Albanian offers heirloom mini-Koran for sale

Skender Halim Prushi holds a small Koran, measuring 26.8 mm long by 21.6 mm wide, with thickness of 10.9 mm and weighing 5.2 grams, in his hand at his home in the northern Albania town of Lac some 55 km (34 miles) from Tirana November 15, 2006. The tiny Koran has been with the Prushi family for generations, but now he wants to sell it to a museum either in the Arab world or the West. REUTERS/Arben Celi

This is a rather unusual story through Yahoo News. It is an interesting religious artifact--if you can call it an artifact. What I will say is that someone took a lot of time and effort to create a the Koran this small. Wait a minute--does Christianity have a tiny Bible as well?

LAC, Albania (Reuters) - Skender Prushi always keeps the tiny Koran in his trouser pocket for safekeeping. Before opening it, he washes his hands and puts the book on his forehead and on his heart.

The book, which is 2.68 cm long, 2.16 cm wide and 1.09 cm thick, has been in his family for generations. Now 64 years old, Prushi wants to keep a promise he gave his father 26 years ago and send the Koran to a museum worthy of its holiness and value.

"Men in my family never lived past 70, and my children and my brother's children did not come under the full influence of religion," said the chain-smoking Prushi.

"So I am ready to sell the Koran at an auction. I'd be happy if it went to a museum either in the Arab or the Western world."

The book is held in small blackened silver case with a miniature magnifying glass on one side.

Visitors who come to this impoverished industrial town to see it are gently asked to wash their hands with raki, the Albanian brandy, before leafing through the gold filigree cover.

Prushi's Koran has 418 pages and is less than half the size of a matchbox. The smallest Koran, according to the website of the Guinness World Records, was published in Cairo in 1982 and measures 1.7 cm by 1.28 cm by 0.72 cm and has 571 pages.

Prushi said there are two legends about the book's origin. The first speaks of a relative who was a soldier schooled in Arabia and brought the book back in the 17th century.

The other says that Prushi's forefathers, then Catholics, were digging the foundations for a new house in the Djakovica region, in present-day
Kosovo, when they found the perfectly preserved body of a man buried there.

"They found the Koran over his heart," Prushi said, "I'm telling it as I heard it".

UNDERGROUND HIDING PLACE

Since then, the family converted to Islam, producing several high ranking Muslim clerics. Skender Prushi's father Halim, an officer of Albania's King Zog in the 1930s, knew Arabic.

He kept the book on himself as a talisman, reading from it to family and trusted friends even after the Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha banned religion in the late 1960s.

After his father's death in 1980, Prushi became the Koran's guardian. He had to smuggle it out of Albania two years later, after he showed it to an Iranian couple working for the Persian service of Radio Tirana, the country's world-wide service.

"I told them I had a small-sized Koran. The man kissed it, put it to his heart and told me it belonged to the Arab world, not Albania. He said I did not know what immense value it had and that I would never have to work in my life if I gave it up," Prushi said.

He says the conversation must have been watched by Hoxha's notorious Sigurimi secret service. A month later four men knocked on his door, saying they wanted to buy the Koran and put it in a museum.

He denied its existence, and the next day jumped on a relative's coal truck heading for the Kosovo border. By midnight, the Koran was in safe hands in the Teke (Islamic monastery) in the historic Kosovo town of Prizren.

A day later, the secret police stormed Prushi's house looking for the book.

For the next two decades the Koran was stored underground. It was spared the violence that tore through Kosovo in the wars of the 1990s and was later dug out and kept with other valuable manuscripts in the Teke's library.

Prushi went to Prizren for the book last month and is now pondering its fate. Sitting in his modest living room, the only picture on the walls a magazine cutout of a young bride, he said selling the book would set him up for life.

"I don't know its value, but I have read in a book that it's one of only five copies in the world," Prushi said.