Corpus Coranicum

▶ L'authenticité du texte coranique repose sur l'efficacité de la tradition orale islamique, qui aurait permis de le transmettre à l'identique depuis la mort du prophète de l'islam

▶ La découverte de manuscrits coraniques anciens met en cause la plausibilité du récit de cette transmission orale, en montrant par des preuves matérielles que le texte coranique a subi tout un processus d'écriture, de correction et de réécriture

▶ L'étude critique de la tradition orale supposée qui aurait permis la transmission des hadiths révèle en fait que l'on a à faire non à une tradition orale mais bel et bien à une tradition écrite

▶ Le Coran et la tradition de l'islam procèdent en fait d'un processus d'écriture centralisée, dirigé par le pouvoir califal.

Aspects of Mary’s presence in Islam. From Koranic references to popular devotion and from mysticism to iconography. The figure of Mary is certainly the scriptural and theological point where Christianity and Islam converge. It has raised the scholars’ interest only since the mid XIX century which has seen a flourishing of translations and researches which has increased in the last years. There is still much to say in the field of spiritual and mystic theology – even on comparative terms – when we observe the key role Mary has assumed in Islamic Sufism.

“Under the cover of an islam that has been distorted by ignorantists, some fanatics, corruptors of the faith, who are at ease with ignominy, commit the worst crimes against God and humanity. By distorting Islâm and all the universal, moral values, they are cultivating discord, hatred of others, violence and sectarianism. Although it is undeniable that these demonic criminals target and threaten civilisation as a whole, Muslims are the first victims of their theories and their nightmarish practices.” (Farid Gabteni)

The Sun Rises in the West by Farid Gabteni is published in two volumes: Science for the Hour and Programmed Coincidence. Each of the volumes features a preface by a doctor in history and philosophy of science, the first by Doctor Fouzia Madani and the second by Doctor Ismaël Omarjee.

This scientific treatise, extended to all Quranic Readings, is a pathbreaking masterpiece and constitutes a rigorous and irrefutable argument against obscurantism. It restores likewise the original Message of Islam to both Muslims and non-Muslims.

Science, conscience, peace and tolerance: these are the Quran’s and of Islam’s form and content, masterly exposed by the author of the book, through an applied and demonstrative study.

The Arabic graffiti of the early decades of Islam, in Arabia and in the Middle East, represent an inexhaustible source of information on the origins of Muslim society. Recent discoveries have revealed that among thousands of graffiti written by anonymous people some few inscriptions are mentioning the names of famous and well-known persons. Among them we find some caliphs who were the direct successors of the prophet Muḥammad like ʿUmar b. al-Ḫaṭṭāb and ʿUṯmān b. ʿAffān. Among the inscribers, we also have mentions of some Umayyad rulers and princes who left their names on the stones, as well as famous companions from the first generations of scholars who reported some traditions from the prophet. These texts are showing that Islamic graffiti are not only religious texts but they also have an historical and political weight particularly when we consider that some of them were engraved just before or during the first civil war (fitna).

In recent decades the Qur'an has been the subject of increasing interest among scholars in the Muslim world as well as in the West. One of the most important issues raised by researchers pertains to its textualization –that is, how the Qur'an was transformed from oral tradition into the written text as we have it today; how the Revelation was received and recorded, circulated and passed down from generation to generation, in both the ancient way of memorization and through the methods of reading and writing, as rigorously and accurately as it should be. Although initially the contents of the Qur'an were widely distributed in the memories of men (i.e. the Prophet and his Companions), they were also written down piecemeal on various materials. The compilation and codification of the Qur'an was accomplished under the authority of Caliph Abu Bakr, and the standard codex (al-mushaf al-imâm) was produced during the Caliphate of Utsman in order to bring consensus among the Muslim community both with regard to recitation and orthography (al-Rasm al-'Uthmâni). Given its paramount importance in Islam, the history of Qur'anic text will remain of perennial interest to both Muslim and non-Muslim researchers as it could be manipulated, distorted or exploited by those pursuing their own goals for polemical or political reasons. The present article addresses such concerns with a view to separating the wheat from the chaff in the textual history of the Qur'an.

El objetivo de este estudio es demostrar la estrecha relación que media entre dos de los manuscritos que actualmente se conservan de la traducción latina del Corán de Robert de Ketton (1142-1143), y la figura de Juan de Segobia (1390/5-1458), quien desde 1437 había estudiado esta versión del Corán hasta que él mismo, con la colaboración de un alfaquí hispano, elaboró una nueva traducción. Tras exponer las noticias que Juan de Segobia ofrece sobre los ejemplares del Corán latino que poseyó, se esboza una ordenación general de la tradición manuscrita del Alchoran de Robert de Ketton, que se divide en dos familias, α (la de los códices más antiguos) y β (la de los más recientes, derivados de un manuscrito traído en 1437 desde Constantinopla a Basilea por Johannes de Ragusio). La comparación entre la redacción que ofrece un grupo de manuscritos de la familia α (muy en particular, la del códice Paris BNF lat. 3393) con las variantes presentes en los códices de la familia β y en la propia...

