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This essay explores the tense relationship between the oral and written transmissions in the history of the Qurʾān. While Muslim scholars consider "orality" to be the cornerstone in the process of transmitting their holy text, I argue that writing, in its various forms, was a crucial element in transmitting and validating the Qurʾān. Orality was also an important component in this process of transmission but it also played a theological role in establishing the superiority of the Qurʾān over the Bible. Indeed, the written transmission of the Qurʾān might have been more authoritative than its oral counterpart, which was/is mainly used as an argumentative device to establish the integrity of the text rather than to establish the text itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Abstract This article gives an overview of the David Kaufmann Geniza (DKG)/Cairo collection of Arabic documents conserved at the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. Almost entirely unpublished and unexploited, they are the subject of a catalogue raisonné in preparation by the author. Appendix 1 provides a complete list of the DKG documents that are in Arabic or somehow bear Arabic. In Appendix 2 one item of the collection, the text of a folio of the Kitāb al-fityān, a lost book by al-Jāi, is published with two plates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]