Corpus Coranicum

[4] In the Manuscripta Coranica, the earliest surviving handwritten witnesses to the text of the Quran are made available; in addition to images of the manuscripts preserved in libraries and private collections worldwide, the database contains various metadata on the documents.

[1] Among other things, it uses the methods of textual criticism and engages with existing preliminary work, including that of Abraham Geiger, Theodor Nöldeke and Arthur Jeffrey.

His hypotheses, methodology and results met with widespread rejection in the research community, but the study was able to initiate a deeper discussion of the traditions of the Quranic text.

This source material consists of photographs of ancient Quran manuscripts collected before World War II by Gotthelf Bergsträsser and Otto Pretzl.

After the British RAF on 24 April 1944 bombarded the building where they were housed, Arabic studies scholar Anton Spitaler claimed the photograph collection had been destroyed.

[3] Although the photographs of the archive form an important part of the objects of study of the Corpus Coranicum, the research ambition of the project goes far beyond the critical apparatus formerly envisaged by Bergsträsser.

According to his paper on the matter, this was intended as a commentary on the Cairo edition (1924), in which traditional readings as well as manuscript variants were to be recorded in order to produce a secure text—in the sense of the historical-critical method.

[20] In 2007 journalist-publisher Frank Schirrmacher wrote an article for the Frankfurt Book Fair suggesting that the Academy's preparation of a historically critical Quran edition had been motivated by Pope Benedict XVI's ill-received Regensburg lecture of 2006 and predicting that the Corpus Coranicum would spark similar outrage among Muslims, comparing it to the punishment of Prometheus for bringing fire to mankind.

"[3] Michael Marx, Neuwirth and Nicolai Sinai spiritedly defended the project, writing that negative reaction to the papal speech should not be equated with Islamic hostility towards a historical-textual or philological approach to the Quran.

[23] Through the example of one of the shorter surahs, teenagers would explore the text through the tools of modern philology while experiencing it orally and through calligraphy as well,[24] with the aim of increasing the students' curiosity and scientific interest in the humanities during their transition to university.