In his article ‘Les premiers documents arabes de l’ere musulmane’, Youssef Ragheb argues that there are a few surviving Islamic documents dated to the seventh century CE. All of these documents are extracted from different material; including papyri, pre-Islamic and Islamic inscriptions, graffiti, and texts written on parchment and palimpsests. The author does not limit his study to religious texts, however; many of the examples include biblical and Qurʾānic material. By religious texts, I mean what William Graham calls Scripture, texts ‘perceived as sacred or holy, powerful and meaningful, possessed of an exalted authority’. They concern mainly religious written texts although they are generally transmitted orally in addition to being written. The survival of religious seventh century documents might be explained by their value in spiritual life as can be seen in the ‘Geniza-like practice’ of storing sacred texts or documents of legal importance in sacred trash such as false ceilings. Ragheb's material belongs to the Muslim era but does not contain only Islamic texts; some of the documents superimpose merchantile and biblical content. Approaching documents dated to the seventh and eighth centuries CE, and sometimes earlier, raises the problem of their incompleteness – what we call in this volume ‘fragmentariness’.

By using the words ‘fragment’ and ‘fragmentariness’, I borrow the notion largely used by modern philosophers, art historians, archeologists, and so on, to designate the character of a piece deriving from a missing ‘whole’. The fragment denotes a closed unit detached from its totality and refers to an intriguing absence: the absence of the ‘whole’. The problematic of fragment has been raised in various fields of knowledge such as art history, archelology, the social sciences, and so on.

The field of archeology is the ideal introduction to the meaning of the fragment; archeology is par excellence the field of fragments. Archeological items, and among them, religious texts, are studied as fragments deriving from an absent whole. The archeological definition addresses the materiality of the fragment and highlights the missing totality indissociable of the fragment and suggests its non-accomplishment and its ‘interruption’. Paradoxically, the fragment expresses a certain autonomy that allows its definition as such. Relating the fragment to the whole depends on the process of interpretation. Ruibal mentions the crucial role of the interpretation in reconstructing the supposed wholeness and insists that the notion of ‘origins’ is often confused with the notion of ‘whole’.