After the initial seventh-century conquest of the Middle East, an estimated half the world’s Christians fell under Muslim rule. The Qur’an identifies Christians as “People of the Book” by virtue of their possession of a written scripture and includes commands for their treatment as dhimmi, or protected people. Following 9/11, there was a flood of literature purporting to historicize the inevitable clash between “crescent and cross.” Recently, scholars have begun to focus on non-confrontational contact between the people of the two faiths in the early centuries of Islam. Scholarship on the interaction of the Christian Bible and Muslin Qur’an, however, has been largely limited to textual commonalities and contradictions. Comparative scholarship on the codices themselves has been limited to the theory that Muslims chose a horizontal (landscape) orientation for their written scripture as a means of differentiating the Qur’an from the vertical (portrait) orientation of Christian Bibles. This paper approaches Christian and Muslim written scriptures as material objects and as nodes of cultural intersection between the two faiths, and seeks to situate early Qur’an codices in the multi-confessional societies in which they were produced. During the eighth and ninth centuries, Qur’an production in the Middle East was remarkably stable and therefore provides firm and fertile ground for comparison to contemporary Christian biblical manuscripts. This paper is based on my study of several hundred Qur’an manuscripts, as well as digitized and published images of Byzantine Gospels and Lectionaries produced in the eighth through the tenth centuries. Even though Muslims exclude representations of humans, the similarities between Christian and Muslim scriptures are striking, including both ornamental elements as well as page layout, and, in particular, the use of negative space. Such resemblances strongly suggest bibliographic influences between the two communities. While the absence of colophons as well as the intrinsic mobility of books make it impossible to determine the exact circumstances in which these Qur’ans were produced, the material evidence found in the codices is buttressed by textual evidence. Abd al-Razzaq (d. 826), Abu Ubayd (d. 838), and Ibn Abi Dawud (d. 928) all include in their literary works eighth-century legal debates on the probity of Christians copying Qur’an manuscripts as well as the rectitude of adding ornament to the books, which is common in biblical texts. My paper argues that embedded in both the debates and the codices is tantalizing evidence of remarkable cross-cultural interaction in early Islamic Qur’an production.