Marife Turkish Journal of Religious Studies

Abstract

The word Orientalism derives from the French word "Orient". It is the process in which a person who feels that he or she belongs to the Western culture compiles information and documents about the culture he or she describes as the East and writes, speaks, and makes certain judgments about the image he or she calls "the East" after conducting the necessary studies on them. The studies in question are called “Orientalism” and those making these studies are called “Orientalists.” The orientalists, who discussed the subjects such as the life of the Prophet, the Arabic language, hadith, mysticism and tafsir, were generally interested in the Qur'an. Until the 19th and 20th centuries, the studies carried out by orientalists in the context of the Qur'an were generally translations of the Qur'an and the origins of the Qur'an. This movement, which has a history of more than a thousand years, has almost never included the recitation and the texting process of the Qur'an, although they translated the Qur’an into many Western languages in the process. The science of recitation began to interest orientalists after the science in question was seen as an important proof that could undermine the belief that there was only one text of the Qur'an. Since the 19th century, their serious studies on the history of the Qur'an, the textualization process and the writing features of the Qur'an have led them to focus on the science of recitation and to make studies on recognizing this science. In 1857, an establishment called "Parisien Academie des Inscription et Belles-Lettres" firstly brought up the idea of a project which was applied to the Torah and the Gospel before; creating a critical Mushaf by making a comparison between the original copies of the Qur'an and the existing copies today. Influenced by this idea, Theodor Nöldeke addressed this issue in his book, Geschicte des Qurans. Gotthelf Bergstrâsser, who planned the project, published the report of the study with the name "Plan eines Apparatus criticus zum Koran" in 1930, Munich. During the project supported by Arthur Jefferey, around 42.000 copies of mushafs, books etc. were collected in the archive.
Theodor Nöldeke, the author of the book "Geschichte des Qorâns" in which the history of the Qur'an is examined comprehensively, wrote a chapter on the science of recitation in this book and he claimed that the formation process of the Qur'an began with the hadith of seven letters and ended with Taberî (d. 310/923) within this heading. In addition, it deals with many topics, including the qiraat-rasm relationship, the conditions put forward for the acceptance of a recitation such as conformity to the grammar, conformity to the mushaf line and sound sanad, as well as the the ammah principle and unification of the recitations. Ignaz Goldziher, another orientalist who opened a special title for recitations in his work Die Richtungen der Islamischer Koranauslegung, focused on the subject seriously. Goldziher does not accept the Qur'an as the word of God and claims that the recitations emerge from the character of the Arabic script and consist of some preferences of the scholars. He says that this book, which was created after the death of the Prophet, does not have an agreed text and there are serious doubts about the validity of the Qur'an. To justify this view, he reveals the differences between Mushafs and Qiraats. In this study, we discussed the critical Mushaf project, which is the first step of Western studies on the science of recitation, and the claims of Nöldeke and Goldziher, who stand out with their work in the field of recitation, about different readings of the Qur’an. We tried to give the necessary answers to some serious claims of Goldziher.