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The intertwined world of the oral and written transmission of sacred traditions in the Middle East

Applicant Dr. Alba Fedeli
Subject Area Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
Term from 2019 to 2023
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 428993887
 
Final Report Year 2023

Final Report Abstract

The InterSaME project investigated the representation of oral traditions in Arabic Qur’ans, Syriac Bibles, and Arabic transcriptions of the Hebrew Bible. The writing systems of these three traditions were studied to establish how they reflect oral reading traditions and how much these three traditions converged, and to understand possible connections in the transmission and encoding of sacred texts during the early Islamic centuries. In the fourth and fifth century Syriac scribes began to add dots to their manuscripts. Some of these dots were used to differentiate between words that looked identical but were pronounced differently. A second layer of dots were used to divide the text into smaller units. This layer, which also indicate rising and falling tones, was the focus of the Syriac strand. The distribution of these dots and their function was investigated, specifically the use in different grammatical constructions, to sketch an outline of the prosody of Classical Syriac. The second part of the Syriac strand focused on medieval treatises, comparing these texts with data from the survey of manuscripts. The insights from the investigation of the manuscripts provided a new window into these treatises and produced a wealth of observations about specific accents, biblical passages, as well as the larger aims and methodologies of the Syriac grammarians. Dots were incorporated into the Arabic writing system of the Qur’an in the eight/ninth century. Their gradual introduction answered the need to mark vowels (distinguishing between identical words) but these dots never marked intonation or pitch contour like the Syriac accents. The Qur’anic strand focused on partially dotted manuscripts in order to uncover the original function of these dots. The digital edition of some Qur’anic manuscripts and their data analysis showed that morphosyntactic information plays an important role in the dotting but the vocalization system was mainly intended for marking the text according to recitation rules. In some cases, the dotting reflects an awareness of different reading traditions (qirāʾāt). Single dots were not enough to encode all the details of the Qur’anic reading traditions. While the eastern Syriac tradition added a third layer of dots, specifically designed to mark vowels, the Qur’anic dotting system was abandoned in favour of vowel-symbols corresponding to the modern Arabic system. The Hebrew strand of the project focused on a corpus of Hebrew Bible manuscripts that were written by Karaite Jews in the Middle Ages in Arabic transcription. These reflect a remarkable degree of rapprochement of Jews with their Muslim environment. The transcriptions represent a convergence with the external form of the Muslim Arabic Qur’an and also with the concepts of authority associated with the transmission of Muslim scripture. The object of study for this strand was a corpus of Karaite Arabic transcriptions of the Hebrew Bible in the British Library. The codicology of the manuscripts were investigated, the various methods of transcription reflected by the manuscripts were described in detail and the pronunciation traditions reflected by the transcriptions were analysed. These investigations show that there are clear convergences between the Christian, Muslim and Jewish traditions in their attempts to preserve and represent their respective reading traditions in the Middle Ages, even while they never fully adopt the system of any of the other traditions in order to maintain their individual identity.

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