Dr. Ervan Nurtawab

• Nurtawab, E. “Haji Abdul Malik Karim Amrullah, or Buya Hamka, or Hamka.” In Georges Tamer (Ed.), Handbook of Qurʾānic Hermeneutics. Vol. 4: Qur’ānic Hermeneutics in the 19th and 20th Century (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2024): 325-333.
• Nurtawab, E, and F. Syukroni. “Qur’anic Arabic, Tafsir al-Jalalayn and Javanese: Javanese translation in an eighteenth-century Banten Qur’an,” in Johanna Pink (Ed.), Qur’an translation in Indonesia: Scriptural politics in a multilingual state (London: Routledge, 2024): 19-36.
• Nurtawab, E, “Qur’anic readings and verse divisions in 18th-century Banten Qur’ans A.51, W.277 and RAS Arabic 4,” Indonesia and the Malay World 51:150 (2023)
• Daneshgar, M, and E. Nurtawab (Eds), Malay-Indonesian Islamic Studies: A Festschrift in Honor of Peter G. Riddell(Leiden: Brill, 2023)
• Nurtawab, E, and A. Deswijaya (2022): “Verse numbering system and Arabic references in Bagus Ngarpah‘s early 20th century Javanese Qur‘an,” Indonesia and the Malay World 50:147 (2022): 173-197.

Qur’an Manuscripts in Southeast Asia: Differences, Diversities and Standardisation

The Qur’an tradition in Southeast Asia has been established for centuries, the known oldest extant manuscript dating from as early as the 16^th century. However, the process of standardisation of Qur’anic manuscripts and the development of a Southeast Asian tradition of writing the Qur’an has as yet been poorly understood. With this research project, I plan to make a significant contribution towards a better understand of how and why specific regional traditions developed, what role the agency of scribes and the existence of Arabic canonical traditions played in this, and how these processes might have influenced the emergence of print in the nineteenth century.

In relation to the study of the Qur’anic reading systems, two main features are commonly studied to understand the distinctions between readings: first, orthography and pronunciation, and second, the divisions of the verses that often result in differences regarding the total number of verses in the Qur’anic chapters. The second feature, that is, verse divisions, had become part of the central attention among the reciters (qurrā’) and those who are responsible for the transcription of the Qur’an. Differences from the recognised counting systems regarding the placement of verse markers mentioned in the Arabic scholarship in the Qur’anic sciences are commonplace. In order to better understand how these idiosyncrasies came about, this research project examines differences and variants in the production of the Qur’an manuscripts in the Southeast Asian region, with a special focus on the systems employed for marking the ends of the verses.