The idea of a workshop on the fragmentation of religious texts arose from my study of the transmission of texts in Islam and the complex relationship I observed between different genres of early religious literature. The same complexity led me to think about the confusion of genres and the textual composition of religious motives and texts within the corpus of Islamic texts.

The idea of studying the textual fragment and its relationship to the whole (book or codex) emerged during discussions with Omar Ali de-Unzaga and Stephen Burge at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London between 2011 and 2017. We found that this ‘fragment vs. whole’ formulation uncovered a number of assumptions: the difference between oral and written transmission; the process of fragmentation and re-fragmentation as a technique of composition, in what Aziz al-Azmeh might call the ‘paleo-Muslim Qurʾān’; and alternative ways of conceiving of textual variants, composition, and the ‘original text’. As Jean-Jacques Glassner's paper at the opening of the volume highlights, these questions bring Qurʾānic and Islamic studies into conversation with other contexts and disciplines such as codicology (Fedeli), epigraphy (Imbert), and Judaic studies (Zellentin and Stoumsa). The contribution of the interdisciplinary perspective created an innovative reflection on Islamic religious literature, which has led the editors of this volume to insist on bringing together contributions from different fields of expertise and also to incorporate transcription of the discussions that took place in the workshop into this volume.

Textual criticism within Islamic studies has entered the domain of the postmodern critical school and such questions arise concerning the reception, impact, context and intertextuality of text. In consequence, the question of when, where and how texts begin has become central. When did the religion of Islam establish the canonical status of its founding texts? Such questions, whether addressed directly or indirectly, continue to have considerable influence on textual studies. Studying the problematic of the fragment vs. the whole could offer many inter-disciplinary tools for the analysis of texts and could supplement, or might even override, the potentially tyrannical conception of ‘The Original Book’.