The University of Michigan was recently granted a CLIR-sponsored, Mellon-funded “Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives” grant to support their "Collaboration in Cataloging: Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan" project.
The project should prove to be an excellent resource for Quranic manuscripts and related disciplines. Visit the site here.
أهلاً بكم في موقع فهرسة المخطوطات الاسلامية بجامعة ميشيغان
Showing posts with label Quran. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Quran. Show all posts
Sunday, 9 August 2009
Thursday, 26 June 2008
The Lost Archive: Missing for a half century, a cache of photos
ANDREW HIGGINS January 12, 2008
-- Munich, Germany
On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.
The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God's word. The wartime destruction made the project "outright impossible," Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.
Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars -- and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.
"He pretended it disappeared. He wanted to be rid of it," says Angelika Neuwirth, a former pupil and protégée of the late Mr. Spitaler. Academics who worked with Mr. Spitaler, a powerful figure in postwar German scholarship who died in 2003, have been left guessing why he squirreled away the unusual trove for so long.
Ms. Neuwirth, a professor of Arabic studies at Berlin's Free University, now is overseeing a revival of the research. The project renews a grand tradition of German Quranic scholarship that was interrupted by the Third Reich. The Nazis purged Jewish experts on ancient Arabic texts and compelled Aryan colleagues to serve the war effort. Middle East scholars worked as intelligence officers, interrogators and linguists. Mr. Spitaler himself served, apparently as a translator, in the German-Arab Infantry Battalion 845, a unit of Arab volunteers to the Nazi cause, according to wartime records.
During the 19th century, Germans pioneered modern scholarship of ancient texts. Their work revolutionized understanding of Christian and Jewish scripture. It also infuriated some of the devout, who resented secular scrutiny of texts believed to contain sacred truths.
The revived Quran venture plays into a very modern debate: how to reconcile Islam with the modern world? Academic quarrying of the Quran has produced bold theories, bitter feuds and even claims of an Islamic Reformation in the making. Applying Western critical methods to Islam's holiest text is a sensitive test of the Muslim community's readiness to both accommodate and absorb thinking outside its own traditions.
Learn more about the Corpus Coranicum project, plus read the Quran in English and see other languages and readings
"It is very exciting," says Patricia Crone, a scholar at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and a pioneer of unorthodox theories about Islam's early years. She says she first heard that the Munich archive had survived when attending a conference in Germany last fall. "Everyone thought it was destroyed."
The Quran is viewed by most Muslims as the unchanging word of God as transmitted to the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century. The text, they believe, didn't evolve or get edited. The Quran says it is "flawless" and fixed by an "imperishable tablet" in heaven. It starts with a warning: "This book is not to be doubted."
Quranic scholarship often focuses on arcane questions of philology and textual analysis. Experts nonetheless tend to tread warily, mindful of fury directed in recent years at people deemed to have blasphemed Islam's founding document and the Prophet Muhammad.
A scholar in northern Germany writes under the pseudonym of Christoph Luxenberg because, he says, his controversial views on the Quran risk provoking Muslims. He claims that chunks of it were written not in Arabic but in another ancient language, Syriac. The "virgins" promised by the Quran to Islamic martyrs, he asserts, are in fact only "grapes."
Ms. Neuwirth, the Berlin professor now in charge of the Munich archive, rejects the theories of her more radical colleagues, who ride roughshod, she says, over Islamic scholarship. Her aim, she says, isn't to challenge Islam but to "give the Quran the same attention as the Bible." All the same, she adds: "This is a taboo zone."
Ms. Neuwirth says it's too early to have any idea what her team's close study of the cache of early texts and other manuscripts will reveal. Their project, launched last year at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science and Humanities, has state funding for 18 years but could take much longer. The earliest manuscripts of the Quran date from around 700 and use a skeletal version of the Arabic script that is difficult to decipher and can be open to divergent readings.
Mystery and misfortune bedeviled the Munich archive from the start. The scholar who launched it perished in an odd climbing accident in 1933. His successor died in a 1941 plane crash. Mr. Spitaler, who inherited the Quran collection and then hid it, fared better. He lived to age 93.
The rolls of film, kept in cigar boxes, plastic trays and an old cookie tin, are now in a safe in Berlin. The photos of the old manuscripts will form the foundation of a computer data base that Ms. Neuwirth's team believes will help tease out the history of Islam's founding text. The result, says Michael Marx, the project's research director, could be the first "critical edition" of the Quran -- an attempt to divine what the original text looked like and to explore overlaps with the Bible and other Christian and Jewish literature.
A group of Tunisians has embarked on a parallel mission, but they want to keep it quiet to avoid angering fellow Muslims, says Moncef Ben Abdeljelil, a scholar involved in the venture. "Silence is sometimes best," he says. Afghan authorities last year arrested an official involved in a vernacular translation of the Quran that was condemned as blasphemous. Its editor went into hiding.
