Plants of the Quran: History & Culture by Shahina A. Ghazanfar, Illustrated by Sue Wickison

Plants of the Qur-an is the first book to examine the flora mentioned in this major religious text, illustrated with fifty vivid new paintings. The Qur'an is one of the world's foundational religious texts, a source of wisdom and spiritual guidance to the 1.8 billion adherents of Islam worldwide. It has been analyzed as a historic work of narrative art, an exemplar of classical Arabic poetry and prose, and a code for human morality, but one aspect of it has remained unexplored until now: the plants that are written about its pages.  Plants of the Qur'an is the first book to explore the plant life in this holy book. Looking at familiar flora like pomegranates, grapes, ginger, and garlic, Ghazanfar illuminates the contexts in which they're mentioned in the Qur'an: as food, medicine, beauty products, and even simple shade. She reframes the historical and cultural associations of the thirty plants featured most prominently, including citations of where the plant is mentioned in the Qur'an,