The Intertwined World of the Oral and Written Transmission of Sacred Traditions in the Middle East

DFG-AHRC Joint Project: 2020-2023

InterSaME is a DFG-AHRC joint project. Principal investigators are Alba Fedeli (Universität Hamburg) and Geoffrey Khan (University of Cambridge). The German team of Universität Hamburg is working on the Qur’an manuscript material and the British team at the University of Cambridge is investigating Syriac and Hebrew Bible manuscripts.

The purpose of InterSaME (The intertwined world of the oral and written transmission of sacred traditions in the Middle East) is to bring together strands of research related to various aspects of the transmission of sacred texts in order to reach a deeper understanding of the intertwined world of the three major religions of the Middle East at their formative periods of development during the early Islamic centuries. The Arabic Qur’an, the Syriac Bible and the Hebrew Bible, the sacred texts of Islam, Eastern Christianity and Judaism respectively, were all transmitted in oral and written form. The modes of transmission of these traditions converged to a remarkable degree in the medieval Middle East, reflecting close contact between the various religious communities. Two particularly striking phenomena of convergence include (i) the development of notation systems consisting mainly of dots added to the consonantal skeleton of the script representing the oral reading traditions in the early Islamic period and (ii) the assimilation of the mode of transmission of the Hebrew Bible in the 10th and 11th centuries to that of the Arabic Qur’an. The embryonic development of such notation systems is attested simultaneously in the early Qur’an manuscripts (8th century) and contemporary Syriac Bible manuscripts. The convergence of the transmission modes of the Hebrew Bible with the Qur’an reached its extreme point in a corpus of Hebrew Bible manuscripts written in Arabic transcription by the Jewish Karaite community in the 10th and 11th centuries. In addition to making important contributions to the comprehension of the individual sacred traditions, the project will provide the opportunity to identify parallels across these traditions. Parallels identified across Arabic and Syriac in the development of their notation system would be likely to reflect direct contemporary contact. Parallels across (ii) and (i) would be largely of a typological nature and would serve as an important heuristic and strengthening of hypotheses of contact within (i).

The investigation on the early Qur’an manuscripts focuses on a few fragments that have an incomplete vowel-dot system that likely encapsulates the original function of these vowel-dots and other diacritical signs that were added from the eight century on, when Arab Muslims invented their first vocalization dot system, which was later replaced by modern vowel-letters that first appeared in non-Qurʾanic manuscripts of the ninth century. The modern system of vowel-letters was defined by al-Dānī as ‘the marking for poetry’, while Qurʾanic manuscripts continued to use the archaic dot system. Some manuscripts have both systems in their stratigraphy, sign of a long use over time adapting the script of the early manuscripts to the development of a new markup system in the Arabic writing.

The analysis of the Qur’anic manuscripts is based on a digital annotation of details in the manuscript images for searching and comparing letters and their diacritics thus applying digital+palaeography as ‘self-reflective tools to question models we use to analyse the objects’ using Arianna Ciula’s definition and approach. Reading early Qur’anic manuscripts and interpreting their early vocalization system that was later replaced with a more efficient system requires to question the model scholars built upon a one-to-one correspondence between the dot system and the modern letter system of vocalization. The passage from one system to the other represents a re-formatting or re-mediating the text and its reading in a new form.

The digital and palaeographic annotations are an instrument for reading and encoding the manuscript text and features in an editorial environment that allows to create data from the manuscripts that can be processed, analysed and mined for answering the research questions proposed in InterSaME project, i.e., the function of diacritics in representing the oral reading traditions in the early Islamic period and the tools for marking how to recite the sacred text of Islam, but also research questions related to the Qur’anic text in its manuscript culture that are not part of the goals of this three-year joint project.

The results from the analysis of the Qur’anic manuscripts are interpreted in light of the possible points of convergence between the vocalization and punctuation systems in the Syriac and Hebrew Bible and the role played by innovation and conservatism in the written transmission of the Qur’anic text from the seventh to the tenth and eleventh century.

Further information

• https://www.intersame.uni-hamburg.de/
• https://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/voror/personen/fedeli.html