Many Christians, too, dislike secular scholars boring into sacred texts, and dismiss challenges to certain Biblical passages. But most accept that the Bible was written by different people at different times, and that it took centuries of winnowing before the Christian canon was fixed in its current form.
Muslims, by contrast, view the Quran as the literal word of God. Questioning the Quran "is like telling a Christian that Jesus was gay," says Abdou Filali-Ansary, a Moroccan scholar.
Modern approaches to textual analysis developed in the West are viewed in much of the Muslim world as irrelevant, at best. "Only the writings of a practicing Muslim are worthy of our attention," a university professor in Saudi Arabia wrote in a 2003 book. "Muslim views on the Holy Book must remain firm: It is the Word of Allah, constant, immaculate, unalterable and inimitable."
Ms. Neuwirth, the Berlin Quran expert, and Mr. Marx, her research director, have tried to explain the project to the Muslim world in trips to Iran, Turkey, Syria and Morocco. When a German newspaper trumpeted their work last fall on its front page and predicted that it would "overthrow rulers and topple kingdoms," Mr. Marx called Arab television network al-Jazeera and other media to deny any assault on the tenets of Islam.
Europeans started to study the Quran in the Middle Ages, largely in an effort to debunk it. In the 19th century, faith-driven polemical research gave way to more serious scientific study of old texts. Germans led the way.
Their original focus was the Bible. Priests and rabbis pushed back, but scholars pressed on, challenging traditional views of the Old and New Testaments. Their work undermined faith in the literal truth of scripture and helped birth today's largely secular Europe. Over time, some turned their attention to the Quran, too.
In 1857, a Paris academy offered a prize for the best "critical history" of the Quran. A German, Theodor Nöldeke, won. His entry became the cornerstone of future Western research. Mr. Nöldeke, says Ms. Neuwirth, is "the rock of our church."
The Munich archive began with one of Mr. Nöldeke's protégés, Gotthelf Bergsträsser. As Germany slid towards fascism early last century, he hunted down old copies of the Quran in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. He took photographs of them with a Leica camera.
In 1933, a few months after Hitler became chancellor, Mr. Bergsträsser, an experienced climber, died in the Bavarian Alps. His body was never given an autopsy; rumors spread of suicide or foul play.
His work was taken up by Otto Pretzl, another German Arabist. He too set off with a Leica. In a 1934 journey to Morocco, he wangled his way into a royal library containing an old copy of the Quran and won over initially suspicious clerics, he said in a handwritten report about his trip.
The Nazis began to use Arabists early in the war when German forces began pushing into regions with large Muslim populations, first North Africa and then the Soviet Union. Scholars were used to broadcast propaganda and to help set up mullah schools for Muslims recruited into the German armed forces.
Mr. Pretzl, the manuscript collector, appears to have worked largely in military intelligence. He interrogated Arabic-speaking soldiers captured in the invasion of France, then, according to some accounts, set off on a mission to stir up an Arab uprising against British troops in Iraq. His plane crashed.
Axel Hölper
Film from the Quran photo archive
Responsibility for the Quran archive fell to Mr. Spitaler, who had helped collect some of the photos. During the war, Mr. Spitaler served in the command offices in Germany and later as an Arabic linguist in Austria, gaining only a modest military rank, records indicate.
After the war, he returned to academia. Instead of reviving the Quran project, he embarked on a laborious but less-sensitive endeavor, a dictionary of classical Arabic. After nearly half a century of work, definitions were published only for words beginning with two letters of the 28-letter Arabic alphabet.
Mr. Spitaler rarely published papers, but was widely admired for his mastery of Arabic texts. A few scholars, however, judged him overly cautious, unproductive and hostile to unconventional views.
"The whole period after 1945 was poisoned by the Nazis," says Günter Lüling, a scholar who was drummed out of his university in the 1970s after he put forward heterodox theories about the Quran's origins. His doctoral thesis argued that the Quran was lifted in part from Christian hymns. Blackballed by Mr. Spitaler, Mr. Lüling lost his teaching job and launched a fruitless six-year court battle to be reinstated. Feuding over the Quran, he says, "ruined my life."
He wrote books and articles at home, funded by his wife, who took a job in a pharmacy. Asked by a French journal to write a paper on German Arabists, Mr. Lüling went to Berlin to examine wartime records. Germany's prominent postwar Arabic scholars, he says, "were all connected to the Nazis."
Berthold Spuler, for example, translated Yiddish and Hebrew for the Gestapo, says Mr. Lüling. (Mr. Spuler's subsequent teaching career ran into trouble in the 1960s when, during a Hamburg student protest, he shouted that the demonstrators "belong in a concentration camp.") Rudi Paret, who in 1962 produced what became the standard German translation of the Quran, was listed as a member of "The Institute for Research on and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life." Despite their wartime activities, the subsequent work of such scholars is still highly regarded.
