New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday said that he took the oath during his inauguration using an 18th-century Quran copied in Ottoman Syria.
According to Mamdani, the manuscript belonged to Arturo Schomburg, a Puerto Rican-born Black scholar and bibliophile, who sold his collection of 4,000 books to the New York Public Library in 1926.
"This manuscript was copied in Ottoman Syria, and is written in black ink with red highlighting the text's divisions - no ornate decoration, it belonged to the everyday reader, and it now belongs to all New Yorkers as part of our City's next chapter," he said.
He underlined that citizens will be able to find the manuscript at the main branch of the New York Public Library, which opens its doors on Wednesday.
According to the library, Schomburg was the co-founder of Las Dos Antillas, a revolutionary anti-colonialist political organization that advocated for Cuban and Puerto Rican independence.
