http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120008793352784631.html
Der 2003 im Alter von 93 Jahren verstorbene Arabist und Hochschullehrer Anton Spitaler hat die Ergebnisse einesNazi-Forschungsprojekts, das 450 Filmrollen mit Aufnahmen alter Koranhandschriften aus entlegenen Bibliotheken zusammenbrachte, bis zu seinem Tod vor der Fachöffentlichkeit verborgen gehalten, indem er behauptete, die Projektergebnisse seien 1944 durch einen Bombenangriff in München zerstört worden.
offizieller Nachruf der Bay. Akademie der Wiss. auf Prof. Spitaler (PDF) mit der Angabe, das Archiv sei vernichtet worden.
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.
Joseph L. Sax hat in seinem großartigen Buch "Playing Darts with a Rembrandt" (1999) ein Kapitel "The Privatization of Scholarly Research", in dem er vor allem anhand der Schriftrollen vom Toten Meer überzeugend ausführt, dass exklusive Publikationsrechte von Übel sind und die wissenschaftliche Gemeinschaft am meisten profitiert, wenn alle Zugang zu den Quellen haben, um mit ihnen zu arbeiten und sie auszuwerten.
Sax stellt zutreffend fest, dass Forscher zu veranlassen, ihre Daten zugänglich zu machen, kein auf die Archäologie und vergleichbare Felder beschränktes Phänomen ist (S. 174). Wenn der offene Zugang zu solchen Daten bereits in der traditionellen Druckkultur dringend wünschenswert erscheint, ist Open Access zu wissenschaftlichen Daten im digitalen Zeitalter eine conditio sine qua non des wissenschaftlichen Fortschritts.
Forschungsfinanzierer und Universitäten sollten, soweit das rechtlich zulässig ist, ihre Forscher verpflichten, Rohmaterial und Daten (ggf. nach einer großzügig bemessenen Frist) "Open Access" - und das heisst mit Weiterverwendungsmöglichkeiten - zugänglich zu machen.
In dem oben angegebenen Artikel erfährt man nicht, wie die Eigentumsverhältnisse der derzeit von einem Berliner Projekt verwalteten Unterlagen sind. Ob BGH "Grabungsmaterialien" übertragbar ist?
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4599054/
Die Informationsfreiheitsgesetze schließen den Zugang zu Forschungsunterlagen an den Universitäten regelmäßig aus. An rechtlich relevanten Gesichtspunkten listen wir auf:
* das Verbot staatlicher Forschungsmonopole (Art. 5 GG), überwiegend diskutiert anhand der Frage, ob der Staat via Genehmigungsvorbehalt archäologische Grabungen seinen eigenen Behörden reservieren darf
* der Anspruch auf eine ermessensfreie Entscheidung über Zugangsgewährung aufgrund Art. 5 GG (dazu der von mir als Kläger durchgefochtene Fall Auskunftsanspruch eines Wissenschaftsautors)
* der aus dem Gleichheitssatz des Art. 3 GG folgende Anspruch aller Wissenschaftler auf Gleichbehandlung.
NACHTRAG:
Frau Professorin Neuwirth hatte die Freundlichkeit, auf Anfrage Stellung zu nehmen.
Ich danke Ihnen für die Eröffnung der Möglichkeit, zu Ihrem Text Stellung zu
nehmen. Ich möchte Sie bitte, unbedingt auf das Prädikat
"Nazi-Forschungsprojekt" zu verzichten: Das ist sachlich unrichtig. Es
handelt sich bei der Bergsträsserschen Initiative doch um ein Vorhaben, das
von Gotthelf Bergsträsser längst vor der Machtergreifung eingeleitet wurde,
Bergsträsser hat diese ja kaum mehr erlebt. Er arbeitete bekanntlich nicht
nur mit einem australischen Forscher, Arthur Jeffery, sondern auch mit dem
später als Angehöriger der "Weißen Rose" hingerichteten Karl Huber in
München zusammen. Zudem hatte das Projekt zu keiner Zeit irgendeine
Verbindung zur Politik, die von Otto Pretzl und Anton Spitaler geleistete
philologische Arbeit spielte sich am Münchener Schreibtisch ab, sie war so
politikfern wie die majoritäre deutsche Orientwissenschaft ihrerzeit
politikfern arbeitete - reine Sprach- und Traditionsgeschichte. Dass Pretzl
später in einer militärischen Aktion des II. Weltkriegs umkam, dass Spitaler
als junger Mann zum Dienst als Übersetzer eingezogen wurde, hat diese Arbeit
nie tangiert. Der aus ihrer Arbeit resultierende Band III der "Geschichte
des Qorantexts" ist ein ausschließlich mit Phonetik, Morphologie und
Kodikologie befasstes Werk.
Das Archiv selbst wird gegenwärtig - im Rahmen des 2007 angelaufenen
Akademie-Projekts Corpus Coranicum - digitalisiert und über internet der
weiteren Forscherkommunität zugänglich gemacht.
