cmaguire@phoenix.princeton.edu (Camm Maguire) (12/03/89)
Greetings! Thanks for the informative post! I wonder if I might ask a few other questions of the Islamic scholars in this group: >Salaam. Wilson Bishai, lecturer of Arabic at Harvard, has entered the >Qur'an (with diacritics <tashkyl>) on the Apple II in the early 80's. >You might want to get in touch with him to find out if he can >distribute it. He was waiting for Al-Azhar to authenticate his copy. 1) Does anyone know of a machine readable English translation of the Qur'an? Is there an English translation widely considered as "standard" among Muslims, analogous to the King James Version of the Bible? >I know that there are machine readable copies of the hadith (sayings >of the Prophet (peace be upon him)). Somebody in London had entered >the hadith into a database program on an IBM PC. I saw a demo of it: you >entered some keywords and it would retrieve all hadith on that topic. >This whole system was for sale and it was demo'ed for the late Gen. Ziaul Haq >of Pakistan. He was suitably impressed and ordered the Ministry of Religious >Affairs to buy a couple of copies. > 2) Do you know how to get in touch with this person? 3) Can the hadith be classified into groups of varying authenticity? Does there exist such a classification that is widely accepted among Islamic scholars? 4) Is there basic agreement on what constitutes the hadith (i.e. are the hadith a closed body of literature?) Can a complete set of the hadith be found in any book? (I have only seen selections published before.) Is the above computer copy "complete"? 5) Specifically, I've been looking for a particular hadith for some time. The Prophet (may peace be upon Him) is reported to have given the number of Prophets of the past as either 124,000 or 144,000. Some hadith give the first figure, some the second. Momen's book on Shi'ih Islam gives these figures on p.177 but does not cite a reference. Does anyone know where I can find these sayings? Many Thanks! Camm
cmaguire@phoenix.princeton.edu (Camm Maguire) (12/14/89)
Greetings! The responses have been pouring in! So far we have 20 committed typists. In addition, a friend of mine here at Princeton knows of about 20 potential others at U Penn. He seems confident that they will wish to participate. Many respondents have been indicating their schedule constraints, and it seems as if late January or early February would be the best time to type. Unless anyone disagrees, let's shoot for Feb. 1. As far as the choice of translation goes, I suggest the following procedure: 1) First find out which translations are copyrighted and eliminate those. 2) Then limit the choices to those which are well known among all Muslims, especially Islamic scholars. 3) Then take a net vote as to whether Victorian or modern English is preferred. This should eliminate roughly half of the choices left after step 2). 4) Then eliminate those not easily accessible to any of our committed typists. 5) If any choice remains at this stage, take a net vote. If there are any objections to this procedure, please post them to soc.religion.islam within the next week or so, and through consultation we will amend it as necessary. If there are no objections to this procedure, I will volunteer to do step one, and will post a list of non-copyrighted translations. If anyone has access to a broad range of Islamic scholars and could then do step two, please send me mail. Otherwise, I can check with the Near Eastern Studies Department here at Princeton. In the mean time, please keep sending volunteers to type! If you know any friends who might not see this message themselves, ask them if they're interested. It looks as if this project is going to go! Peace! Camm