KARACHI, July 21: Thousands of people flocked to the Defence Central Library on Sunday where an exhibition of 900 rare and valuable copies of the Quran entered its second day.

The exhibition is organized by the Memon Khidmat Forum, Quran Foundation, Khalikdina Hall Library Association and Students’ Welfare Organization.

The pieces de resistance of the show were the heaviest and the smallest copies of the Quran ever penned: the former weighs around two tons and latter is barely one inch long.

A volunteer of the administrative committee told Dawn that it had taken the Lahore-based writer, Mohammad Basheer Ambalvi, 40 years to pen the copy of the Quran. He added that the writer was currently working on a four-tonmanuscript.

Placed along the heaviest copy was the smallest copy of the Quran which can only be read with the magnifying glass.

A copy of the Quran that attracted a large number of admirers was the one written on cloth. The border of each page of another 350-year-old copy of the Quran was covered with gold. Some manuscripts were written with sapphire, ruby and gold.

According to the volunteer, some extremely yellowed pages of the Quran, placed in one corner of the hall, were at least 800 years old. It had the impressions of the rings of Hazrat Ali and his descendants. Next to it was another 600-year-old handwritten copy of the Quran.

The volunteer explained that the reason why most old copies of the Quran were swaddled in plastic sheets was that they would come apart if not properly handled.

There were several copies of the Quran whose every line begins with a certain alphabet. Similarly in other copies the first and last line begin with a certain alphabet. There was another copy of the Quran written in Braille.

The volunteer pointed to a rare copy of the Quran whose 23 parey (chapters) were written out of the first nine parey written by the writer’s father.

A large number of copies were written in foreign languages — Indonesian, Russian, Hindi, Turkish-Azeri, Spanish, Bengali, Thai, Malyalam, Somali, Albani, German, Eriterian, Persian, Greek, Turkish, Uzbek and English.

Similarly, in the regional languages the copies of the Quran were also available in Brahvi, Balti, Sindhi, Punjabi, Gujrati and Urdu.

In one corner of the room, there were 99 attributes of Allah written on eggs. Similarly, Huroof-i-Muqatiyat were also written on eggs. There were specimens of different types of scripts on display. New Quranic softwares were also on display.