Frau Neuwirth und Herr Marx haben mir die Antwort von letzterem auf den WSJ-Artikel zugänglich gemacht, die ich hier ebenfalls dokumentieren möchte:
A reaction to the article „The Lost Archive“, The Wall Street Journal 12.1.2008, page 1 (US edition)
Michael Marx (marx@bbaw.de)
Director of Research Centre Corpus Coranicum (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der
Wissenschaften)
The lost archive, the myth of philology, and the study of the Qur’an
The belief in the myth that old manuscripts should be mysterious and powerful is part and
parcel of the age of Modernity. That such expectations were operative in the discussion on
the Qumran fragments is still remembered, and more recently the Da Vinci Code, in itself a
quite shallow story, sold extremely well. The fact that the Wall Street Journal placed an
article on the “lost Bergsträsser-film archive” of Qur’anic manuscripts on its front page on
12th of January seems to be due to the myth of “textual wars” taking place in the world.
Labelled as a clash of civilizations or war of religions, conflicts today in the Middle East and
Europe involving Christians, Muslims and Jews are likely to be perceived in isolation from
their economical, social, or political preconditions. On September 12th 2001 a friend of mine
bought a copy of the Qur’an in order to “understand what is going on”. Indeed, as if in the
spirit of the protestant slogan of “sola scriptura” (= “through scripture only”), the idea of
deciphering the software of “Muslim patterns of action” through the Sacred Book of Islam is
tempting. As superficial as it may look, this very perception of the direct causal link between
“what Muslims do” and passages of the Qur’an seems to be widespread. No article on the
missing enlightenment in “Islam” without pointing to a still missing “but urgently needed”
critical edition of the Qur’an. Almost no coverage on warfare in the Middle East and suicide
bombings without the attempt to dig out passages from the Qur’an and pictures of praying
and reciting Muslims. The cultural, social, and religious diversity of a whole region, the
Middle East, that European and American history labels as the cradle of civilisation and the
birthplace of Judaism and Islam appears transmuted into a “disturbing” monolithic religious
monster.
The article on the lost photo archive of old Quranic Manuscripts collected by Gotthelf
Bergsträsser (1886-1933) and his colleague Otto Pretzl (1893-1941) calls to mind a whole
tradition of philological research on the Qur’an that has fallen into oblivion since World War
II. Two centuries ago, it was German speaking philologists who laid the foundation for
critical approaches to the Quran. Abraham Geiger’s (1810-1874) often quoted and
frequently misunderstood book “Was hat Mohamed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen”
(“What did Mohamed take from Judaism?”), published in 1833, can be seen as a landmark,
setting up a school of Jewish scholars who for almost a hundred years included the study of
Islamic sources into the text corpus of Jewish texts they studied. The title of Geiger’s book
is misleading, since the author is far from attacking the prophet but sees Mohamed as a
kind of genius, embedded in a (Late Antique) context where Jewish texts and traditions are
seen as integral parts of the emerging first Muslim community. It is a paradoxical fact that
the founding figure of the Jewish Reform movement sought to trace Jewish tradition back to
a Middle Eastern context in order to accommodate Judaism in post-Napoleonic Central
European societies by studying interconnections between rabbinical traditions and the
Qur’an. In a society where the ghettos just had been dissolved, a Jewish movement
developed its vision of a European Jewish identity by tracing their tradition back to the
Middle Eastern context and showing links to another religion emerging in the same region.
The 19th century also saw German speaking scholars like Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921),
Theodor Nöldeke (1836-1930), and Gustav Weil (1808-1889) who laid the foundations of a
philologically sound approach to Middle Eastern literatures in Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew, and
Persian. The fruits of their and their students’ works are often considered milestones of text
edition and are still to be found in bookstores in the Middle East and the Western world. It
was Theodor Nöldeke who left a book on the history of the Qur’an that is considered a
landmark of philological scholarship of the Qur’an by Western and Eastern scholars. Even if
Nöldeke, in his 19th century spirit, referred to the prophet as a genius, thus attributing
authorship of the text to him, his work offers proof of a degree of knowledge of Islamic
tradition and philological methods that is almost non-existent today. Among Nöldeke’s
successors were scholars like Gotthelf Bergsträsser and Otto Pretzl who developed the
project of creating a philological critical study of the Qur’an. Bergsträsser not only travelled
diverse Arab countries (the Mediterranean Sea) to take pictures with the newly developed first transportable Leica photo-camera but also went regularly to Cairo to participate in the
meetings of the Royal Egyptian Academy of Sciences. He can be described as a scholar
who not only studied his “object”, Arabic texts, but who also understood that knowledge of
the Muslim tradition had to be included in his intellectual approach by sharing and
exchanging knowledge with his Middle Eastern colleagues. After his premature and
unexpected death in 1933, he left behind a treasure that was lost from sight after World War
II. The widespread belief in its non-accessibility was reinforced by rumours of the
destruction of the material in 1944 and the silence of his successor Anton Spitaler (1910-2003).
