianate manuscripts; rather, its power lies in a measured sobriety that—through the Foucauldian lens—marks it as a deeply ethical artifact within the regime of self-care and subject formation.

In The History of Sexuality Vol. 3: The Care of the Self, Foucault turns our attention to the ancient techniques by which individuals made their lives into works of art—through deliberate practices of the self. The Topkapi Qur’an can be read as a material form of that ethical practice: it is not merely a vessel for the transmission of divine instruction, but a disciplined field upon which the ethical subject emerges through reading, recitation, and the cultivation of presence.

The Kufic script in this Qur’an is austere, with wide horizontal spacing and sparse diacritics. This is not a defect but a philosophical invitation. As in Foucault’s aesthetics of existence, the form of life is what matters. The slowness required to read such script enforces a pedagogy of patience, and the absence of illustrative distraction cultivates an ethic of restraint—both qualities integral to the Islamic ideal of taqwa (God-consciousness), which parallels Foucault's notion of the self vigilantly curating its own transformations.

Moreover, the Topkapi Qur’an becomes a technology of subjectivation in its most literal sense. It neither offers visual spectacle nor narrative imagery. Instead, it produces the believer as subject through the performance of reading. Every line and glyph is a step in the spiritual exercise that Foucault would liken to askēsis—training, not for a body, but for a soul attuned to divine order.

From Foucault's broader theory of power/knowledge, this Qur’an resists the visual hegemony of Western manuscript culture and instead mobilizes power through abstraction and discipline, not spectacle. In this, it functions like a cloister: confining the gaze to the essential, training the mind to see beyond the visible.