First coin to record Islamic phrase ‘There is no God but Allah’ expected to sell in set of 56 gold dinars for £500,000 at auction
Worldwide, Daily news | ankakh | April 15, 2013 16:16The first ever coin to record the famous Islamic phrase ‘There is no God but Allah’ is set to sell for hundreds of thousands of pounds when it goes under the hammer.
The historic gold dinar from 690 AD was minted in Damascus by the Umayyad dynasty – the first Arab empire, which stretched from Spain in the west to India in the east at the peak of its power.
The coin, which weighs 0.15oz and is slightly larger than a 5p piece, comes in a set of 56 gold dinars struck between 690 and 750 – expected to sell for £500,000 at auction next month.
Andre Di Clement, head of Islamic coins at central London auctioneers Baldwin’s, said: ‘What makes these coins so important is that they are from the first Arab empire.
‘These coins, and coins like these, would have been used to finance the building of the Umayyad empire. Each year a new coin was made.
‘It was a military campaign, where they conquered and converted people to Islam. They used to create the coins by melting down coinage from those they had conquered.’
The coins will be sold as part of a wider collection of Islamic coins by Baldwin’s on May 9. A similar collection of dinar coins from the same period sold for just under £1million in Switzerland last year.
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