The Qur'an in its historical context (pdf - Islam and Christian-Muslim ...

THE QUR’AN IN RECENT SCHOLARSHIP
as we have seen. To address these orthographic issues we need, ideally, to examine
all early manuscripts of the Qur’an, and to compare them with other important
epigraphic and palaeographical sources for early Arabic orthography. We can
hope that this will help us to understand, finally, just how the text was originally
written, how it was recited, and the relationship of the “Ur-Qur’anic” orthography
to the orthographic traditions for writing Arabic current just before and during the
time of Muhammad.
The most effective way to enable scholars to do this would be to establish QMD,
containing a high-quality scanned image of every known early Qur’an leaf –
anything prior to perhaps the third or fourth century AH. (It should, of course,
also include other early Arabic inscriptions and documents.) The thousands of
photographs of early Qur’ans collected in the 1930s by Bergsträsser, once thought
to have perished during the bombing of Munich in the Second World War, are
according to some rumors still in existence, perhaps in Berlin, and if so, they
should be incorporated into this database until better, color scanned images of
the original manuscripts can be secured. Photographs of the San‘a’ Qur’an manuscripts
should also be posted on this site. This would finally permit researchers
readily to examine all the evidence for orthographic questions as they arise. Note
that the goal of the project is not to embark on analysis of the texts themselves,
which would take many years, but simply to make available all the relevant
information so that others could begin to make such analyses on their own.
There are at least three important advantages to this project, which we can
summarize under the rubrics “security,” “real-time availability,” and “flexibility.”
a While most precious early Qur’an leaves are held in well-maintained library or
museum collections, not all are so secure. In any case, their very nature as unique
documents means that the irreplaceable information they contain is vulnerable to
intentional or unintentional loss. The possibility of fire, flood, theft, or other
mishap can never be dismissed even for well-maintained collections, as the recent
sad fates of documents in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin in the 1980s,
the library of the Institute of Islamic Studies in Sarajevo in the 1990s, and the
libraries and museums of Baghdad in the 2000s, make all too clear. One advantage
of the project, then, is that the textual (orthographic) information on every
early Qur’an leaf would be preserved in digital form and, therefore, secured from
loss even if the original document were to perish.
b Another advantage is that the information entered into the database would
become available for scholars to use very quickly. As opposed to formal publication
of printed facsimile volumes, which could easily consume years to prepare
and would be expensive to print (and hard to sell!), large-size, high-resolution
color images of individual Qur’an leaves could be scanned and mounted on the
site relatively quickly once permission had been obtained. Moreover, the site
would be cumulative; at first relatively few historic Qur’ans might be illustrated,
but with time the collection would become more and more comprehensive. In any
case, scholars could begin working with what was available on-line, and would
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