SURVEYING: to save manuscripts from destruction and suppression
The great bulk of the Islamic cultural heritage is to be found in the three million or so manuscripts that have come down to us through fourteen centuries of Islamic history. They range in subject from Quranic tafs'ir and fiqh to history, from astronomy to geology, from rhetoric to the ethics of war.
Yet any gathering that has to do with manuscripts abounds in tales of past and present horror: of manuscripts rotting in boxes without ventilation, of damp seeping through walls and eating away at the paper and, more dramatically, of burning and looting in the world's many and proliferating trouble-spots. The irony, of course, is that even the most inadequately stored manuscripts tend to be jealously guarded so that access to them is not possible without a prohibitive amount of bureaucracy. What we seem to have, therefore, is a formula for the destruction and suppression of our manuscripts and, therefore, our heritage.
AI-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation was set up with two goals in mind: to participate in the preservation of the Islamic cultural heritage and to attempt to render it more accessible both to scholars and to the interested public in general.
Achieving these overall objectives was seen as contingent upon the accomplishment of several specific tasks among which priority was given to two: cataloguing previously uncatalogued collections of Islamic manuscripts, and compiling as extensive a visual record of these manuscripts as possible using the most efficient technology available.
To ensure, however, the economic and efficient deployment of our necessarily finite resources, these tasks could not be embarked upon before answers were found to certain questions: Where should our priorities lie? Which manuscripts should be copied first?
Obviously an important manuscript, existing only in a unique copy and under unsafe conditions would be the ideal candidate for copying.
Obviously also any time, money or effort spent in 'preserving' a manuscript or a collection on which work had already been done was, in a sense, wasted, as it could not be spent where it was most urgently needed.
Checking existing bibliographic works did not yield the information we needed as these mostly gave details of collections that were or had become well-known or had at least been catalogued. Where a collection had been only partly catalogued, the tendency was for information to be available on the catalogued section even if the uncatalogued section was the larger or potentially the more significant.
The Foundation therefore became engaged in what we saw as Step One of our overall project: commissioning a world-wide survey of collections of Islamic manuscripts, a survey that we hoped would include private as well as public collections, collections which are unknown and uncatalogued as well as the ones which are mentioned in previously published surveys of this area.
In establishing the format of our survey, our aim was to collect as much information as possible to help us draw up our list of priorities for further stages of the project: the cataloguing and copying.
This survey, to be published in 40 volumes with addenda, will cover more than 106 countries which hold collections of Islamic manuscripts. Some of them, such as Albania, Benin, Brunei, Cyprus, Japan, Kenya, Sierra Leone, the Philippines, Thailand, have never been surveyed before.
While the survey came into being as a preliminary part of al-Furqan Foundation's project, we have no doubt that this major reference work in which it has resulted will prove a useful tool for scholars and researchers in Islamic studies, enabling them, perhaps with greater ease, to contributie to the preservation of our common legacy.