The Wall Street Journal reports:
On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force
bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian
Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno.
Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic
scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient
manuscripts of the Quran.
The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the
war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text
Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God's word. The wartime
destruction made the project "outright impossible," Mr. Spitaler wrote
in the 1970s.
Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived,
and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out
to scholars -- and a Quran research project buried for more than 60
years has risen from the grave.
"He pretended it disappeared. He wanted to be rid of
it," says Angelika Neuwirth, a former pupil and protégée of the late
Mr. Spitaler. Academics who worked with Mr. Spitaler, a powerful figure
in postwar German scholarship who died in 2003, have been left guessing
why he squirreled away the unusual trove for so long.
Ms. Neuwirth, a professor of Arabic studies at
Berlin's Free University, now is overseeing a revival of the research.
The project renews a grand tradition of German Quranic scholarship that
was interrupted by the Third Reich. The Nazis purged Jewish experts on
ancient Arabic texts and compelled Aryan colleagues to serve the war
effort. Middle East scholars worked as intelligence officers,
interrogators and linguists. Mr. Spitaler himself served, apparently as
a translator, in the German-Arab Infantry Battalion 845, a unit of Arab
volunteers to the Nazi cause, according to wartime records.
Via Cronaca