Rationale

We skectch the academic background of this project.

Medieval Arabic texts, especially those from intellectual history (philosophy, natural theology, theoretical mysticism) are sorely underrepresented in current digital text databases (such as al-Maktaba al-Shamela and Noorlib). There are, however, many (critical or not so critical) editions available of these texts. We therefore wanted to advance the use of printed editions to automatically create digital texts.

Commentary writing is the practice of taking an earlier text and interspersing it with additional text. A commentary tradition is the standardization of such a practice on a given earlier text. This phenomenon is widely perceived in late medieval and early modern Islamic intellectual history. Ibn Arabi’s Fusus al-hikam is an example of such a source text, on which dozens, perhaps hundreds, of commentaries were written through the centuries.

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