By the mid-1970s, Mr. Spitaler in Munich was nearing retirement at the university there. He began moving boxes into a room set aside for the dictionary project at Bavaria's Academy of Sciences. His last doctoral student in Munich, Kathrin Müller, who was working on the dictionary, says she looked inside one of the boxes and saw old film. She asked Mr. Spitaler what it was but didn't get an answer. The boxes, she now realizes, contained the old Quran archive. "He didn't want to explain anything," she says.
In the early 1980s, when the archive was still thought to be lost, two German scholars traveled to Yemen to examine and help restore a cache of ancient Quran manuscripts. They, too, took pictures. When they tried to get them out of Yemen, authorities seized them, says Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, one of the scholars. German diplomats finally persuaded Yemen to release most of the photos, he says.
Mr. Puin says the manuscripts suggested to him that the Quran "didn't just fall from heaven" but "has a history." When he said so publicly a decade ago, it stirred rage. "Please ensure that these scholars are not given further access to the documents," read one letter to the Yemen Times. "Allah, help us against our enemies."
Berlin Quran expert Ms. Neuwirth, though widely regarded as respectful of Islamic tradition, got sideswiped by Arab suspicion of Western scholars. She was fired from a teaching post in Jordan, she says, for mentioning a radical revisionist scholar during a lecture in Germany.
Around 1990, Ms. Neuwirth met Mr. Spitaler, her old professor, in Berlin. He was in his 80s and growing frail, but remained sharp mentally. He "got sentimental about the old times," recalls Ms. Neuwirth. As they talked, he casually mentioned that he still had the photo archive. He offered to give it to her. "I had heard it didn't exist," she says. She later sent two of her students to Munich to collect the photo cache and bring it to Berlin.
The news didn't spread beyond a small circle of scholars. When Mr. Spitaler died in 2003, Paul Kunitizsch, a fellow Munich Arabist, wrote an obituary recounting how the archive had been lost, torpedoing the Quran project. Such a venture, he wrote, "now appears totally out of the question" because of "the attitude of the Islamic world to such a project."
Information about the archive's survival has just begun trickling out to the wider scholarly community. Why Mr. Spitaler hid it remains a mystery. His only published mention of the archive's fate was a footnote to an article in a 1975 book on the Quran. Claiming the bulk of the cache had been lost during the war, he wrote cryptically that "drastically changed conditions after 1945" ruled out any rebuilding of the collection.
Ms. Neuwirth, the current guardian of the archive, believes that perhaps Mr. Spitaler was simply "sick of" the time-consuming project and wanted to move on to other work. Mr. Lüling has a less charitable theory: that Mr. Spitaler didn't have the talents needed to make use of the archive himself and wanted to make sure colleagues couldn't outshine him by working on the material.
Mr. Kunitzsch, the obituary author, says he's mystified by Mr. Spitaler's motives. He speculates that his former colleague decided that the Quran manuscript project was simply too ambitious. The task, says Mr. Kunitzsch, grew steadily more sensitive as Muslim hostility towards Western scholars escalated, particularly after the founding of Israel in 1948. "He knew that for Arabs, [the Quran] was a closed matter."
Ms. Müller, Mr. Spitaler's last doctoral student, says the war "was a deep cut for everything" and buried the prewar dreams of many Germans. Another possible factor, she adds, was Mr. Spitaler's own deep religious faith. She opens up a copy of a Quran used by the late professor, a practicing Catholic, until his death. Unlike his other Arabic texts, which are scrawled with notes and underlinings, it has no markings at all.
"Perhaps he had too much respect for holy books," says Ms. Müller.
-- Munich, Germany
On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.
The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God's word. The wartime destruction made the project "outright impossible," Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.
Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars -- and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.
"He pretended it disappeared. He wanted to be rid of it," says Angelika Neuwirth, a former pupil and protégée of the late Mr. Spitaler. Academics who worked with Mr. Spitaler, a powerful figure in postwar German scholarship who died in 2003, have been left guessing why he squirreled away the unusual trove for so long.
Ms. Neuwirth, a professor of Arabic studies at Berlin's Free University, now is overseeing a revival of the research. The project renews a grand tradition of German Quranic scholarship that was interrupted by the Third Reich. The Nazis purged Jewish experts on ancient Arabic texts and compelled Aryan colleagues to serve the war effort. Middle East scholars worked as intelligence officers, interrogators and linguists. Mr. Spitaler himself served, apparently as a translator, in the German-Arab Infantry Battalion 845, a unit of Arab volunteers to the Nazi cause, according to wartime records.
During the 19th century, Germans pioneered modern scholarship of ancient texts. Their work revolutionized understanding of Christian and Jewish scripture. It also infuriated some of the devout, who resented secular scrutiny of texts believed to contain sacred truths.
The revived Quran venture plays into a very modern debate: how to reconcile Islam with the modern world? Academic quarrying of the Quran has produced bold theories, bitter feuds and even claims of an Islamic Reformation in the making. Applying Western critical methods to Islam's holiest text is a sensitive test of the Muslim community's readiness to both accommodate and absorb thinking outside its own traditions.