Der Koran wird uns noch in vielen Folgen begegnen, weswegen es gleich in der dritten Folge um diesen Text, sein Entstehungsumfeld, seine Form und Funktionen geht.
Wie praktisch, dass es genau dazu ein Projekt der Berlin Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften gibt: die Arbeitsstelle Corpus Coranicum. Hier bin ich zu Gast beim Leiter, Michael Marx, der uns Einblicke in das Projekt und den Koran als Text der Spätantike gibt: Was genau macht das Projekt? Was zeigen uns die ältesten Handschriften? Welche anderen Texte braucht man, um den Koran besser zu verstehen? Wie unterscheidet er sich von der Bibel? Wie wurde er überliefert, übersetzt und und und…

Zum Weiterlesen hier einige Empfehlungen:

    Für den Einstieg von Prof. Dr. Michael Cook: „Der Koran. Eine kleine Einführung.„
    Von Prof. Dr. Angelika Neuwirth sehr umfassend: „Der Koran als Text der Spätantike. Ein europäischer Zugang.“
    Von Michael Marx:  “Der Korantext als Herausforderung”, in: G. Dane/J. Jungmayr/M. Schotte (Hrsg.), Wege zur Weltliteratur. Komparatistische Perspektiven der Editionswissenschaft. (Berliner Beiträge zur Editionswissenschaft 15), Berlin 2015, S. 253–278. und
    M. Marx, “Europa, Islam und Koran: Zu einigen Elementen der gegenwärtigen gesellschaftlichen Debatte”, K. Spenlen (Hg.), Gehört der Islam zu Deutschland, Fakten und Analysen zu einem Meinungsstreit, Düsseldorf 2013, S. 61–98.

"According to Islamic tradition a prophet, Muhammad, appeared in the Arabian town of Mekka in the year 610. For a period of little more than 20 years Muhammad proclaimed poetical texts, ‘suras’, that he had received as revelations, and through his preaching set up a community. These ‘suras’, which were later codified to form the Qur’an, have lived on as the very heart of Islamic self-expression. But what do we know about the context of the Qur’an, the Arabian Peninsula, on the eve of the emergence of Islam? Islamic tradition tends to view the pre-Islamic period of Arabian history as a „time of ignorance“(‘asr al-jâhilîya), a label that has severely handicapped research on the history of Arabia before Islam. Western research has tended to view the Qur‘an as a mere compilation, a text simply grafted on Jewish and Christian traditions. In order to take seriously the desideratum of reading the Qur‘an as a message adressed to a Late Antique audience, one has to read
the text against its historical and cultural background. Such an attempt to reconnect the text to its first listeners is made in the Corpus Coranicum project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

The conference assembles specialists from the fields of philology, archaeology, and epigraphy in order to discuss the following questions: What kind of evidence concerning the Qur’an’s historical context can be gleaned from these disciplines? What are the scholarly instruments to determine and to narrate the history of the period immediately before Islam? Is archaeological evidence compatible with historical knowledge derived from Nabatean and South Arabian stone inscriptions? How are descriptions of pre-Islamic Arabia in Arabic sources of the 8th and 9th centuries to be evaluated? In 2011 the research cooperation „COR ANICA: Du contexte au texte”, sponsored by the German DFG and the French ANR , between the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres will start its work on the relationship between philology and material evidence for the environment of the text of the Qur’an."

Der Workshop findet im Rahmen des Forschungsfeldes „Der Koran als Text einer gemeinsamen Antike und geteilten Geschichte“ von „Europa im Nahen Osten – Der Nahe Osten in Europa“ (EUME) statt. Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Villa Jaffé, Wallotstr. 10, 14193 Berlin. "Im Januar 2007 hat das Projekt Corpus Coranicum – Textdokumentation und Kommentar zum Koran der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften seine Arbeit aufgenommen, dessen Ziel eine Dokumentation der koranischen Textüberlieferung und ein ausführlicher Korankommentar sind. Letzterer soll den Koran einerseits konsequent im Rahmen seines historischen Kontextes auslegen, indem er systematisch inhaltliche und terminologische Überschneidungen mit spätantiker jüdischer, christlicher sowie altarabischer Literatur registriert. Andererseits nimmt der Kommentar den Koran aus einer konsequent diachronen Perspektive in den Blick, d.h. als ein in über zwei Jahrzehnten gewachsenes Textkorpus, welches formale und inhaltliche Differenzen aufweist und in dem frühere Suren durch spätere Rückbezüge und Ergänzungen vielfach aus- und umgedeutet werden."