Egyptian Artist Looks To Join Guinness Book of Records with Handwritten Quran

Saad Mohammed, an Egyptian artist, may be the next African to make it in to the Guinness World Records book for his extensive handwritten copy of the Quran, the Muslim holy book.

Mohammed’s intricately decorated copy of the Quran is written on a 700-meter (2,296 ft.) scroll. According to the BBC, the school-drop-out-turned-artist believes it is the world’s biggest handwritten Quran, and he hopes it gets an entry in to the Guinness book of records.

“This Quran is 700 metres long, and of course that’s a large amount of paper,” he told Reuters TV.

“I self-funded this project for the past three years, and I’m an average person. I don’t have assets or anything.”

Mohammed wants help from private and public entities to offset the costs of officially applying and submitting an entry to Guinness.

At his home in the town of Belqina, north of Cairo, Mohammed displays his Quran, which is contained in a large wooden box with rollers at the end.

At 700 meters, Mohammed’s Quran is only 300 meters shy of a kilometer, and when completely unfurled, it is about the length of seven football fields.

Guinness already has an existing record for the world’s biggest printed copy of the Quran; there is no record holder, though, for the largest handwritten version.

In 2012, a handwritten Quran — measuring more than 2.2 metres long and 1.55 meters wide with 218 pages of beautifully written text — was unveiled in Afghanistan.

The massive copy of the holy book, which weighed 500 kg. and took five years to create, was then wrapped in a leather cover created from the skins of 21 goats.

There appears to be no entry of it in the Guinness World Records.