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

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The purpose of this project is to bring together strands of research related to various aspects ofthe transmission of sacred texts. This aims at reaching a deeper understanding of the intertwinedworld of the three major religions of the Middle East at their formative periods of developmentduring the early Islamic centuries.The Arabic Qur'an, the Syriac Bible and the Hebrew Bible, the sacred texts of Islam, EasternChristianity and Judaism respectively, were all transmitted in oral and written form. The modes oftransmission of these traditions converged to a remarkable degree in the medieval Middle East,reflecting close contact between the various religious communities. Two particularly strikingphenomena of convergence include (i) the development of notation systems consisting mainly ofdots added to the consonantal skeleton of the script representing the oral reading traditions in theearly Islamic period and (ii) the assimilation of the mode of transmission of the Hebrew Bible inthe 10th and 11th centuries to that of the Arabic Qur'an. The embryonic development of suchnotation systems is attested simultaneously in the early Qur'an manuscripts (8th century) andcontemporary Syriac Bible manuscripts. The convergence of the transmission modes of theHebrew Bible with the Qur'an reached its extreme point in a corpus of Hebrew Bible manuscriptswritten in Arabic transcription by the Jewish Karaite community in the 10th and 11th centuries.In addition to making important contributions to the comprehension of the individual sacredtraditions, the project will provide the opportunity to identify parallels across these traditions.Parallels identified across Arabic and Syriac in the development of their notation system wouldbe likely to reflect direct contemporary contact. Parallels across (ii) and (i) would be largely of atypological nature and would serve as an important heuristic and strengthening of hypotheses ofcontact within (i).