FUSUS

“Medieval Arabic texts, especially those from intellectual history (philosophy, natural theology, theoretical mysticism) are sorely underrepresented in current digital text databases. 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. We wish to revive our understanding of this corpus. The base text and fourteen commentaries have been edited and published. Their thousands of pages, millions of words, can quickly blur into each other one by one, as differences between commentaries can be narrowly small. We propose to turn this into a digital corpus, which, we believe, can be achieved within a small timespan and simply with technology currently available.”