Open accessThe Transmission of Sacred Texts in the Medieval Middle East

14 November 2025

Photo: Open Book Publishers

The interconnections between oral and written traditions have played a pivotal role in shaping the transmission of sacred texts among the three major religions of the Middle East: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. A new book sheds light on the ways in which orality and manuscript culture interacted.

The newly published open-access volume brings together the results of the collaborative research project, ‘The Intertwined World of the Oral and Written Transmission of Sacred Traditions in the Middle East’ (InterSaME), funded jointly by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Under the direction of Alba Fedeli and Geoffrey Khan, InterSaME implemented a multifaceted approach to compare and contrast the written forms that reflect the oral traditions of sacred scriptures during the early Islamic centuries.

The research paid particular attention to the material dimensions and mechanisms of transmission, such as diacritical and vocalisation systems, codicological features, page layouts, and paratextual apparatuses like treatises and marginal notes. In particular, the researchers gained new insights into the cross-cultural exchanges and convergence of textual practices across various religious communities in the medieval Middle East.

The project benefited from the expertise of teams based in Hamburg and Cambridge, each with its own areas of focus. The Hamburg team, comprised of Alba Fedeli, Alicia González Martínez, and Carolin Kinne-Wall, explored the evolution of writing systems in early Qur’anic manuscripts. Adopting a transdisciplinary methodology that combined traditional philology, archaeology, and computer science, the team made significant advances, such as Alba Fedeli’s identification of patterned vowel usage in early Arabic manuscripts, contributing innovative stratigraphic methods to the study of Qur’anic codices. These developments are further explored in the project entitled ‘What is in a Scribe’s Mind and Inkwell’.

The Cambridge team investigated the Arabic models underlying medieval Karaite transcriptions of the Hebrew Bible, positioning these works within broader debates on script, identity, and cultural adaptation. Geoffrey Khan’s research highlighted the structural parallels between the transmission of Jewish and Muslim scriptures, revealing how shared manuscript conventions and oral practices influenced both traditions. Additionally, Johan Lundberg’s innovative study of the Syriac Biblical tradition delved into grammatical treatises, educational texts, and manuscript usage, revealing not only the organisational logics of the Syriac manuscript system but also its pedagogical functions and the agency of its textual artefacts in their original settings.

The new volume features papers presented at the conference ‘The Intertwined World of the Oral and Written Transmission of Sacred Traditions in the Middle East’, held at the CSMC in September 2022. Collectively, these contributions advance the field of comparative manuscript studies and offer fresh methodologies and perspectives for researchers interested in the complex histories of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sacred texts.