COBHUNI Lecture: How an ancient text drives technological innovationLecture by linguist Thomas Milo on Tuesday, February 13 2018 at 10 am, AS Saal, ESA 1

24 January 2018

Handling discrepancies between historical text, encoding, script grammar, calligraphic conventions, and modernised Azhar orthography in Unicode and in computer typography. The Omani electronic edition of the Qur'an, www.mushafmuscat.om, was officially inaugurated on June 12, 2017 by Haitham bin Tariq Al Said, the Minister of Heritage and Culture of the Sultanate of Oman. DecoType’s ground-breaking work in the field of Arabic script grammar prompted Sheikh Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Abdullah Al Salmi, the Minister of Endowments and Religious Affairs to commission this project to create a technically perfect and textually integral digital Qur’ān. It takes into account calligraphic legacy of Arabic with elaborate script rules. For this official edition of the Sultanate of Oman, device and operating system-independent computer typography had to be invented. Verses of the Qur'an are displayed with a computer model of the Ottoman writing style (naskh style). The challenge was to reconcile its delicate script grammar with the novel orthography of the Qur'an printed in 1924. In this regard, the digital edition of the Omani Qur'an is a showcase of pushing the limits of technology to handle a key historical text.