Eléonore Cellard and AbdurRahmanAbou Almajd about Coranica

Eléonore Cellard and AbdurRahmanAbou Almajd about Coranica .

We have a fresh opportunity to reflect about Coranica, At this point Eléonore Cellard is not only going to speak about Coranica but she will also speak about her PhD research on the qur’ānic manuscripts .

Eléonore Cellard :

PhD student in Arabiccodicology andl inguisticat the  Institut National des langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) in Paris .

During her masters in the Arabic Language at INALCO, she had the opportunity to attend Déroche’s seminar about the codicology of Arabic manuscripts. A great part of this seminar was dedicated to the qur’ānic manuscripts. She later obtained state funding for her PHD project at INALCO, titled “The written transmission of the Qur’an: Study of a corpus of manuscripts probably from the second A.H./eighth century A.D.” During these last years, she conducted her research in conjunction with teaching at INALCO .

Since 2011, she has been involved in the Franco-German project Coranica, working on the edition of the most ancient fragments of the Qur’an. As part of this project, she presented her research at the event “Les Origines du Coran, le Coran des Origines” in the French Academy (March 2011) and organized a workshop, “ManuscriptaCoranica” in Paris (October 2012).

Manuscripts chosen from en.wikipedia.org, wikimedia.org and samfogg.com

Q: I wonder what the Coranica is like ?

EC: Coranica is a research project initiated in March 2011 and funded by the French ANR and German DFG. It brings together many of the greatest French and German specialists on archeology andqur’ānic studies and also young researchers. This project aims to purpose new materials for the history of the Qur’an. Two aspects – text and context – will be distinguished :

First, we are interested by the qur’ānic manuscripts and other qur’ānic citations of the first century of Islam. We purpose an edition of the earliest qur’ānic manuscripts with, first, its photography and the precise transliteration of its text and second, physical informations: Radiocarbon dating and formal observations(concerning codicology, paleography, etc … )

Second, we examine the historical context of the birth of the Qur’ān, enlightened by the recent epigraphic discoveries. We try to bring some precisions on the linguistic situation in Arabia just before the rise of Islam .

Q: You try to bring some precisions on the linguistic situation in Arabia just before the rise of Islam. Could you give some examples on that, please ?

EC:Tens of thousands Arabian inscriptions give us important informations about the multi-linguistic situation in Arabia before Islam. Located on the commercial roads through which incense was brought from Yemen towards Byzantium and Persia, Arabia is a linguistic crossroad. Its numerous Arabian dialects and foreign borrowings reflect the vicissitudes of the political context. At the present time, we are able to identify more of ten ancient dialects used between the 8th century BC and the 4th century AD, in different regions of Arabia .

During the last centuries before the rise of Islam, many of these dialects have already disappeared, probably due to the intrusion of prevailing languages. Severalinscriptions in foreign languages (Imperial Aramaic, Nabatean, Greek, etc…) and reports of the Islamic Tradition indicate that local populations employed these languages for cultural purpose, religious matters and also communication. Our actual ambition is to establish precise mappings of these foreign borrowings, based on epigraphy and Islamic Tradition .

Q: What prompted you to takeCoranica ?

EC: The objectives of Coranica are not innovative, but rather resume precedent research projects (the Amari Project for the edition of manuscripts and other French ANR projects) and complete the actual Corpus Coranicum project (www.corpuscoranicum.de ).

Our particular interest on the material testimonies is an answer to the problematic situation, particularly in the study of qur’ānic manuscripts: until today, many studies have been published on the qur’ānic manuscripts, but they neglected too often the access to the physical evidences.The greatest example is the Şan‘ā’ palimpsest. By giving access to the material, we hope that our project inaugurates a more reliable approach in this field .

Q: I know since 2011, you have been involved in the Franco-German project Coranica, could you elaborate on that, please ?

EC: My collaboration in the Coranica project completes and widens my PHD’s researches which I began five years ago, under the supervision of François Déroche(EPHE, Paris) and Georgine Ayoub (INALCO, Paris). Indeed, I am studying a corpus of qur’ānic manuscripts, probably from the second century of Islam. Compared to the manuscripts selected for Coranica, my PHD corpus reflects a later stage in the written transmission of the Qur’ān. However, the approach is still the same and requires competences in many fields: codicology, (i.e. the formal study of the book), paleography (script style), history of art, Arabic linguistic and knowledge of the early Arabic sources (grammar, traditions and variant Readings). By using these methods, we are trying to reconstruct the history of the Holy Book in the earliest centuries of Islam and answer to many questions: What place occupies the writing in the early Islamic community? What are the aesthetic criteria in the written representation of the Qur’ān? How does the qur’ānic orthography stand up in relation to the development of Arabic grammar? And what are the qirā’āt the most commonly represented in the manuscripts?Of course, many other questions could be added here .

Q:Well, you have analyzed, some of the peculiarities appear frequently and are not directly connected to a given reading: could you elaborate on, could you elaborate on hamza and imāla ?

EC:It is probably at the end of the first century or beginning of the second that appears a system of vocalization in the qur’ānic manuscripts. Some traditions attribute it to the famous poet and grammarian of Basra Abū-l Aswad ad-Du’alī (dead in 69/688-9), while according other, it is the work of a Basran commission ordered by al-Hajjāj ibn Yūsuf(dead in 95/694).In any event, a great number of manuscripts datable to the second century confirm these reports by including a system of vocalization, represented by colored dots .

Among the manuscripts that I have analyzed, some of them differ in the dotting’s representation and also in its rules. If the basic rule – that is dot’s position indicates the vowel – is systematically applied, more complex rules – particularly about hamza– are not yet clearly established and are therefore subject to variation .

Furthermore, the corpus in question shows that those who vocalize the text do not totally adhere to one of the seven eponymous Reading against another. It seems rather that some of thempractice anikhtiyār by preferringa majority reading against a more particular variant reading .

Among these preferences, some dialectal features seem to have been widespread, like the imāla (particularly on the verb jā’a), the ḍammmīm al-jam‘(i.e. humu), and, even less so, the non-harmonization of the article hu/hum after an /i/ vowel or the letter yā’ (‘alayhum instead of ‘alayhim). All of these features are known as geographic features but some of them could be probably linked to chronological issues and therefore help us in the dating of the manuscript and its vocalization . 

Abdur-Rahman: Thank you very much,Eléonore .

EléonoreCellard: It is a pleasure! Thank you for your interest .