Dr. Raha Rafii received her PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in Islamic jurisprudence and Arabic philology, and has also written on Orientalism in Islamic art museum exhibitions, manuscript acquisition, and the ethics of digitization. She is a lecturer at The New School.

What was the nature of the acquisition of Arabic and Persian manuscripts in the Philadelphia and New York areas during the era of industrialization, and how did social elites fundamentally shape the collections of museums, libraries, and academic institutions? I trace this phenomenon through a biography of a Quran manuscript in the University of Pennsylvania Museum, from its journey from medieval Iran and early modern Egypt to its final destination in Philadelphia after being sold to industry magnate Eldridge Johnson. Yet this Quran manuscript continued to be shaped and altered after its entry into the Penn Museum holdings through cataloguing, photography, art historical scholarship, and more recently, digitization. These processes both figuratively and literally dismembered the Quran manuscript in order to reform and conform it to Western academic and aesthetic concerns. The acquisition history of NEP-27, as the manuscript came to be known—as reflected in its provenance, the collecting practices of Philadelphia research institutions, and now worldwide digitization access—thus constitute a key and final element in understanding its role in the development of museum collections and Islamic art history, as well as a testimony to the concept of Western civilization itself.