Textual Transmission in the Islamic Manuscript Age: On the Variance, Reception, and Usage of Arabic and Persian Works from the Middle East to the Indian Subcontinent

The transmission processes of handwritten texts that confront today’s researchers into the Islamic world before the widespread introduction of printing in the 19th century take different forms and can include both minor “corrections” and additions as well as complete revisions of a text with changes to its central statements. The aim of the international cooperation between scholars in Germany and Japan is to make existing approaches and findings relating to the creation, transmission, and reception of texts from the Middle Eastern subjects of Arabic Studies, Islamic Studies, and Iranian Studies, which are strongly represented in both countries, internationally fruitful and visible. The objective is to shed light on how historiographical, religious, scientific, legal, or literary works in Arabic and Persian were copied, handed down, received, deliberately altered,
and made newly usable in the region ranging from the Near East to the Indian subcontinent throughout the extended early modern period.

The case studies to be discussed include texts from various regions of the Near and Middle East, the majority of which were written or handed down between c. 1300 and 1800. The focus is on authors, copyists, and later recipients who composed, copied, interpreted, and used texts in new contexts, modifying them according to changing socio-cultural contexts, (religious) political necessities, or individual preferences. The following questions are addressed:

(1) What type of narrative or motif in literary and historiographical works is selectively transmitted from one context to another?

(2) What changes in content can be demonstrated here, and to what factors can they be attributed?

(3) Which actors were involved and how?

(4) How did the transmission of knowledge take shape with regard to phenomena such as collected manuscripts (majmūʿa) with partial sections from works or abridged versions (mukhtaṣar)?

(5) What does this say about the contemporaneous understanding of texts and knowledge?