Many, although by no means all, German scholars who remained in Germany after the
Nazis came to power, did have sympathies for the Nazis. In times of war, knowledge of
foreign languages qualified scholars for specialized positions in the German war machinery
where their linguistic skills were seen as important. Nevertheless, measuring the
achievements of German scholars by examining their political biographies seems to me not
helpful. Gotthelf Bergsträsser only experienced the very beginning of the political
catastrophe that was the Third Reich. His colleague at Munich University, the musicologist
Kurt Huber (1893-1943), who together with Bergsträsser published an article on the
recitation of the Qur’an in Cairo, joined the White Rose movement that opposed the Nazi
regime. He was executed in 1943. The fact that the German philological tradition of studying
the Qur’an flourished in the 1920s and remained in existence during the Nazi period, cannot
in itself justify describing German scholarship in that field as having a Nazi agenda (as
observed in many internet blogs discussing the “The Lost Archive”). As Jewish scholars in
Germany and Europe were killed or had left the country, post-War Germany had lost not
only its intellectual elite, but also German as a language of international scholarship
underwent a decline, not only in Oriental studies.
Post World War II studies on the Qur’an no longer followed the tradition set by Goldziher,
Nöldeke, and Bergsträsser. In the 1970s, the works of John Wansbrough (1928-2002) and
Patricia Crone suggested a new perspective on the Qur’an, where the text either would
emerge one to two centuries after the prophet, or come out of Palestinian religious
movements (reducing Mecca and Medina to collective retrospective imaginations of the Muslim community). Neither theory is in harmony with results of research of the last two
decades. Today, perhaps neither of the scholars mentioned would write their books a
second time in the same vein. Yet, in a field like Qur’anic studies, both works were often
seen by Muslim readers as revealing the true aims of Western scholarship, thus to a certain
extent they can be said to have destroyed mutual trust. For scholars from Europe today, the
suspicion of belonging to a “revisionist school” can still be sensed in the Middle East, and is
often an obstacle to academic exchange between scholars.
The field of Qur’anic studies, that can be described as under-studied compared to two
centuries of Biblical studies, contains many “blank spaces” on the research map. The lack of
a comparative study of the oldest manuscripts and the oral Muslim tradition requires a lot of
documentation and analytical work. The Bergsträsser photo archive affords a good overview
of important old manuscripts from European and Middle Eastern libraries, it can not,
however, serve as a magic wand. From the material that has been entered into a database
to date it would appear that any expectations that old Qur’anic manuscripts in the Old Hijazi
script included in the Bergsträsser photo archive would offer a different text of the Qur’an
are unjustified. It is interesting to note that orthographic differences observed in manuscripts
of the early 8th century are variations of spelling that a comparison of 20th century prints of
the Qur’an from Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Nigeria show to be still alive.
Muslim tradition does indeed refer to one text, yet still allows and transmits variant readings
and writings within a certain range. This “unmodern” attitude towards the text, (textual
behaviour) of allowing ambiguity and a range of readings, can be described as having
characterized Muslim tradition since the earliest times. Until the present day, the Qur’an is
recited in slightly “diverging” textual and acoustic shape in Morocco and in Egypt. What is
required here is a systematic study of all the available material, manuscripts or sources on
the different Muslim traditions of reading the Qur’an, in order to study the text of the Qur’an
– in the same way the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are studied – with due
diligence, knowledge, and precision.
Since Nöldeke, Bergsträsser, Pretzl and their Australian colleague Arthur Jeffery (1892-
1959) developed a framework for a systematic study in the 1920s that was interrupted in the
following years by the death of the scholars involved and the events leading up to and during World War II, the only perspective left is a modest attempt to continue Nöldeke’s and
Bergsträsser’s work today – more than seventy years later. Even if the story sounds
intriguing, no Da Vinci Code scenario or Qumran fever will make things easier. The study of
old manuscripts and Muslim oral tradition requires a lot of time and patience. Until today,
each and every hypothesis of a “new text”, a “different text” or a completely new historical
scenario of the genesis of the text remains a hypothesis based on scarce material evidence
and looks very unlikely. This is valid for the hypotheses of Luxenberg, Ohlig, Wansbrough
and other spectacular “new readings” of the Qur’an. Scholarly work has of course to take
place in isolation from religious claims of any sort, which simply belong to another
discourse. (That does not mean that one has to subscribe to the religious dogma that the
Qur’an is an inspired text or that it has a divine origin). The metaphysical question of the
text’s origin cannot be answered by science and philology. What can be studied are the
textual beginnings of the Qur’an as they are manifested in manuscripts and in the Muslim
tradition across the centuries.
