Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan المشاركة في الفهرسة: المخطوطات الاسلامية في جامعة ميشيغان

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

Glories of Yemen in digital detail

SANA’A // It started as a graduation project: a multimedia platform to showcase Yemen’s heritage. But the idea caught the attention of the course organisers and the project has now taken on a new direction.

The three young women who came up with the idea – Aminah Al Ajamai, Lina al Maqtari and Abeer al Khashabi – all in their twenties, had taken part in a year-long course on experiential learning, networking, leadership and entrepreneurship skills run by the Youth Leadership Development Foundation (YLDF), a non-governmental organisation.

“We have discovered during our work how rich Yemen is with heritage and we decided to initiate a project aiming at preserving this rich heritage. What is unique about the project is using multimedia and that it is comprehensive in scope,” said Ms al Ajamai, the project manager.

The project aims to create an “electronic encyclopaedia” of Yemeni heritage in Arabic, English and French, both on CD and on the internet, through a mixture of words, photos and music.

“There are plenty of old books and documents on Yemen heritage but we want to present this knowledge in an interesting way on CDs and target as many people as we can. Nobody has done this before and we are proud of initiating this project,” Ms al Ajamai said.

So far the project has looked at the old city of Sana’a, including its architecture, urban planning, markets and old wall.

“Any passing-by visitor to the old city of Sana’a will find many things to astonish him, but he will not go deeper to find out the secrets behind, for instance, designs of buildings and how there are rooms for each season. Everything has a secret and this shows the genius of old Yemeni people. We are trying to revive this past so that it is not left behind,” she said.

It took seven months to complete the first phase, including meeting historians, researchers and long-time residents of Sana’a to verify the information.

“We planned three months, but because of conflicts between information we received and the scarcity of resources, it took more than double that time,” Ms al Khashabi said.

In the next phase, the three intend to document the folklore, dress and traditions of the people as well as other parts of the country.

“We are planning to cover Unesco world-preserved sites like Zabid in the south-west, Shibam in the north-east, Socotra island in the Indian Ocean and other historically significant cities and sites,” Ms al Khashabi said.

Ms al Maqtari said the project aims to build awareness among Yemenis of their heritage, as well as to promote the country as a tourist destination.

“I have been living in Sana’a for about 20 years but have never paid a visit to the old city of Sana’a. I was astonished and stunned by the architecture and everything around me looked amazing. I then realised our country is full of many precious things that require our attention. I understand it is important this message get through to everybody. Our motto has been ‘your heritage is your future’,” Ms al Maqtari said.

The digital heritage project was one of three that won US$1,000 (Dh3,670) from the YLDF.

“Our course objective is to prepare young people for their next endeavours, mainly as agents of change in the civil society,” said Antilak al Mutwakil, the head of the YLDF.

The women said financing the project was one of their biggest challenges as they were often promised funds that never materialised.

The first phase of the project cost about $12,000, most of which they had to pay out of their own pocket.

“The financial and logistical support we got was not enough and, therefore, we had to put money we had saved into the project as people did not have faith in the project or in our abilities as young entrepreneurs to do something worthwhile,” Ms al Khashabi said.

More than 2,000 CDs will be available after the official launch of the project within the next two months.

“We do not have a fixed time for launching the project but we expect it within two months at most,” Ms al Khashabi said.

After releasing a CD for each of Yemen’s historical cities, the women hope one of the villages will be a hub for tourism and entertainment as well as set up a tourism company.

“This project is pioneering. I think these CDs can play an important role in promoting tourism in Yemen and this is pride to all of us,” the YLDF’s Mrs al Mutwakil said.

Online archive will preserve the past

In the ghost village of Jazirat al Hamra, once a thriving pearling community in Ras al Khaimah, a visitor tries to show her daughter the beach where she played as a young girl. She finds it inaccessible behind a wire fence.

Jazirat al Hamra, thought to have been occupied since the 16th century, is one of the few remaining coastal villages in the Gulf region that predate the discovery of oil.

Yet today the abandoned houses of coral, sand and seashell, hemmed in on all sides by the pressure of encroaching modern development, are in danger of being lost altogether. The fate of the sandcastle village sums up the dilemma facing the UAE today: how to embrace the future while cherishing and preserving the heritage that is the foundation of today’s nation and is in danger of being lost.

Today, The National launches UAE Heritage, a project designed to capture and record living memories of the region’s past.

The weekly feature, which begins today on page a20 with the story of how Umm al Qaiwain was transformed in the lifetime of Sheikh Rashid bin Ahmed, will be a gateway to a growing online collection of stories, photographs, video and oral histories.

