From Codicology to Technology: Islamic Manuscripts and Their Place in Scholarship.

• Author: Witkam, Jan Just
• Position: Book review

From Codicology to Technology: Islamic Manuscripts and Their Place in Scholarship. Edited by STE-FANIE BRINKMANN and BEATE WIESMULLER. Berlin: FRANK & TIMME, 2009. Pp. 215. [euro]29.80.

Who would have thought a few years ago that manuscripts would once more play a role of importance in the study of Islamic literatures? Certainly in Europe, working with Islamic manuscripts--and the pursuit of philology in a wider sense for that matter--has for quite a while been seen as somewhat of an atavistic activity, a romantic emulation of those nineteenth-century scholarly giants, such as Wilhelm Ahlwardt (1828-1909) or Michael Jan de Goeje (1836-1909), whose achievements are in any case inimitable. Cataloguing manuscripts, textual criticism, and the editing of Islamic texts have become rare activities in European universities. It was thought that since we had passed the elementary stage of inventorizing collections and exploiting these with reliable editions of classical works, as took place in the first half of the twentieth century, the remaining work could be entrusted to scholars in Muslim countries.

With the political, cultural, and scholarly emancipation of the Middle East, especially after World War II, scholars there embarked upon a great number of text editions of the classics of Islam--unfortunately, few are of scholarly caliber, and most are commercial projects. In addition, a vast number of catalogues of manuscript collections in the Middle East has appeared in print. At the same time, a decline in the numbers of such publications in Europe could be observed. In Western academia one could hear the opinion that our Arab. Persian, or Turkish colleagues were much better equipped than we to edit texts, having the advantage of a much more intimate and immensely vaster knowledge of classical Oriental languages and literatures. This increase of interest in the East and its decrease in the West are, of course, two sides of the same coin. The decrease and subsequent end of political and colonial involvement of Europe in the Middle East necessarily led to a process of rethinking academic research subjects in European universities. Editions of texts became unfashionable as Ph.D. theses in many European universities ("just copying a book written by someone else") and the same went for cataloguing manuscripts (with a few honorable exceptions such as the Verzeichnis of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the German Research Foundation), which was considered by university authorities to be a purely administrative task consisting of little more than copying...