The Berlin project that started in 2007 under the title “Corpus Coranicum”, sees itself as the
attempt to collect documents on the Qur’an systematically and transparently. The rich
material of the Bergsträsser collection offers a solid basis for a documentation of the text of
the Qur’an in history. On the other side, it also refers to the achievements of a scholar who
came from the German speaking philological school and was fully aware of the importance
of studying Arabic sources and exchanging ideas with his Middle Eastern colleagues. The
project, based at the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, was developed by Angelika
Neuwirth, Nicolai Sinai and the author in 2006. Angelika Neuwirth’s more than thirty years’
experience in Qur’anic scholarship can be described as an approach that is based on a
careful study of the text itself, combining material from the Islamic tradition with modern text
hermeneutics. In the framework of Corpus Coranicum this is a perspective which no single
scholar would ever have been able to pursue alone but one which unquestionably requires
the cooperative work of researchers from diverse specializations. The project group studies
the Qur’an as a text that has a history in Late Antiquity; Hebrew, Syriac, Greek and
Ethiopian source texts about the theological debates contemporary with the emergence of
the Qur’an are collected and made available in a database structure (Texte zur Umwelt des
Koran = “Texts on the Environment of the Qur’an”), in order to reconstruct the milieu that the text addressed. Every text enters a world where there are earlier texts in existence. The
Qur’an addressed listeners from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds. Charitable
reading of the Qur’an means undertaking the attempt to reconstruct the way the text was
received by the earliest community. If the 112th Sura is read against the background of the
most important Jewish credo (“Shma Israel”; Deutronomy 6,4) and the Nicene Creed (of the
First Council of Constantinople in 381 CE), the relationship – the message of the text seen
against the background of two other Late Antique texts – can be described in the sense that
the Qur’an addressed people in a given context.
By studying overlaps with Late Antique traditions, the originality of the Qur’an in its context
becomes evident. The idea of a text emerging in a context sounds trivial, but in the case of
the Qur’an investigating it requires the unearthing of the achievements of a whole (mostly
German speaking) tradition that is very little studied today, not least as a result of the
decline in German language skills among scholars. The above mentioned Jewish Reform
Movement founded by Abraham Geiger in the 19th century produced numerous studies on
the Qur’an and its context. These scholarly achievements are almost forgotten today and
were only continued in miniature after World War II. The tragedy of neglected scholarship in
this field has contributed to the deplorable current situation of Qur’anic scholarship. For the
study of the Qur’an as pursued by the Corpus Coranicum project, two traditions have to be
revived, one is the “Lost Archive”, the other could be classified as “forgotten books”. Both
are seen as necessary and have to be brought together in an integral scholarly effort,
combining philology of manuscripts with knowledge about Late Antique reference material in
order to allow us to see the Qur’an in the context of human history.
Any examination of the time before the Qur’an does entail the need to include Islamic
history in a wider framework of Middle Eastern history of Christianity and Judaism. Hereby
the concept of an exclusive vision of a Jewish-Christian identity has to be questioned. If
Judaism and Christianity, religious traditions that emerged from the same region, can be
accommodated in Europe or the United States, why should the Qur’an and Islamic history
be seen as separate. By showing and documenting that the discourse of the Qur’an
addressed a Late Antique milieu where Judaism and Christianity was known, the Qur’an
and the history of the Muslim community can be freed from their current connotations of exotic (“non-European”) otherness. Comparisons between Jewish and Muslim legal
traditions not only show similarities but show also how a new discourse can enter into a
rivalry with an existing one. At the same time, dogmatic debates reflected in the Qur’an
point to the fact that the text is situated in a region where six centuries of Church history not
only produced harmony.
The Qur’an project is conscious of the fact that exchange and debate is necessary. The
approaches of the Corpus Coranicum project are the subject of debates with Muslim
scholars. After lectures and discussions held in Morocco, Iran, and Turkey the opinion that a
“critical project” on the Qur’an is tantamount to a suicide project, does not coincide with my
own (albeit limited) experiences. On the contrary, a debate in the city of Qom on the study
of manuscripts and the relationship between the uncanonical gospel of the infancy of
Thomas and parts of the 3rd Sura turned out to involve a number of Shiite clerics in a
discussion of the type of discourse the Qur’an could be described as. The possibility that
any of the speakers might not necessarily be a Muslim seen as being relevant was not
sensed by the author. Late Antique sources in Syriac or Hebrew language are of course
scarcely studied and translated into Arabic or Persian in Muslim countries today, thus
hindering discussion of such material. At the same time, many Western scholars of
theology, Jewish studies, church history, Syriac etc. have also shown themselves sceptical
about discussing the importance of their respective disciplines for understanding the Qur’an.
In the end, it is the necessity and the will to discuss an embeddedness of the text in time
and space that is at stake. Many scholars have refused to accord the Qur’an its due place in
history, the recently begun Corpus Coranicum project has decided to take an opposite
approach. Consisting of a mixed group of researchers, the academic target audience is a
European one, whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish or other.
By laying the groundwork for a systematic approach to Qur’anic Studies, the outlined
research approach is aimed at contributing to a vision of history in which Christian, Jewish
and Muslim traditions refer to a shared Middle Eastern heritage. From a European
perspective, the Middle East as a point of departure has always been accepted for the age
of Antiquity, why should Late Antiquity be treated differently? In a time when the belief
seems to be widespread that sacred texts are capable of supplying explanations for the behaviour of individuals, research on the contexts of a text could contribute towards
dissolving an essentialist perspective on a sacred text – something which is still too rarely
questioned in public debate and scholarship.
After having read a column in the Asian Times Online (15th of January) under the title
“Indiana Jones meets Da Vinci Code”, based on the Wall Street Journal’s article on “The
Lost Archive”, I bought hats for our whole research team, our female Muslim colleagues
now wear them on top of their headscarves.