And we want to hear from you. Saleh Hanbalouh, of the coastal village of Galileh, recently shared with us his memory of fishermen’s songs, learnt on his father’s boat as a child. His story, and some of the songs, can be heard in The National’s online UAE Heritage archive. Perhaps, like Saleh, your relatives also handed down their memories.

E-mail heritage@thenational.ae with your personal histories

Click here to read the first story from the UAE Heritage project – feature on how Umm al Qaiwain was transformed in the lifetime of Sheikh Rashid bin Ahmed.

Digital film archive of Emirates history

Dhows crowd Dubai Creek next to the National Bank of Dubai in 1971. Horst Faas / AP

ABU DHABI // Thousands of hours of film showing what life was like in Abu Dhabi and other emirates from the 1950s to the 1980s will be restored and digitally archived for posterity.

The 16,000 hours of footage from Abu Dhabi Television’s sizeable archive were shot for news broadcasts, documentaries and other television programmes.

The collection includes black and white celluloid showing Abu Dhabi city as a small collection of buildings along the coast.

Film from the 1950s shows Qasr al Hosn and a bustling market, with shops made from palm fronds, and cows and camels roaming the road.

In one take, pearl divers jump from the side of their boats. In another, a woman leads a camel loaded with goods across the desert.

There is also extensive footage of the late Sheikh Zayed, the founder of the nation, taking part in traditional celebrations, touring the Emirates and meeting foreign leaders, plus film taken in other Gulf countries.

Edward Borgerding, the chief executive of Abu Dhabi Media Company (ADMC), which owns Abu Dhabi Television and is the publisher of The National, stressed the importance of archiving the footage.

“In the UAE, where the written history of the country is actually quite limited, preserving the documents that do exist, [whether it be] written or on film or photograph, is critical and needs to be done before the documents are lost over time or because of the elements which slowly degenerate film,” he said.

“These things degenerate over time so it is important that we get it now and capture and store it in the best conditions.”

Abdul Hadi al Sheikh, ADMC’s chief technology officer, said the archive included one-inch reels and cinema reels, and four obsolete video formats.

“The footage dates back to the 1950s and this really is a national initiative to restore the film using state-of-the-art technology,” he said.

Colour correction and noise reduction measures would also be done when the film was moved to digital format, Mr Sheikh said.

Tom Canavan of Ascent Media, the company that will preserve the historical archive, said the digitalisation process would take between 10 and 12 months and would be done once a technical infrastructure was developed by year’s end.

The initiative will also see the chronicling of modern film and, as none of the original footage is permitted to leave the country, a team from ADMC will be trained in digital archiving.

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.

Digitised Arabic texts from the University of Leeds

We have digitised as scans and backlights a sample of the rich collection of Arabic texts held by the Library of the University of Leeds, and its Special Collections.
We have scanned comprehensively at high resolution to reveal of the text, paper texture and manufacture, and watermarks. We believe this product will be of interest to papyrologists, arabists, digital archivists and others.
The Leeds project is interested in developing techniques to examine the watermark in such documents, together with other concealed properties of the paper.
Texts currently available are
The "Mahdiyya" Qur'an
The "West African" copy of the Qur'ān
Durrat ‘iqd al-naḥr fī ‘asrār ḥizb al-baḥr: A prayer book of uncertain date, probably 18th century.
For more information: Prof. Roger Boyle. School of ComputingUniversity of LeedsLeeds LS2 9JT

Digitising Islamic Resources a report by the University of Exeter

In February 2008, Exeter University Library was awarded £34,900 by theJoint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of behalf of HEFCE (HigherEducation Funding Council for England), to carry out a survey into UserRequirements for Digitised Resources in Islamic Studies.A team led by Paul Auchterlonie and Ahmed Abu Zayed worked on the project(named DigiIslam) between March and May, using a mixture ofquestionnaires, focus groups, telephone interviews and bibliometricanalysis. The resulting report has now been sent to JISC.JISC will study this report and will pass on any recommendations to HEFCE,who will be announcing their wider strategy for Islamic Studies in HigherEducation later this summer.The report is available at the DigiIslam Project website at :http://www.projects.ex.ac.uk/digiIslam/documents/DigiIslamReport.pdfIt is a substantial document, but the Executive Summary andRecommendations can be found on pages 5-11.For details of all the other reports which have been commissioned by HEFCEsince June 2007, when Islamic Studies was designated a Strategic Subjectby the UK Government, go to the HEFCE website (subsection Islamic Studies)at :http://www.hefce.ac.uk/aboutus/sis/islamic/

Paul Auchterlonie