(ANSAMED) - ROME, SEPTEMBER 7 - Today it is believed that Islam's holy text was directly dictated by Allah to Mohammed and therefore it must be viewed as a body of strict rules. But there was a time when the wise Muslims talked in critical terms about the Koran. A German group of researchers - as reported by the 'Jesus' monthly in an article - has now decided to follow that path once again. We are talking about the Corpus Coranicum, a project by the Berlin and Brandenburg Academy of Sciences that aims to present, in an open and digital form, the different 'lessons' of the book of Koran referred by oral and written history, together with the most significant historical commentaries and the texts of the cultural environment in which Islam's holy book was formed.
The objective of Corpus Coranicum is not that of drawing up a 'critical edition' of the Koran as a whole - establishing a new text 'cleaned out' of historical encrustment, transcription and transmission errors that piled up during 1400 years of history.
Rather, as project director Michael Marx explained to Jesus, ''we are setting the foundations for a potential critical edition: what we are doing is taking 35 different editions into account, trying to insert certain data from our database to refresh memories that the history of Muslim culture has a critical approach to the text''.
The idea of comparing, from a synoptic standpoint, the various 'lessons' of the Koran is certainly controversial. In most contemporary Muslim societies the prevailing notion is that the text of the Koran was directly dictated by Allah to Mohammed, and that consequently any intervention on the text must be considered blasphemous. In reality, for centuries the Muslim researches looked into the variations to the text, debating, accepting or rejecting the various 'lessons' set forth by the different traditions. And it is this same heritage that the Corpus Coranicum aims to systematise, organising it according to the Western research methods. (Source)
And now for a blast from the past: