In recent decades much innovative and impactful scholarship on the Quran’s history has been lifted by the appearance of scattered Quranic manuscript folios on the art market. These fragments are often unprovenanced. In some cases, it has been possible to connect them to library collections, suggesting they were subtracted from the holding institution; in other cases, simply not enough information is available about the objects' finding and ownership chain. By incorporating unprovenanced folios into their research, experts in Islamic studies have been able to create new knowledge and insights about Quranic history and codicology, fueling discussions about the text's transmission and codification. The art market, thus, has provided scholars in Islamic studies with important source materials. At the same time, the circulation and sale of such folios is also incentivized by the interest of experts, for whom rare manuscripts represent an opening onto complex debates. In the case of the Quran, the relationship between those two worlds has also fed sensationalist discourses around the history of the text. The art market ensures the perceived rarity of such specimens, while scholarship on the Quran develops research questions around that very rarity. Moreover, media coverage shows that there is broad interest in Quranic manuscripts as objects of study, going beyond as well as attracting the attention of individual collectors. This contribution proposes to trace the symbiotic relationship between the contemporary art market and recent scholarship on the Quran. It considers various methods employed by scholars to access scattered folios and draws from three case-studies: the “Sana'a' palimpsest”, a Coptic-Arabic palimpsest, and Quranic folios in the so-called “Afghan Genizah”. It argues that the field's research questions and methods have been influenced in important ways by its relationship not only with the art market, but also with the illicit trade in ancient manuscripts. In some ways this relationship might continue to be beneficial to both worlds (i.e., scholarship and art market) in the future. However, it is important to highlight how it operates to understand its implication for, on the one hand, research methods and agendas and, on the other hand, concrete attempts at curbing the illicit trade affecting the Middle East's documentary and manuscript cultures.