25-year-old Hussain Al Kharsan has given himself the task of writing the longest copy of the Quran, Gulf news report on Friday. The young Iraqi says the scroll will be between 3.4 and 3.7 miles (5,500 and 6,000 metres long).
Kharsan says he hopes to break a new Guinness record by writing the world's longest copy of the Quran.
"At the beginning, the agreement was to finish the work in six months, on the basis of writing three pages out of 503 pages of the Quran every day," Al Kharsan told Gulf News.
"I succeeded at the beginning and worked for 16 hours a day for more than two weeks until I started suffering pains," he said. However it did not stop Kharsan from continuing.
"The doctor asked me to stop working for about a month but I refused and told him that I work with the blessings of the Quran. Now I take pain-killing pills and work for five hours a day, which means I need about a year to finish."
Al Kharsan's work will be displayed in Najaf, a city 160 km (roughly 100 miles) south of Baghdad.
Guinness World Records does not have any entries for the longest Quran, but the largest printed copy measures two metres (6.5 feet) high and 1.52 metres (4 feet, 11 inches) wide. The smallest copy, printed in Cairo in 1982 is 1.7 by 1.3 centimetres (0.66 by 0.5 of an inch).