Learn more about the Corpus Coranicum project, plus read the Quran in English and see other languages and readings
"It is very exciting," says Patricia Crone, a scholar at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and a pioneer of unorthodox theories about Islam's early years. She says she first heard that the Munich archive had survived when attending a conference in Germany last fall. "Everyone thought it was destroyed."
The Quran is viewed by most Muslims as the unchanging word of God as transmitted to the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century. The text, they believe, didn't evolve or get edited. The Quran says it is "flawless" and fixed by an "imperishable tablet" in heaven. It starts with a warning: "This book is not to be doubted."
Quranic scholarship often focuses on arcane questions of philology and textual analysis. Experts nonetheless tend to tread warily, mindful of fury directed in recent years at people deemed to have blasphemed Islam's founding document and the Prophet Muhammad.
A scholar in northern Germany writes under the pseudonym of Christoph Luxenberg because, he says, his controversial views on the Quran risk provoking Muslims. He claims that chunks of it were written not in Arabic but in another ancient language, Syriac. The "virgins" promised by the Quran to Islamic martyrs, he asserts, are in fact only "grapes."
Ms. Neuwirth, the Berlin professor now in charge of the Munich archive, rejects the theories of her more radical colleagues, who ride roughshod, she says, over Islamic scholarship. Her aim, she says, isn't to challenge Islam but to "give the Quran the same attention as the Bible." All the same, she adds: "This is a taboo zone."
Ms. Neuwirth says it's too early to have any idea what her team's close study of the cache of early texts and other manuscripts will reveal. Their project, launched last year at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science and Humanities, has state funding for 18 years but could take much longer. The earliest manuscripts of the Quran date from around 700 and use a skeletal version of the Arabic script that is difficult to decipher and can be open to divergent readings.
Mystery and misfortune bedeviled the Munich archive from the start. The scholar who launched it perished in an odd climbing accident in 1933. His successor died in a 1941 plane crash. Mr. Spitaler, who inherited the Quran collection and then hid it, fared better. He lived to age 93.
The rolls of film, kept in cigar boxes, plastic trays and an old cookie tin, are now in a safe in Berlin. The photos of the old manuscripts will form the foundation of a computer data base that Ms. Neuwirth's team believes will help tease out the history of Islam's founding text. The result, says Michael Marx, the project's research director, could be the first "critical edition" of the Quran -- an attempt to divine what the original text looked like and to explore overlaps with the Bible and other Christian and Jewish literature.
A group of Tunisians has embarked on a parallel mission, but they want to keep it quiet to avoid angering fellow Muslims, says Moncef Ben Abdeljelil, a scholar involved in the venture. "Silence is sometimes best," he says. Afghan authorities last year arrested an official involved in a vernacular translation of the Quran that was condemned as blasphemous. Its editor went into hiding.
Many Christians, too, dislike secular scholars boring into sacred texts, and dismiss challenges to certain Biblical passages. But most accept that the Bible was written by different people at different times, and that it took centuries of winnowing before the Christian canon was fixed in its current form.
Muslims, by contrast, view the Quran as the literal word of God. Questioning the Quran "is like telling a Christian that Jesus was gay," says Abdou Filali-Ansary, a Moroccan scholar.
Modern approaches to textual analysis developed in the West are viewed in much of the Muslim world as irrelevant, at best. "Only the writings of a practicing Muslim are worthy of our attention," a university professor in Saudi Arabia wrote in a 2003 book. "Muslim views on the Holy Book must remain firm: It is the Word of Allah, constant, immaculate, unalterable and inimitable."
Ms. Neuwirth, the Berlin Quran expert, and Mr. Marx, her research director, have tried to explain the project to the Muslim world in trips to Iran, Turkey, Syria and Morocco. When a German newspaper trumpeted their work last fall on its front page and predicted that it would "overthrow rulers and topple kingdoms," Mr. Marx called Arab television network al-Jazeera and other media to deny any assault on the tenets of Islam.
Europeans started to study the Quran in the Middle Ages, largely in an effort to debunk it. In the 19th century, faith-driven polemical research gave way to more serious scientific study of old texts. Germans led the way.
Their original focus was the Bible. Priests and rabbis pushed back, but scholars pressed on, challenging traditional views of the Old and New Testaments. Their work undermined faith in the literal truth of scripture and helped birth today's largely secular Europe. Over time, some turned their attention to the Quran, too.
In 1857, a Paris academy offered a prize for the best "critical history" of the Quran. A German, Theodor Nöldeke, won. His entry became the cornerstone of future Western research. Mr. Nöldeke, says Ms. Neuwirth, is "the rock of our church."
The Munich archive began with one of Mr. Nöldeke's protégés, Gotthelf Bergsträsser. As Germany slid towards fascism early last century, he hunted down old copies of the Quran in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. He took photographs of them with a Leica camera.
In 1933, a few months after Hitler became chancellor, Mr. Bergsträsser, an experienced climber, died in the Bavarian Alps. His body was never given an autopsy; rumors spread of suicide or foul play.
