In 2017, the Irankoran project was launched at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin/Potsdam) with the financial support of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF). The project’s primary objective is to digitally research and publish ancient Quranic manuscripts held in public and private museums, libraries, and collections in Iran and their corresponding fragments located globally. Irankoran enhances the already established project, Corpus Coranicum, which since 2009 has made available to researchers a comprehensive online catalog of the earliest Quranic manuscripts, primarily housed in European and American libraries and museums.
Over the past three decades, significant progress has been made in the research of Quranic manuscripts. There has been groundbreaking work done in the fields of codicology, palaeography, and dating of ancient Quranic manuscripts. So far, the majority of the researched manuscripts have come from the western part of the Islamic world, including Fustat (Old Cairo), Damascus, and Sana'a. However, to gain a comprehensive understanding of the history of the written text of the Quran, it is imperative to study and analyze manuscripts from the eastern part of the Islamic world. Unfortunately, Quranic manuscripts from countries such as Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia have received limited attention from researchers, mainly due to the difficulties of accessing them. In Iran, despite the availability of incomplete and sometimes outdated catalogs, it is believed that there are many Quranic manuscripts housed in libraries, museums, and private collections. The number of ancient Quranic manuscripts dating back to the first three centuries of Islam is likely far greater than what is indicated in these catalogs.
The Irankoran project has two primary goals: first, to create a comprehensive catalog of Quranic manuscripts in Iran by gathering information about these manuscripts and, second, to provide global researchers access to these manuscripts with the cooperation of institutions, collections, and individuals who collect Quranic manuscripts for personal interests. The next step involves producing digital editions of Quranic manuscripts, specifically Kufic ones, in collaboration with young Iranian researchers. These editions include transliteration of the Quran codices and representation of variant readings, verse counts, and surah headings as they appear in the manuscripts. This information will serve a thorough analysis of the history of the Quranic text. To date Quranic manuscripts, conventional methods such as codicology and palaeography are utilized, and radiocarbon analysis is conducted in collaboration with the laboratory of Ion Beam Physics of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, ETH Zürich).
Irankoran is an interdisciplinary research project that applies both philological analysis and scientific experiments, including radiocarbon dating, on Quranic manuscripts. Irankoran is the first project that has so far carried out scientific dating of Quranic manuscripts (and also the first project that has used this technique on manuscripts in general) in Iran. The achievements improve the chronological perception of early Kufic Qurans date back to the 8th century onward. The project's findings will be made accessible online. Its main objective is to encourage Iranian institutions, libraries, and collections that host Quranic manuscripts to grant digital access, thereby providing a foundation for further research on the history of the Quran by researchers worldwide. Iranian researchers are also encouraged to contribute to the cataloguing and research of Quranic manuscripts and their contributions will be published online.