Project: COBHUNI
Contemporary Bioethics and the History of the Unborn in Islam
In the ERC project COBHUNI from September 2015 to February 2021, Prof. Dr Thomas Eich and his team at the University of Hamburg investigated the historical anchoring of today's concepts of "Embryology" in the Koran and Hadith. Since the 1980s, the Islamic bioethics debate on questions relating to the beginning of life has been fundamentally based on the relevant passages.
As part of the project, these Qur'anic passages and hadiths were analysed in the context of early Islamic history - including Aramaic, Syriac, Greek, Latin and Hebrew texts from other religious communities - as well as their interpretation over the course of history. In order to analyse the texts, the interpretations of important scholars in al-Andalus in the 11th and 12th centuries (including al-Qādī ʿIyād and al-Qādī Ibn al-ʿArabī) and the interpretations of modern exegetes and physicians (including ʿAbd al-Maǧīd az-Zindānī and Dr Muḥammad ᶜAlī al-Bār) were examined in particular.
The project also aimed to develop digital functionality for working with Arabic texts. To this end, a workflow for annotating texts and exporting them into an analysis environment was created, including the programming of the necessary interfaces. In addition, an algorithm for searching Arabic texts in non-uniform encodings was developed as part of the project, including the possibility of searching by rasm alone.