His work was taken up by Otto Pretzl, another German Arabist. He too set off with a Leica. In a 1934 journey to Morocco, he wangled his way into a royal library containing an old copy of the Quran and won over initially suspicious clerics, he said in a handwritten report about his trip.
The Nazis began to use Arabists early in the war when German forces began pushing into regions with large Muslim populations, first North Africa and then the Soviet Union. Scholars were used to broadcast propaganda and to help set up mullah schools for Muslims recruited into the German armed forces.
Mr. Pretzl, the manuscript collector, appears to have worked largely in military intelligence. He interrogated Arabic-speaking soldiers captured in the invasion of France, then, according to some accounts, set off on a mission to stir up an Arab uprising against British troops in Iraq. His plane crashed.
Axel Hölper
Film from the Quran photo archive
Responsibility for the Quran archive fell to Mr. Spitaler, who had helped collect some of the photos. During the war, Mr. Spitaler served in the command offices in Germany and later as an Arabic linguist in Austria, gaining only a modest military rank, records indicate.
After the war, he returned to academia. Instead of reviving the Quran project, he embarked on a laborious but less-sensitive endeavor, a dictionary of classical Arabic. After nearly half a century of work, definitions were published only for words beginning with two letters of the 28-letter Arabic alphabet.
Mr. Spitaler rarely published papers, but was widely admired for his mastery of Arabic texts. A few scholars, however, judged him overly cautious, unproductive and hostile to unconventional views.
"The whole period after 1945 was poisoned by the Nazis," says Günter Lüling, a scholar who was drummed out of his university in the 1970s after he put forward heterodox theories about the Quran's origins. His doctoral thesis argued that the Quran was lifted in part from Christian hymns. Blackballed by Mr. Spitaler, Mr. Lüling lost his teaching job and launched a fruitless six-year court battle to be reinstated. Feuding over the Quran, he says, "ruined my life."
He wrote books and articles at home, funded by his wife, who took a job in a pharmacy. Asked by a French journal to write a paper on German Arabists, Mr. Lüling went to Berlin to examine wartime records. Germany's prominent postwar Arabic scholars, he says, "were all connected to the Nazis."
Berthold Spuler, for example, translated Yiddish and Hebrew for the Gestapo, says Mr. Lüling. (Mr. Spuler's subsequent teaching career ran into trouble in the 1960s when, during a Hamburg student protest, he shouted that the demonstrators "belong in a concentration camp.") Rudi Paret, who in 1962 produced what became the standard German translation of the Quran, was listed as a member of "The Institute for Research on and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life." Despite their wartime activities, the subsequent work of such scholars is still highly regarded.
By the mid-1970s, Mr. Spitaler in Munich was nearing retirement at the university there. He began moving boxes into a room set aside for the dictionary project at Bavaria's Academy of Sciences. His last doctoral student in Munich, Kathrin Müller, who was working on the dictionary, says she looked inside one of the boxes and saw old film. She asked Mr. Spitaler what it was but didn't get an answer. The boxes, she now realizes, contained the old Quran archive. "He didn't want to explain anything," she says.
In the early 1980s, when the archive was still thought to be lost, two German scholars traveled to Yemen to examine and help restore a cache of ancient Quran manuscripts. They, too, took pictures. When they tried to get them out of Yemen, authorities seized them, says Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, one of the scholars. German diplomats finally persuaded Yemen to release most of the photos, he says.
Mr. Puin says the manuscripts suggested to him that the Quran "didn't just fall from heaven" but "has a history." When he said so publicly a decade ago, it stirred rage. "Please ensure that these scholars are not given further access to the documents," read one letter to the Yemen Times. "Allah, help us against our enemies."
Berlin Quran expert Ms. Neuwirth, though widely regarded as respectful of Islamic tradition, got sideswiped by Arab suspicion of Western scholars. She was fired from a teaching post in Jordan, she says, for mentioning a radical revisionist scholar during a lecture in Germany.
Around 1990, Ms. Neuwirth met Mr. Spitaler, her old professor, in Berlin. He was in his 80s and growing frail, but remained sharp mentally. He "got sentimental about the old times," recalls Ms. Neuwirth. As they talked, he casually mentioned that he still had the photo archive. He offered to give it to her. "I had heard it didn't exist," she says. She later sent two of her students to Munich to collect the photo cache and bring it to Berlin.
The news didn't spread beyond a small circle of scholars. When Mr. Spitaler died in 2003, Paul Kunitizsch, a fellow Munich Arabist, wrote an obituary recounting how the archive had been lost, torpedoing the Quran project. Such a venture, he wrote, "now appears totally out of the question" because of "the attitude of the Islamic world to such a project."
Information about the archive's survival has just begun trickling out to the wider scholarly community. Why Mr. Spitaler hid it remains a mystery. His only published mention of the archive's fate was a footnote to an article in a 1975 book on the Quran. Claiming the bulk of the cache had been lost during the war, he wrote cryptically that "drastically changed conditions after 1945" ruled out any rebuilding of the collection.
