Institute for Qur’anic Content
A Qur’anic society adhering to Open Access principles, a consortium of specialists in linguistics, religious studies, archeology and textual criticism.
Actions
Propagate existing content
We replicate and host several Open Access Qur’an translations in different languages.
- We hunt for less available translations requiring effort to be transformed and put online.
- Institute's Multilingual Qur’an Reader
Produce new content
We produce Qur’anic translations into several selected languages and release these into the Public Domain. We engage professional linguists and translators specializing in Arabic:
- Endow nations with accessible and high-quality translations of the Qur’an;
- Contribute to the standardization and uniformization of the international Qur’anic terminology.
Develop collateral content
We aggregate and maintain repositories of ancient Islamic texts, always in Open Access.
- We populate Islam- and Qur’an-related parts of the OARC's archive Intangible Textual Heritage.
The Basics
In the 21st century, the only truly Open content is that which is easily discoverable (that is, well web-indexed) and readily propagated (that is, easily reproducible). The intitative for Open Access to Research Content provides for better visibility of scientific and educational knowledge through simple and robust web and paper publishing and populazation models.
The Premises
The concept of Open Access is endemic to Abrahamic religious, European civilizational and scientific traditions.
The need to provide reproducible, verifiable and refutable discourses dominated in Judaism and Christianity and endowed with exemplary status some corpuses of their content: primary (writings) and derivative (commentaries and commentaries on commentaries). It came into general use that the access to these bodies of writings should be free and universal.
In the Middle East, medieval Islamic thought established similar prerogative of direct access with respect to the received texts.
In the XVI c., European Christianity instituted the sovereignty of the Bible for religious purposes and imposed it through the printing technology. The culture of unlimited access has then contributed to the advent of the positivist science in the XIX—XX cc.
I have always militated for the Scripture and educational content being Openly Accessible in national languages. "So that every ordinary person and a citizen, through reading or listening, could understand what is needed for their spiritual fulfillment."
(1517)
Francysk Skaryna, PhD
Scripture translator, bookprinter
Entity
History
The Institute for Qur’anic Content is an international consortium of specialists in ancient and modern linguistics, religious studies, archeology and textual criticism. Originally refered to as “al Farahidi Textual Workshop", the Institute has been held as a scientific summer school since 1998 in different locations around the world. The formalization as a stable entity took place in 2007 and the Open Access orientation has been articulated since 2016.
Key dates:
1998 First aFTW, Koshice
2007 Registration, Paris
2016 OA enrollment, Surabaya
Presence
Our activities span worldwide and we engage specialists affiliated with scientific institutions in Germany, Russia, Iran, France, Indonesia, Tajikistan. The Institute is headquartered in Paris (France).
Funding
The Institute constitutes a scientific interest group with regard to the French nomenclature, and as such we do not receive any funding from denominational, or non-, organizations.
However, the French Governmental Services may sporadically contribute to the work of the Institute through a funding grant distributed by the French Development Agency, notably within one of their Open Access actions.
Indexing
IQC strives to monitor research and communication activities in scientific disciplines adjacent to its sphere of interest. We identify high-quality content and federate researchers in diverse fields of Qur’anic studies.
The Institute maintains a dedicated curated directory of expert resources on the following topics:
- General Qur’anic Studies
- Qur’anic Studies and Early Islamic History
- General Qur’anic Texts
- Qur’anic Studies and the Ancient Near East
- Early Islamic Traditions and Qur’anic Interpretation
- General Early Islamic Texts
- Life of the Prophet Muhammad and Hadith
- Early Islamic Jurisprudence and Theology
- Arabian and Pre-Islamic History and Culture
- Qur’anic Origins and Apocryphal Texts
- Textual Analysis, Translation, and Linguistics
- General Textual Analysis in Qur’anic Studies
- Qur’anic Textual Criticism and Ancient Near Eastern Comparisons
- Early Islamic Textual Criticism and Tradition
- Theory and Reception
This nomenclature falls within the scope of the Section 32 of the CNRS, “Ancient and medieval worlds”
Assets
This engine hosts several Open Access Qur’an translations.
Intangible Textual Heritage is an Open Access archive of quintessential texts of our civilization. IQC contributes to its Islam- and Qur’an-related sections.