(Berlin/Potsdam, 16.1.2008)
Der 2003 im Alter von 93 Jahren verstorbene Arabist und Hochschullehrer Anton Spitaler hat die Ergebnisse eines
offizieller Nachruf der Bay. Akademie der Wiss. auf Prof. Spitaler (PDF) mit der Angabe, das Archiv sei vernichtet worden.
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.
Joseph L. Sax hat in seinem großartigen Buch "Playing Darts with a Rembrandt" (1999) ein Kapitel "The Privatization of Scholarly Research", in dem er vor allem anhand der Schriftrollen vom Toten Meer überzeugend ausführt, dass exklusive Publikationsrechte von Übel sind und die wissenschaftliche Gemeinschaft am meisten profitiert, wenn alle Zugang zu den Quellen haben, um mit ihnen zu arbeiten und sie auszuwerten.
Sax stellt zutreffend fest, dass Forscher zu veranlassen, ihre Daten zugänglich zu machen, kein auf die Archäologie und vergleichbare Felder beschränktes Phänomen ist (S. 174). Wenn der offene Zugang zu solchen Daten bereits in der traditionellen Druckkultur dringend wünschenswert erscheint, ist Open Access zu wissenschaftlichen Daten im digitalen Zeitalter eine conditio sine qua non des wissenschaftlichen Fortschritts.
Forschungsfinanzierer und Universitäten sollten, soweit das rechtlich zulässig ist, ihre Forscher verpflichten, Rohmaterial und Daten (ggf. nach einer großzügig bemessenen Frist) "Open Access" - und das heisst mit Weiterverwendungsmöglichkeiten - zugänglich zu machen.
In dem oben angegebenen Artikel erfährt man nicht, wie die Eigentumsverhältnisse der derzeit von einem Berliner Projekt verwalteten Unterlagen sind. Ob BGH "Grabungsmaterialien" übertragbar ist?
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4599054/
Die Informationsfreiheitsgesetze schließen den Zugang zu Forschungsunterlagen an den Universitäten regelmäßig aus. An rechtlich relevanten Gesichtspunkten listen wir auf:
* das Verbot staatlicher Forschungsmonopole (Art. 5 GG), überwiegend diskutiert anhand der Frage, ob der Staat via Genehmigungsvorbehalt archäologische Grabungen seinen eigenen Behörden reservieren darf
* der Anspruch auf eine ermessensfreie Entscheidung über Zugangsgewährung aufgrund Art. 5 GG (dazu der von mir als Kläger durchgefochtene Fall Auskunftsanspruch eines Wissenschaftsautors)
* der aus dem Gleichheitssatz des Art. 3 GG folgende Anspruch aller Wissenschaftler auf Gleichbehandlung.
NACHTRAG:
Frau Professorin Neuwirth hatte die Freundlichkeit, auf Anfrage Stellung zu nehmen.
Ich danke Ihnen für die Eröffnung der Möglichkeit, zu Ihrem Text Stellung zu
nehmen. Ich möchte Sie bitte, unbedingt auf das Prädikat
"Nazi-Forschungsprojekt" zu verzichten: Das ist sachlich unrichtig. Es
handelt sich bei der Bergsträsserschen Initiative doch um ein Vorhaben, das
von Gotthelf Bergsträsser längst vor der Machtergreifung eingeleitet wurde,
Bergsträsser hat diese ja kaum mehr erlebt. Er arbeitete bekanntlich nicht
nur mit einem australischen Forscher, Arthur Jeffery, sondern auch mit dem
später als Angehöriger der "Weißen Rose" hingerichteten Karl Huber in
München zusammen. Zudem hatte das Projekt zu keiner Zeit irgendeine
Verbindung zur Politik, die von Otto Pretzl und Anton Spitaler geleistete
philologische Arbeit spielte sich am Münchener Schreibtisch ab, sie war so
politikfern wie die majoritäre deutsche Orientwissenschaft ihrerzeit
politikfern arbeitete - reine Sprach- und Traditionsgeschichte. Dass Pretzl
später in einer militärischen Aktion des II. Weltkriegs umkam, dass Spitaler
als junger Mann zum Dienst als Übersetzer eingezogen wurde, hat diese Arbeit
nie tangiert. Der aus ihrer Arbeit resultierende Band III der "Geschichte
des Qorantexts" ist ein ausschließlich mit Phonetik, Morphologie und
Kodikologie befasstes Werk.
Das Archiv selbst wird gegenwärtig - im Rahmen des 2007 angelaufenen
Akademie-Projekts Corpus Coranicum - digitalisiert und über internet der
weiteren Forscherkommunität zugänglich gemacht.