Ms. Neuwirth, the current guardian of the archive, believes that perhaps Mr. Spitaler was simply "sick of" the time-consuming project and wanted to move on to other work. Mr. Lüling has a less charitable theory: that Mr. Spitaler didn't have the talents needed to make use of the archive himself and wanted to make sure colleagues couldn't outshine him by working on the material.
Mr. Kunitzsch, the obituary author, says he's mystified by Mr. Spitaler's motives. He speculates that his former colleague decided that the Quran manuscript project was simply too ambitious. The task, says Mr. Kunitzsch, grew steadily more sensitive as Muslim hostility towards Western scholars escalated, particularly after the founding of Israel in 1948. "He knew that for Arabs, [the Quran] was a closed matter."
Ms. Müller, Mr. Spitaler's last doctoral student, says the war "was a deep cut for everything" and buried the prewar dreams of many Germans. Another possible factor, she adds, was Mr. Spitaler's own deep religious faith. She opens up a copy of a Quran used by the late professor, a practicing Catholic, until his death. Unlike his other Arabic texts, which are scrawled with notes and underlinings, it has no markings at all.
"Perhaps he had too much respect for holy books," says Ms. Müller.
Wednesday, 11 June 2008
Understanding Islam--McGill News
"McGill has long recognized that this institute is one of its most renowned academic units." —ROBERT WISNOVSKY
Rachel Granofsky
In its 56 years of existence, McGill's Institute of Islamic Studies has grown from a gesture of interfaith camaraderie to a vital site of wide-ranging study.
BY MARK ABLEY
On a high shelf in Robert Wisnovsky's spacious office stands a bust of a bearded man in a turban. It gazes down on a hive of intellectual activity—apart from directing McGill's Institute of Islamic Studies, Wisnovsky is the recent recipient of a Canada Foundation for Innovation grant to develop a searchable database for Islamic philosophy and theology.
"I inherited the sculpture from my predecessor," Wisnovsky says, "and I like to think it's Avicenna"— the great Persian scientist and philosopher. "But I've been told it could also be the medieval poet Sa'di. Or perhaps Ayatollah Khomeini."
That implicit range of disciplines—science, philosophy, literature, theology, politics—suggests a lot about the work of the institute.
Founded in 1952, it's the oldest of its kind in Canada. For several decades it functioned as a small research centre, blessed by a remarkable library and housed in the ornate Victorian surroundings of Morrice Hall. But since 2004, the year before Wisnovsky took over as director, the institute has been transformed. It expanded from five to 15 academic staff; it added about 30 courses; and it made a determined new foray into undergraduate teaching. Last fall it began to offer an official minor in Islamic Studies.
The response from undergraduates has been enthusiastic. Three hundred signed up for courses in Islamic studies this year. The institute hopes to expand its offerings and accommodate as many as 1,000 undergraduates by 2012.
Wisnovsky arrived at McGill with an impressive resumé. Having studied at Yale, he did his doctoral work at Princeton and spent two postdoctoral years at King's College in London, before taking an academic post at Harvard.
Since moving to Montreal, he has gratefully learned that "the institute is more central to the life of the University than the Near Eastern Languages Department was at Harvard, where it's quite marginal. McGill has long recognized that this institute is one of its most renowned academic units. It competes academically at the highest level."
Of course, even a staff of 15 is inadequate to encompass the riches of cultures that stretch from Senegal to Indonesia, that include about 1.3 billion people, and that span 1,400 years of history. The institute's faculty teach everything from the Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Urdu languages to the history of women in the Middle East, and they research such up-to-the-minute topics as Iranian urban culture and religious fundamentalism in Sudan. The logical question, it appears, is not why McGill houses such an institute, but why so few universities in North America have anything similar.
"It has to do with academic history," Wisnovsky explains. In Europe, Islamic scholarship was traditionally an adjunct to either classics or Biblical studies, refracted after the Victorian era through the sometimes distorting lens of Orientalism. "And in North America, Islamic studies was seen through a paradigm of 'area studies' set up during the Cold War. Various imperial projects—be they French or British in the 19th century, or American in the Cold War period—still taint the study of Islam."
IGNORANCE ISN'T AN OPTION
"There need to be more programs like [McGill's] at other universities," says Azim Nanji, MA'70, PhD'72, director of the Institute of Ismaili Studies in England. Nanji, who will join the faculty of Stanford University this summer, is one of many graduates of the institute now teaching and pursuing research at leading institutions throughout the world. Other alumni include senior professors at Harvard, Princeton and Yale.
"The Muslim heritage is part of global history, and an understanding of the world today cannot be based on ignorance about the history, heritage and current challenges faced by a fifth of the world's population, which is Muslim," Nanji declares.
The McGill institute's founder, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, took Islam seriously as a religion long before most Canadians did. Having taught for several years in Lahore (then still part of British India), he wanted to create a haven where North American scholars of Islam would interact productively with their peers from the Muslim world.
