This article in the Boston Globe reports that, “a team of scholars at Germany’s Berlin-Brandenberg Academy of Sciences will complete the first phase of what will ultimately be an unprecedented, two-decade effort to throw light on the origins of the Koran.”

The international project, called the Corpus Coranicum, uses the internet to create “something that scholars of the Koran have long yearned for: a central repository of imagery, information, and analysis about the Muslim holy book,” according to the Globe. “Modern research into Islam’s origin and early years has been hampered by the paucity and inaccessibility of ancient texts, and the reluctance of Muslim governments in places like Yemen to allow wide access to them.”

But now, this project, which draws on some of the earliest Korans known, in Istanbul, Cairo, Paris, and Morocco, allows “users to study for themselves images of thousands of pages of early Korans, texts that differ in small but potentially telling ways from the modern standard version. The project will also link passages in the text to analogous ones in the New Testament and Hebrew Bible, and offer an exhaustive critical,” says the Globe.

According to the project’s scholars, it will be the world’s first “critical edition” of the Koran, a resource that gathers historical evidence and scholarly literature into one searchable, cross-referenced whole. And, because it is web-based, it will accessible to the world.

This last point seems to have stirred up the beginnings of controversy in parts of the Muslim world where the text is taken to be God‘s exact dictation to the Angel Gabriel. To say that the text has historic roots, has existed through time, with permutations, is to many considered slanderous. And, as the Globe reports, “Already, the creators of the Corpus Coranicum, in response to press coverage in Germany, have felt the need to publicly insist on al-Jazeera and in visits to Muslim countries that they have no intention of undermining the faith.”

According to the Globe, “No mainstream Koranic scholars see the Corpus Coranicum, or work like it, triggering a Muslim Reformation. So far, the debates over the roots of the Koran have remained within academia, and most scholars don’t see that changing. ‘Most Muslims simply don’t care about this sort of work, any more than most Christians care about the Dead Sea Scrolls,’ says Walid Saleh, an Islamic scholar at the University of Toronto specializing in the history of Koranic interpretation. ‘This is a Western academic enterprise, this critical historical study.’”