Frau Neuwirth und Herr Marx haben mir die Antwort von letzterem auf den WSJ-Artikel zugänglich gemacht, die ich hier ebenfalls dokumentieren möchte:
A reaction to the article „The Lost Archive“, The Wall Street Journal 12.1.2008, page 1 (US edition)
Michael Marx (marx@bbaw.de)
Director of Research Centre Corpus Coranicum (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der
Wissenschaften)
The lost archive, the myth of philology, and the study of the Qur’an
The belief in the myth that old manuscripts should be mysterious and powerful is part and
parcel of the age of Modernity. That such expectations were operative in the discussion on
the Qumran fragments is still remembered, and more recently the Da Vinci Code, in itself a
quite shallow story, sold extremely well. The fact that the Wall Street Journal placed an
article on the “lost Bergsträsser-film archive” of Qur’anic manuscripts on its front page on
12th of January seems to be due to the myth of “textual wars” taking place in the world.
Labelled as a clash of civilizations or war of religions, conflicts today in the Middle East and
Europe involving Christians, Muslims and Jews are likely to be perceived in isolation from
their economical, social, or political preconditions. On September 12th 2001 a friend of mine
bought a copy of the Qur’an in order to “understand what is going on”. Indeed, as if in the
spirit of the protestant slogan of “sola scriptura” (= “through scripture only”), the idea of
deciphering the software of “Muslim patterns of action” through the Sacred Book of Islam is
tempting. As superficial as it may look, this very perception of the direct causal link between
“what Muslims do” and passages of the Qur’an seems to be widespread. No article on the
missing enlightenment in “Islam” without pointing to a still missing “but urgently needed”
critical edition of the Qur’an. Almost no coverage on warfare in the Middle East and suicide
bombings without the attempt to dig out passages from the Qur’an and pictures of praying
and reciting Muslims. The cultural, social, and religious diversity of a whole region, the
Middle East, that European and American history labels as the cradle of civilisation and the
birthplace of Judaism and Islam appears transmuted into a “disturbing” monolithic religious
monster.
The article on the lost photo archive of old Quranic Manuscripts collected by Gotthelf
Bergsträsser (1886-1933) and his colleague Otto Pretzl (1893-1941) calls to mind a whole
tradition of philological research on the Qur’an that has fallen into oblivion since World War
II. Two centuries ago, it was German speaking philologists who laid the foundation for
critical approaches to the Quran. Abraham Geiger’s (1810-1874) often quoted and
frequently misunderstood book “Was hat Mohamed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen”
(“What did Mohamed take from Judaism?”), published in 1833, can be seen as a landmark,
setting up a school of Jewish scholars who for almost a hundred years included the study of
Islamic sources into the text corpus of Jewish texts they studied. The title of Geiger’s book
is misleading, since the author is far from attacking the prophet but sees Mohamed as a
kind of genius, embedded in a (Late Antique) context where Jewish texts and traditions are
seen as integral parts of the emerging first Muslim community. It is a paradoxical fact that
the founding figure of the Jewish Reform movement sought to trace Jewish tradition back to
a Middle Eastern context in order to accommodate Judaism in post-Napoleonic Central
European societies by studying interconnections between rabbinical traditions and the
Qur’an. In a society where the ghettos just had been dissolved, a Jewish movement
developed its vision of a European Jewish identity by tracing their tradition back to the
Middle Eastern context and showing links to another religion emerging in the same region.
The 19th century also saw German speaking scholars like Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921),
Theodor Nöldeke (1836-1930), and Gustav Weil (1808-1889) who laid the foundations of a
philologically sound approach to Middle Eastern literatures in Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew, and
Persian. The fruits of their and their students’ works are often considered milestones of text
edition and are still to be found in bookstores in the Middle East and the Western world. It
was Theodor Nöldeke who left a book on the history of the Qur’an that is considered a
landmark of philological scholarship of the Qur’an by Western and Eastern scholars. Even if
Nöldeke, in his 19th century spirit, referred to the prophet as a genius, thus attributing
authorship of the text to him, his work offers proof of a degree of knowledge of Islamic
tradition and philological methods that is almost non-existent today. Among Nöldeke’s
successors were scholars like Gotthelf Bergsträsser and Otto Pretzl who developed the
project of creating a philological critical study of the Qur’an. Bergsträsser not only travelled
diverse Arab countries (the Mediterranean Sea) to take pictures with the newly developed first transportable Leica photo-camera but also went regularly to Cairo to participate in the
meetings of the Royal Egyptian Academy of Sciences. He can be described as a scholar
who not only studied his “object”, Arabic texts, but who also understood that knowledge of
the Muslim tradition had to be included in his intellectual approach by sharing and
exchanging knowledge with his Middle Eastern colleagues. After his premature and
unexpected death in 1933, he left behind a treasure that was lost from sight after World War
II. The widespread belief in its non-accessibility was reinforced by rumours of the
destruction of the material in 1944 and the silence of his successor Anton Spitaler (1910-2003).
