Manuscripts

Early Qur’an manuscripts from the first three centuries of Islam are mainly fragmentary artefacts coming from four sacred deposits, namely the Great Mosque of Sanaa, the Great Mosque of Kairouan, the ‘Amr mosque in Fusṭāṭ, and the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. Qur’an manuscripts from Sanaa and Kairouan are mostly in situ while artefacts from Fusṭāṭ and Damascus are now leaves and quires scattered among several institutions all over the world.

The German team of the project will investigate some early Qur’anic manuscripts from Fusṭāṭ and Damascus, like for example some items actually held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (coming from the manuscript collection brought to France after Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt), Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen (coming from the manuscript collection gathered by the Prussian consul in Damascus Johann Gottfried Wetzstein from 1849 to 1861) and the Museum of Islamic Arts in Istanbul (the so-called ‘Damascus Papers’ coming from the Damascus collection).

If you want to navigate your way around the manuscript images, transcriptions and features, or explore possible tools and models for working on the manuscript images and text, please visit our Workspace section. If you wish to volunteer for annotating images or transcribing manuscript texts or if you are interested to work on your own manuscript using our model and tool, please contact us (alba.fedeli@uni-hamburg.de).