After leaving McGill in 1964, Smith took charge of Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions. The Meaning and End of Religion is but the most famous of his many books.
"His kind of interfaith focus is not really central to our mission any more," Wisnovsky says. "But we all benefit academically and personally from a kind of cosmopolitan interaction, and it remains central for us to strive for a balance of backgrounds." The institute aims to be a place where Muslim and non-Muslim students and faculty, both Canadian and non-Canadian, can all feel at home.
Apart from balancing backgrounds, the institute also strives to balance fields of expertise. Khalid Mustafa Medani is one of several professors who recently joined the institute. Medani, who is also a member of the Department of Political Science, has studied the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the allure of Islamic fundamentalism, and the political turmoil in his native country, Sudan. At McGill he enjoys "the very strong exchange of faculty, students and research interests related to topics on the Muslim world. The institute plays an important role in a variety of disciplines."
Part of its challenge, perhaps, is to speak the intellectual truth in an increasingly politicized atmosphere. Wael Hallaq, an eminent scholar of Islamic law who has taught at the institute since 1985, expresses regret about the angry debates in Ontario, Britain and elsewhere that have hauled sharia law onto the front pages.
To Hallaq, "the controversies are based on an almost complete ignorance of what the sharia is and how it worked for over 13 centuries. It is being cast as a political manifesto, a political marker of identity, but not as a cultural or a legal system, which it certainly was. The irony is that even Muslims today, both in the West and in the Muslim world, have a highly distorted, in fact mutilated, vision of what Islamic law meant, and how it operated in communal and social contexts."
In the 21st century, of course, the "Muslim world" includes tens of millions of people living in Western Europe and North America. According to Statistics Canada, the size of this country's Muslim population is expected to almost double within the decade—from 783,700 in 2006 to 1.42 million in 2017. Large cities like Montreal contain thriving mosques that offer sharply contrasting visions of Islam.
"Scholars tend to be pretty conventional unless someone points you in a certain direction. The picture has been skewed up till now—a big chunk of the story has been left out." —F. JAMIL RAGEP
Rachel Granofsky
As Medani notes, "the fact that Montreal has a substantial Muslim community is extremely important in two ways. First, there is greater interest in Islam in politics and public life since this is very much viewed as a 'Canadian' and not just a foreign policy issue. Second, there is a clear advantage in that Muslims from various parts of the globe provide immediate and visible evidence that Islam represents a range of different modes of social practice, intellectual traditions and views about local and international issues. This pluralistic notion of Islam is more evident here than in some parts of the United States."
The winner of a prestigious Carnegie Corporation scholarship in 2007, Medani is looking into the various factors—including poverty, unemployment and ethnic loyalties—that entice some young Muslims into joining militant Islamist groups in Egypt, Sudan and Somalia. His conviction is "that research should not merely be motivated by intellectual stimulation in the abstract, but rather by an effort to come to terms with some important political, social and economic challenges that impact the lives of communities."
A LIBRARY LIKE NO OTHER
Adam Gacek, the head of the Islamic Studies Library, stands on the ground floor of its Octagon Room and gazes up at the books that pack its top level. With its eight symmetrical stained-glass windows, the room was the original library of McGill's Presbyterian College. The Islamic Studies Library, which holds well over 100,000 volumes, lies at the heart of Morrice Hall. In most fields it covers, the library's holdings, both printed and manuscript, are unparalleled in Canada. "The singular nature of the collection is reflected not only in the fact that it is housed in one location," explains Gacek, "but also in its special emphasis on the coverage of traditional Islamic disciplines in addition to the social sciences."
You wouldn't know it from his modest demeanour, but Gacek—a Pole who came to McGill in 1987 from London—ranks among the world's foremost authorities on Arabic and Persian manuscripts. He has published several books and articles about the manuscripts at McGill, hundreds of which were collected in the early 20th century—and they include some extraordinary treasures. Gacek mentions a manuscript from Yemen that is about 300 years old: a beautifully decorated commentary on the Koran and other texts, it was owned by a vizier and is filled with notes in his handwriting.
"I teach a course in the Arabic manuscript tradition," Gacek says, "which has become more and more important because of the new ventures at the institute." He's referring mainly to the CFI grants, totalling more than $2.4-million when combined with matching funds that were earned by Wisnovsky and by F. Jamil Ragep, the institute's Canada Research Chair in the History of Science in Islamic Societies.
Their two projects have now been combined under the title "Rational Sciences in Islam." The aim is nothing less than to provide a new infrastructure for the analysis of a vast corpus of Islamic manuscripts, one that will be made freely available online to scholars and non-professionals alike. Ragep's work focuses on topics as diverse as astronomy, mathematics and music theory.
An American by birth, he came to McGill from the University of Oklahoma, where he ran a centre for peace studies. Since September 2001, scholars from the Middle East have found it increasingly difficult to visit such centres in the United States. "It's not the main reason I moved," Ragep says, "but the opportunities that Canada provides, in terms of dealing with a wider range of people and countries, make life a lot easier here."
