A Digital Preference for the Koran

Islamization proceeds apace in the UK, and finds its way even into the most cloistered cubbies of academia.

Our Flemish correspondent VH draws attention to a post on Roger Pearse’s blog which concerns the diversion of resources to favor the digitizing of Islamic manuscripts over infidel ones. The archive is in Birmingham, which goes some way towards explaining this act of intellectual submission.

Mr. Pearse’s blog post is followed by VH’s notes:

Mingana manuscripts ignored, Korans placed online instead

I saw today an announcement of the Virtual Manuscripts Room at the Mingana collection in Birmingham. This is now available here. They’ve scanned 71 mss. But… disaster; political correctness has struck. They’ve ignored nearly all the collection, in favour of the stray Islamic items that Mingana picked up. Only about a dozen Syriac and a handful of Arabic Christian mss have been digitised. The press release doesn’t even mention non-Islamic items.

I must say that I feel gutted. Alphonse Mingana must be bewailing that he ever left his mss in Birmingham. Edward Cadbury must be apologising to him and wishing that he had chosen his heirs with more care.

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UPDATE: I’ve emailed David Pulford at the library and it seems that JISC — who funded it — is to blame for the way this was presented. They’re doing some “Digital Islam” thing [1] at the moment, and the press release reflected that pretty much exclusively. Still wish we had fewer Korans and more digital Dionysius bar Salibi, tho.

Notes added by VH:

[1]

June 2007, the UK Government designated Islamic Studies a strategically important subject and asked HEFCE [The Higher Education Funding Council for England] to develop a programme to support this field. As a consequence, JISC [Joint Information Systems Committee] issued a call for a review of user requirements for digitised resources for researchers and teachers within higher education working in the field of Islamic Studies in December 2007. The project has the acronym DigiIslam. [source]