ON A LOST ISLAMIC ARCHIVE

SEEING THE LIGHT

This page one article in the weekend Wall Street Journal titled "The Lost Archive", had me riveted this morning.  Here's the sub-title:  "Missing for half a century, a cache of photos spurs sensitive research on Islam's holy text", which of course is the Koran.

The story has a beginning that sounds like something out of an Indiana Jones movie:

"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."

Scholars are just now getting their heads around the implications for secular research of these documents, something that could take decades and be fraught with all sorts of personal, social and political risks.

Here's an example of something that could be unsettling to the current interpretation of what happens to Islamic martyrs:

"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.""

That could get "Christoph Luxenberg" the Salman Rushdie treatment in a hurry.

The challenge here of course is that Islam is just now getting the secular analysis that other religions like Christianity and Judaism have undergone over the past few hundred years.  And it's something that's obviously a powder keg of major proportions.

A thought occurred to me as I was reading the article. 

What if the entire archive were released on the Internet, say on Wikipedia or Google Scholar? 

What if it was then available to any and all scholars, researchers and interested parties to study, discuss and debate the findings?

What if the participants could choose whether to reveal their true identities or publish/discuss under pseudonyms, like many do on the internet today?

Would it diffuse the  risks of a project like this, or would it exacerbate them?

This is something that obviously wouldn't have been possible a few years ago.  But it could be an alternative approach on dealing with this re-discovered treasure.

Something to think about.

Comments

[Alex Tolley]

We still have the problem that the Dead Sea Scrolls are still not available online either - and there is certainly a lot of text that would upset orthodox Christianity in all of its sects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls

Exposing ancient texts should be a good thing - let the world see them and the results of various analyses. "Sunshine is the best disinfectant" it was once said - something that should apply to everything, even sacred documents and the institutions and ideas they support.

[Muneeb]

It's more of a lost cause.

Quran is a source of lot of Islamic knowledge for us, Muslims but everything in Islam is based upon a certain conceptual framework which was proposed 1400 years back by the Prophet (SAW). Not only Quran but every aspect of Islamic history which includes the sayings of the Prophet alongwith the anecdotes of his companions have been verified and validated under the very conceptual framework.

Quran may have been untouched but many other aspects of our islamic archives have been tried to garbled during the course of the history. They seemed pretty logical but they don't concord with basic Islamic philosphy and were very easily driven out.

These archives apparently will suffer the same fate.