Many, although by no means all, German scholars who remained in Germany after the
Nazis came to power, did have sympathies for the Nazis. In times of war, knowledge of
foreign languages qualified scholars for specialized positions in the German war machinery
where their linguistic skills were seen as important. Nevertheless, measuring the
achievements of German scholars by examining their political biographies seems to me not
helpful. Gotthelf Bergsträsser only experienced the very beginning of the political
catastrophe that was the Third Reich. His colleague at Munich University, the musicologist
Kurt Huber (1893-1943), who together with Bergsträsser published an article on the
recitation of the Qur’an in Cairo, joined the White Rose movement that opposed the Nazi
regime. He was executed in 1943. The fact that the German philological tradition of studying
the Qur’an flourished in the 1920s and remained in existence during the Nazi period, cannot
in itself justify describing German scholarship in that field as having a Nazi agenda (as
observed in many internet blogs discussing the “The Lost Archive”). As Jewish scholars in
Germany and Europe were killed or had left the country, post-War Germany had lost not
only its intellectual elite, but also German as a language of international scholarship
underwent a decline, not only in Oriental studies.
Post World War II studies on the Qur’an no longer followed the tradition set by Goldziher,
Nöldeke, and Bergsträsser. In the 1970s, the works of John Wansbrough (1928-2002) and
Patricia Crone suggested a new perspective on the Qur’an, where the text either would
emerge one to two centuries after the prophet, or come out of Palestinian religious
movements (reducing Mecca and Medina to collective retrospective imaginations of the Muslim community). Neither theory is in harmony with results of research of the last two
decades. Today, perhaps neither of the scholars mentioned would write their books a
second time in the same vein. Yet, in a field like Qur’anic studies, both works were often
seen by Muslim readers as revealing the true aims of Western scholarship, thus to a certain
extent they can be said to have destroyed mutual trust. For scholars from Europe today, the
suspicion of belonging to a “revisionist school” can still be sensed in the Middle East, and is
often an obstacle to academic exchange between scholars.
The field of Qur’anic studies, that can be described as under-studied compared to two
centuries of Biblical studies, contains many “blank spaces” on the research map. The lack of
a comparative study of the oldest manuscripts and the oral Muslim tradition requires a lot of
documentation and analytical work. The Bergsträsser photo archive affords a good overview
of important old manuscripts from European and Middle Eastern libraries, it can not,
however, serve as a magic wand. From the material that has been entered into a database
to date it would appear that any expectations that old Qur’anic manuscripts in the Old Hijazi
script included in the Bergsträsser photo archive would offer a different text of the Qur’an
are unjustified. It is interesting to note that orthographic differences observed in manuscripts
of the early 8th century are variations of spelling that a comparison of 20th century prints of
the Qur’an from Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Nigeria show to be still alive.
Muslim tradition does indeed refer to one text, yet still allows and transmits variant readings
and writings within a certain range. This “unmodern” attitude towards the text, (textual
behaviour) of allowing ambiguity and a range of readings, can be described as having
characterized Muslim tradition since the earliest times. Until the present day, the Qur’an is
recited in slightly “diverging” textual and acoustic shape in Morocco and in Egypt. What is
required here is a systematic study of all the available material, manuscripts or sources on
the different Muslim traditions of reading the Qur’an, in order to study the text of the Qur’an
– in the same way the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are studied – with due
diligence, knowledge, and precision.
Since Nöldeke, Bergsträsser, Pretzl and their Australian colleague Arthur Jeffery (1892-
1959) developed a framework for a systematic study in the 1920s that was interrupted in the
following years by the death of the scholars involved and the events leading up to and during World War II, the only perspective left is a modest attempt to continue Nöldeke’s and
Bergsträsser’s work today – more than seventy years later. Even if the story sounds
intriguing, no Da Vinci Code scenario or Qumran fever will make things easier. The study of
old manuscripts and Muslim oral tradition requires a lot of time and patience. Until today,
each and every hypothesis of a “new text”, a “different text” or a completely new historical
scenario of the genesis of the text remains a hypothesis based on scarce material evidence
and looks very unlikely. This is valid for the hypotheses of Luxenberg, Ohlig, Wansbrough
and other spectacular “new readings” of the Qur’an. Scholarly work has of course to take
place in isolation from religious claims of any sort, which simply belong to another
discourse. (That does not mean that one has to subscribe to the religious dogma that the
Qur’an is an inspired text or that it has a divine origin). The metaphysical question of the
text’s origin cannot be answered by science and philology. What can be studied are the
textual beginnings of the Qur’an as they are manifested in manuscripts and in the Muslim
tradition across the centuries.
The Berlin project that started in 2007 under the title “Corpus Coranicum”, sees itself as the
attempt to collect documents on the Qur’an systematically and transparently. The rich
material of the Bergsträsser collection offers a solid basis for a documentation of the text of
the Qur’an in history. On the other side, it also refers to the achievements of a scholar who
came from the German speaking philological school and was fully aware of the importance
of studying Arabic sources and exchanging ideas with his Middle Eastern colleagues. The
project, based at the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, was developed by Angelika
Neuwirth, Nicolai Sinai and the author in 2006. Angelika Neuwirth’s more than thirty years’
experience in Qur’anic scholarship can be described as an approach that is based on a
careful study of the text itself, combining material from the Islamic tradition with modern text
hermeneutics. In the framework of Corpus Coranicum this is a perspective which no single
scholar would ever have been able to pursue alone but one which unquestionably requires
the cooperative work of researchers from diverse specializations. The project group studies
the Qur’an as a text that has a history in Late Antiquity; Hebrew, Syriac, Greek and
Ethiopian source texts about the theological debates contemporary with the emergence of
the Qur’an are collected and made available in a database structure (Texte zur Umwelt des
Koran = “Texts on the Environment of the Qur’an”), in order to reconstruct the milieu that the text addressed. Every text enters a world where there are earlier texts in existence. The
Qur’an addressed listeners from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds. Charitable
reading of the Qur’an means undertaking the attempt to reconstruct the way the text was
received by the earliest community. If the 112th Sura is read against the background of the
most important Jewish credo (“Shma Israel”; Deutronomy 6,4) and the Nicene Creed (of the
First Council of Constantinople in 381 CE), the relationship – the message of the text seen
against the background of two other Late Antique texts – can be described in the sense that
the Qur’an addressed people in a given context.
