Hawzah News Agency- Due to the current political situation in Yemen, the original manuscripts—which are among the oldest Qur’an manuscripts in existence—are currently inaccessible. However, the approximately 24,000 microfilm images, as well as 5,000 color slides and black-and-white photographs, created in the 1990s were acquired in 2019 by the Department of Oriental Studies at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and have since been digitized. This means that, for the first time, it is now possible to analyze this valuable manuscript discovery in its entirety.
To this end, researchers in Islamic Studies at the Asia-Africa Institute of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Hamburg and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin have secured funding from the DFG for a twelve-year research project: “From the Particular View to the Overall Picture: Using Computer Vision, AI, Paleography, and Philology to Reconstruct the Biography of the Great Mosque of Sanaa Manuscript Collection as an Ensemble” (BiSaME) will run from 2026 to 2029 during its first phase and will receive funding of €934,301 for this period.
The project is led by Dr. Alba Fedeli of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, who previously conducted research at the University of Hamburg for many years, and Prof. Dr. Thomas Eich from the Department of Islamic Studies at the University of Hamburg.
Source: uni-hamburg.de
Your Comment