Corpus Coranicum

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Corpus Coranicum is the name of a research project started in 2007 by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences . The main goals of the project are to document the Koran text "in its handwritten and oral form", to link individual Koran passages with Jewish, Christian and other corresponding texts from the context of the Koran and to provide a detailed commentary.

The 18-year project is headed by Angelika Neuwirth , Professor of Arabic Studies at the Free University of Berlin . The Corpus Coranicum is funded as part of the academies program, which is supervised by the Union of Academies of Sciences and Humanities and financed by the federal and state governments.

Project modules

The project essentially consists of three sub-projects (modules):

Text documentation

In the text documentation, a consistent distinction is made between written and oral tradition, i.e. between the early Koran manuscripts and the oral reading versions of the Koran text preserved in Islamic literature (see history of the Koran text ). Both traditions should be available online for every verse of the Koran and are therefore comprehensively recorded in two databases:

  • Manuscripta Coranica (database of Koran manuscripts)
  • Variae Lectiones Coranicae (database of different readings of the Koran )

One focus of work in the area of ​​"text documentation" is the digitization and analysis of the Gotthelf-Bergsträßer archive. It is by Gotthelf Bergsträsser and his successor Otto Pretzl in the 1920s and 1930s created collection of about 12,000 pictures of Koran manuscripts and Lesartenwerken in libraries in Europe and in the East, as the basis of a planned Bergsträßer Apparatus Criticus the Koran should serve . The project manager Neuwirth was entrusted with this photo archive by Anton Spitaler , who died in 2003. Spitaler had previously claimed that the extremely important archive was destroyed in a bomb attack in Munich in 1944 during World War II .

Database "Texts from the environment of the Koran"

This database documents linguistic and content-related "overlaps" between individual Koran passages and pre-Koranic texts that were or could have been present in its environment during the creation of the Koran . This includes in particular biblical and more recent Judeo-Christian writings as well as texts from ancient Arabic poetry. The Koran was created in a spiritual environment of late antiquity , on which such older texts had an impact and with which it deals (cf. intertextuality ). Research into the texts from the environment of the Koran allows conclusions to be drawn about the cultural and religious horizons of the contemporaries of Mohammed , to whom he communicated his revelations, and a better understanding of the Koran texts.

comment

The comment is based on the material from the other modules. The work on the commentary follows the presumed chronological order of the suras during the creation of the Koran text, based on the chronology developed by Theodor Nöldeke . The question is also asked to what extent Nöldeke's chronology should be revised and, if necessary, refined. The individual suras were created over a period of more than two decades, which is reflected in clear differences in content and form.

Example (1st sura, 2nd verse)

The following "tabs" can be selected on the website:

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Corpus Coranicum Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences
  2. ↑ Arnfrid Schenk: Islamwissenschaft: "The Koran is also a European text". In: Zeit Online . February 23, 2010, accessed on November 30, 2019 (interview with Angelika Neuwirth).
  3. ↑ See research projects in the academy program, further under Editions Theology , accessed July 10, 2015.
  4. ^ A b c Corpus Coranicum: Project presentation Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences
  5. ↑ Gotthelf-Bergsträßer-Archiv corpuscoranicum.de
  6. ↑ Andrew Higgins: The Lost Archive, The Wall Street Journal , January 12, 2008. (Limited preview. Google search for Andrew Higgins: The Lost Archive for the full text.)
  7. ^ Table of contents, excerpt, short interview with the author suhrkamp.de