The Digital Muṣḥaf Project: A Project to Visually Reconstruct Dispersed Qurʾānic Fragments

Monday, April 29, 2019

The Digital Muṣḥaf Project: A Project to Visually Reconstruct Dispersed Qurʾānic Fragments

The Digital Muṣḥaf Project aims to create a database of images of early Qurʾānic fragments from dispersed muṣḥafs or codices of the Qurʾanic text and, as far as possible, virtually re-create the original codices so that they are available for scholars and the public in one place together with descriptions and metadata.

There is an ever-growing scholarly interest in Qur’anic Studies in the East and the West. The newly founded International Qur’anic Studies Association (IQSA) is but one manifestation of this. In particular there is an interest in early Qur’anic fragments from a number of points of view including those of chronology, textual criticism, art history, palaeography, and codicology. There may be a number from the high-hundreds to as many as a figure in the low-thousands of fragments from early muṣḥafs from the 7^th to 10^th centuries C.E., scattered throughout the libraries of the world, the exact figure is not known, and although Whelan (1990), Dutton (1999) and others have done valuable work in identifying fragments belonging to the same muṣḥaf, much work remains to be done.

For this Pilot Project, the team decided to focus on a single muṣḥaf, namely the codex discussed by Estelle Whelan (Writing the Word of God, Part I, p. 116-118 ) of which 344 folios are known to be dispersed throughout various libraries. We have given this Codex the rubric Digital Muṣḥaf 1 (DM1). Please refer to Appendix 1 for details of currently known fragments.