By studying overlaps with Late Antique traditions, the originality of the Qur’an in its context
becomes evident. The idea of a text emerging in a context sounds trivial, but in the case of
the Qur’an investigating it requires the unearthing of the achievements of a whole (mostly
German speaking) tradition that is very little studied today, not least as a result of the
decline in German language skills among scholars. The above mentioned Jewish Reform
Movement founded by Abraham Geiger in the 19th century produced numerous studies on
the Qur’an and its context. These scholarly achievements are almost forgotten today and
were only continued in miniature after World War II. The tragedy of neglected scholarship in
this field has contributed to the deplorable current situation of Qur’anic scholarship. For the
study of the Qur’an as pursued by the Corpus Coranicum project, two traditions have to be
revived, one is the “Lost Archive”, the other could be classified as “forgotten books”. Both
are seen as necessary and have to be brought together in an integral scholarly effort,
combining philology of manuscripts with knowledge about Late Antique reference material in
order to allow us to see the Qur’an in the context of human history.
Any examination of the time before the Qur’an does entail the need to include Islamic
history in a wider framework of Middle Eastern history of Christianity and Judaism. Hereby
the concept of an exclusive vision of a Jewish-Christian identity has to be questioned. If
Judaism and Christianity, religious traditions that emerged from the same region, can be
accommodated in Europe or the United States, why should the Qur’an and Islamic history
be seen as separate. By showing and documenting that the discourse of the Qur’an
addressed a Late Antique milieu where Judaism and Christianity was known, the Qur’an
and the history of the Muslim community can be freed from their current connotations of exotic (“non-European”) otherness. Comparisons between Jewish and Muslim legal
traditions not only show similarities but show also how a new discourse can enter into a
rivalry with an existing one. At the same time, dogmatic debates reflected in the Qur’an
point to the fact that the text is situated in a region where six centuries of Church history not
only produced harmony.
The Qur’an project is conscious of the fact that exchange and debate is necessary. The
approaches of the Corpus Coranicum project are the subject of debates with Muslim
scholars. After lectures and discussions held in Morocco, Iran, and Turkey the opinion that a
“critical project” on the Qur’an is tantamount to a suicide project, does not coincide with my
own (albeit limited) experiences. On the contrary, a debate in the city of Qom on the study
of manuscripts and the relationship between the uncanonical gospel of the infancy of
Thomas and parts of the 3rd Sura turned out to involve a number of Shiite clerics in a
discussion of the type of discourse the Qur’an could be described as. The possibility that
any of the speakers might not necessarily be a Muslim seen as being relevant was not
sensed by the author. Late Antique sources in Syriac or Hebrew language are of course
scarcely studied and translated into Arabic or Persian in Muslim countries today, thus
hindering discussion of such material. At the same time, many Western scholars of
theology, Jewish studies, church history, Syriac etc. have also shown themselves sceptical
about discussing the importance of their respective disciplines for understanding the Qur’an.
In the end, it is the necessity and the will to discuss an embeddedness of the text in time
and space that is at stake. Many scholars have refused to accord the Qur’an its due place in
history, the recently begun Corpus Coranicum project has decided to take an opposite
approach. Consisting of a mixed group of researchers, the academic target audience is a
European one, whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish or other.
By laying the groundwork for a systematic approach to Qur’anic Studies, the outlined
research approach is aimed at contributing to a vision of history in which Christian, Jewish
and Muslim traditions refer to a shared Middle Eastern heritage. From a European
perspective, the Middle East as a point of departure has always been accepted for the age
of Antiquity, why should Late Antiquity be treated differently? In a time when the belief
seems to be widespread that sacred texts are capable of supplying explanations for the behaviour of individuals, research on the contexts of a text could contribute towards
dissolving an essentialist perspective on a sacred text – something which is still too rarely
questioned in public debate and scholarship.
After having read a column in the Asian Times Online (15th of January) under the title
“Indiana Jones meets Da Vinci Code”, based on the Wall Street Journal’s article on “The
Lost Archive”, I bought hats for our whole research team, our female Muslim colleagues
now wear them on top of their headscarves.
(Berlin/Potsdam, 16.1.2008)
KlausGraf - am Dienstag, 29. Januar 2008, 02:36 - Rubrik: Open Access
