From Codicology to Technology: Islamic Manuscripts and Their Place in Scholarship (Book Review‪)‬

From Codicology to Technology: Islamic Manuscripts and Their Place in Scholarship. Edited by STE-FANIE BRINKMANN and BEATE WIESMULLER. Berlin: FRANK & TIMME, 2009. Pp. 215. [euro]29.80. Who would have thought a few years ago that manuscripts would once more play a role of importance in the study of Islamic literatures? Certainly in Europe, working with Islamic manuscripts--and the pursuit of philology in a wider sense for that matter--has for quite a while been seen as somewhat of an atavistic activity, a romantic emulation of those nineteenth-century scholarly giants, such as Wilhelm Ahlwardt (1828-1909) or Michael Jan de Goeje (1836-1909), whose achievements are in any case inimitable. Cataloguing manuscripts, textual criticism, and the editing of Islamic texts have become rare activities in European universities. It was thought that since we had passed the elementary stage of inventorizing collections and exploiting these with reliable editions of classical works, as took place in the first half of the twentieth century, the remaining work could be entrusted to scholars in Muslim countries.