Michael Marx: The Qur'an according to Agfa: The Corpus Coranicum project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and its work on the Gotthelf-Bergsträsser-Photoarchive

During the final years of his working life the German scholar Gotthelf Bergsträßer (1886-1933) set up a research plan to create an apparatus criticus for the text of the Qur'an. In a special section, the „Korankommission" of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, black and white-films (mostly Agfa-film) of Qur'anic manuscripts and related literature were stored. These were collected in the late 1920s and 1930s by Bergsträßer and his successor Otto Pretzl (d. 1941). Both scholars were able to collect and photograph a large number of manuscripts by means of a transportable Leica camera in libraries and private collections in Europe (Berlin, Gotha, Paris and Madrid) and in the Orient (Istanbul, Cairo, Meknes and Rabat).

This archive of more than 12000 images survived the destruction of the building of the Munich Academy in World War II and was transferred to Berlin in the 1990s. Currently the archives of Qur'anic manuscripts are being studied, digitised, and conserved in the section „Corpus Coranicum" which was established at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

The paper will consist of the following points:
(1) A short synopsis of the Corpus Coranicum project and its database „Manuscripta Coranica" which aims to document the textual history of the Qur'an.
(2) An overview of Gotthelf Bergsträßer's photo archive and the range of manuscripts it contains.
(3) A presentation how this material is digitised and made accessible through the online-database of the project.
(4) Problems of conservation of the film material (and for a very short part audio material, i.e. wax cylinders) will be discussed.
The photo archive is of course a special case for the conservation of manuscripts in the modern period.

It should be noted here, that especially in the case of the Egyptian and Moroccan manuscripts of the Qur'an (and for the Istanbul manuscripts to a limited extent), the collection on Agfa film offers to date the only reliable source and documentation for some of the oldest manuscripts of the Qur'an, since some of the items the Munich scholars could have seen, are no longer accessible or perhaps no longer exist (e.g. the collection of the Sharif Abdarrahman Zidan in the city of Meknes in Morocco).

For the history of Qur'anic manuscripts, the enterprise of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (which in a sense has been continued by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences) marks a new step towards the conservation and analysis of the manuscripts by means of modern techniques.