Hafiz

This engaging and often playful book is bound in a distinctive pale-pink cover inlaid with decorative motifs, including tiny, lyrical portraits of young girls in headscarves. Its design deliberately echoes the Qur’an, paying homage to the book’s subject.

Title: Hafiz
Original title: Hafiz
Author: Sabiha Çimen
ISBN: 978-1-7376814-0-3
Publisher: Red Hook Editions
Year: 2021

The Qur’an is the sacred and authoritative scripture of the Muslim world. Muslims believe that the Prophet Muhammad recited the text to his followers through divine revelation, and that they memorized and recorded it. The Prophet’s wife Hafsa memorized the entire text, inaugurating a tradition that Muslim women have sustained for 1,500 years. Someone who memorizes the Qur’an is known as a hafiz, an Arabic word meaning “guardian.”

Turkish Magnum photographer Sabiha Çimen entered a girls’ hafiz school at the age of thirteen. She and her twin sister studied there for three years, the average time required to memorize the Qur’an.

The Qur’an comprises 604 pages and 6,236 verses. Memorizing it demands discipline, devotion, and concentration. Upon graduating, a hafiz carries the wisdom of the scripture, becoming one of the Qur’an’s fortunate guardians and attaining an honored place both in the community and in the hereafter.

Çimen believes that making photographs requires empathy. She draws on her experience as a twin—the ability to be both herself and another person—to forge a direct connection with those she photographs.

Throughout the project, her central concern was to give empathy a photographic form.

Çimen’s intimate knowledge of hafiz schools allows her to add nuance to female narratives within her culture, while discovering her own potential through the camera.

Hafiz is a visual coming-of-age story, a glimpse into a sacred tradition, and a tribute to the young women who memorize the Qur’an for generations to come.

Her years at a hafiz school left a profound impression on Çimen, and in 2015 she began photographing these schools.

Although Çimen grew up with a strict religious education, her photographs reveal another side of Muslim life, one rarely seen in Western portrayals of Muslims.

Her tender, warm photographs challenge the dominant narrative of Muslim women as black-clad figures oppressed by men.

She shows that observing traditional Muslim beliefs and being a contemporary woman are not necessarily at odds.

Quiet yet visually arresting, the images include details from birthday parties, girls at play, and dreamlike portraits of the students.

From 2017 onward, she concentrated on working with a Hasselblad—the camera that first connected her to the medium of photography.

Like the relationships she builds with her subjects, shooting on film is a slow and absorbing process.

The photographs are at once biographical and poetic, combining portraits, still lifes, and spontaneous moments in the lives of Muslim girls memorizing the Qur’an.

During a visit, the photographer said: “This story offers a rare glimpse into a world normally hidden from, and off limits to, most people.”

“I wanted to portray the lives of these young girls during the intense years of their Qur’anic education.”

“My project is about these young women, about my twin sister and me, and about memories of the Qur’an. It explores and portrays the power concealed within the girls as they seek their individuality through small acts of resistance. For me, it is a form of autobiography.”

“My project chronicles the students’ daily lives at these schools, showing not only their journey toward becoming hafiz but also how they retain the same dreams and sense of adventure as other young women their age.”

“Through these photographs, I hope to give women the opportunity to speak for themselves and to prevent misunderstanding and misrepresentation of these underrepresented communities, particularly in Western media.”

“I hope to shed some light on, and offer insight into, the inner worlds of these young girls, who carry a profound responsibility as guardians of the Qur’an.”

“The project also explores the ways they break the rules and the pleasure they find in school life beyond their studies.”

“This project gave me the chance to see the person I once was.”

The photobook brought Çimen numerous honors, including the 2022 Aperture First PhotoBook Award, the 2020 World Press Photo award for long-term projects, and the 2020 W. Eugene Smith Grant. Çimen also went on to become a Magnum photographer.

The celebrated photographer Alec Soth also named it one of his ten best photobooks of 2022.

Video: Alec Soth introduces the photobook. Well worth watching.

Video: The photographer in her own words

Video: A flip-through of the winner of the 2022 Aperture First PhotoBook Award

Note: Images are reproduced from the photobook and remain the copyright of their original creator.

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