How ‘Sacred’ is the Text of an Arabic Medieval Manuscript?

al-Qadi, Wadad. “How ‘Sacred’ is the Text of an Arabic Medieval Manuscript?”. Theoretical Approaches to the Transmission and Edition of Oriental Manuscripts. Ed. Judith Pfeiffer and Manfred Kropp. Beirut: Ergon Verlag Wurzberg, 2007. 13-53

Notes:

pp.13-14 Article looks at how much an editor should interfere with a text – methods used by editors of Oriental texts in the past, and his own proposal which “…is based on taking into consideration aspects of Islamic civilization.”

pp.15-16 Editor (in the Western tradition) faced with a choice of two goals

1. The intentions of the author are knowable from the final text and the goal is to “…establish the text as finally intended by its author.”
2. If the authors intention is “unknown or unknowable and unstable, and that works are collaborative, social products, then his goal would be to present the text in the most accurate, historically illuminating form.” (refers to Tanselle pp.25-27)

pp.17-22 Potted history of scholarly editing in the Arab world – argues that it is almost exclusively ‘pre-Gregian’ – i.e. concerned primarily with rendering the text as the author intended it.

p.22 al-Qadi aims to have his editorial approach informed by the “…aspects of Islamic history that have a bearing on editorial policy in general and how ’sacred’ the text of a medieval Arabic manuscript is in particular…”

Believes that the corpus of Arabic manuscripts should be broken up due to the specificities of Islamic history and civilization.  No one set of editorial rules can apply to all components.

p.27 Mentions two annotated bibliographies: Ibn al-Nadim’s Fihrist (written  377/987) and Hajji Khalifa’s Kashf al-zunun (died 1067/1656)

p.28 Process of manuscript composition by scholars teachers (refers to Berkey)

pp.30-31 Copyists and issues with them (useful references).

pp.32-33 Problems with the lack of standardization: different symbols would be use to represent beginnings of chapters or the ends of quotes, pagination developed late, mixing of folios, abbreviations not applied universally.  “Such matters created some chaos in the corpus of manuscripts we have received…” An understatement! Contains full references.

p.34 Proposes tripartite division of texts:

1. Those that the editor must preserve passively (e.g. very early papyri, manuscripts and poetry)
2. Those which the editor mus interfere with minimally in order to aid access (manuscripts which we have strong evidence for authorisation by the author; pp43-44 lists acceptable versions e.g. ones that have been read back to the author, and copies made by students from an approved copy)
3. The rest – possible 90% of the Arabic medieval corpus.

Doesn’t really discuss any solution to the problems of editors dealing with this third category – proposes that corrections should be made if a divergent reading found in another manuscript (51).  The article is not at all a manifesto for action – more a plea that editors leave category one alone, make category two accessible to students, and not feel bad about making substantial changes to category three.