"Research should not merely be motivated by intellectual stimulation in the abstract, but by an effort to come to terms with political, social and economic challenges." —KHALID MUSTAFA MEDANI
Allen McInnis
With his wife, Sally, who doubles as his research associate, Ragep is the managing editor of the bilingual Journal for the History of Arabic Science, produced at the University of Aleppo in Syria. "I don't even know if it would be legal for me to do this in the U.S.," Ragep says ruefully. "I also do a lot of work in Iran. And it has become difficult for an American to establish any connections for scholarly work in those countries."
Since 9/11, many Islamic studies scholars working in the U.S. have had to contend with an uncomfortably charged political environment. "You had to be on the defensive every time you critiqued the government," associate professor Rula Abisaab, an expert on Shia and pre-modern Islamic societies, told the McGill Tribune. "It became quite suffocating." Both Abisaab and associate professor Michelle Hartman, an authority on Arabic literature, left American universities to join the institute, citing the political atmosphere in the U.S. as part of the reason for their moves.
A BROADER VIEW OF SCIENCE
Genial and mild-mannered in person, Ragep is unafraid to engage in heated intellectual debate. Last year he confronted the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg on the letters page of the Times Literary Supplement. Weinberg had claimed that after the early 12th century, "there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries."
Ragep coolly pointed out that between the 12th and 18th centuries, Islamic scientists "proposed the pulmonary circulation, built the first large-scale astronomical observatories, conceived trigonometry as a separate discipline, constructed new calculating devices and maps of astonishing accuracy and sophistication, allowed for the possibility of a moving Earth, [and] developed the mathematical and conceptual tools that were essential for the Copernican revolution."
This is a far cry from the history of science as most people understand it, and Ragep seems almost boyishly excited about the implications. Sitting at his office computer, he shows off a digital image of a diagram by Nasir al-Tusi, a 13th-century thinker from Khorasan (a region of Central Asia now divided among Iran, Afghanistan and several other nations). "It's almost identical to one by Copernicus!" Ragep says. A few clicks later, he produces an image of a text by a hitherto obscure scholar in 15th-century Samarkand, who set out a mathematical proposition of how to move from an earth-centred model of the solar system to a suncentred model. Half a century later, the same idea emerged in Europe.
"It has taken an enormous amount of time to piece all this together," says Ragep, who will take over from Wisnovsky as the institute's director in June. "Scholars are like everyone else—they tend to be pretty conventional unless someone points you in a certain direction." The CFI grants, he emphasizes, "are not just for making accessible what's already been discovered, but for finding new material." Scholars have not examined some manuscripts for hundreds of years. "So it's a pretty good assumption that we'll discover a lot of things and end up with a much better picture of how modern thought came into being. The picture has been so skewed up till now—a big chunk of the story has been left out." The Rational Sciences in Islam project will make some of this information, including biographies of scientists and essays about their work, accessible online.
Many people, Ragep notes, are shocked to learn that Islamic science, philosophy and theology were intimately linked. Great thinkers like Avicenna and al-Tusi saw no contradiction in being at the same time theologians, scientists and philosophers.
"Islamic theology is often seen as very backward, very anti-science," Ragep says, "but for the people Professor Wisnovsky and I are studying, it's just the opposite. Islamic theology is freeing them from the constraints of earlier thought. It shouldn't be surprising that what happened in Europe was influenced by what happened in Samarkand. What we call globalization began a long, long time ago."
Hallaq, the sharia specialist, believes that "Islam and its law are severely misunderstood in Canada, as well as in the Western world at large. I find that ignorance of Islam, even among the learned, is both staggering and shocking. Not only is there so much misunderstanding and stereotyping, but people are able to say things about Islam that they cannot say about any religious or ethnic group."
Similarly, Medani deplores the persistent view expressed in the North American media "that Islam is a monolithic entity. This is related to a popular bias that is evident in some policy circles which assumes that political Islam is rooted in an organic hostility to Western values and interests."
A task of the institute, in short, remains what it was in the days of Smith: public enlightenment. Yet to do everything its professors hope, it would need to expand further. At present, it does not accept graduate students in the fields of Koranic Studies and Sufism because it lacks the specialists needed to supervise them. The institute also has ambitions for new programs that would explore the history of Islamic art and architecture and the development of medicine in the Arabic-Islamic world.
"The singular nature of the [Islamic Library] collection is reflected in its special emphasis on the coverage of traditional Islamic disciplines in addition to the social sciences." —ADAM GACEK
Rachel Granofsky
The institute's international reputation has attracted support.
Hopeful of encouraging the study of Islam in North America, the government of Kuwait presented the institute with a $350,000 gift last year. The money will fund four undergraduate scholarships and two graduate prizes, all of them earmarked for Canadian students. Wisnovsky says the gift is indicative of the respect his institute receives internationally.
"It's amazing that McGill has this institute," marvels Wisnovsky. "It's a Canadian treasure."
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