Thomas Milo: "Koran im Internet - القرآن على الإنترنت - Quran on the Internet." - audio archive

Episode Transcript
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(00:08):
Welcome to Audio Archive, the channel for historical interviews with writers, philosophers,
activists, and intellectuals from around the world.

(00:35):
Hello. Many may initially find today's interview quite special.
I therefore ask you for a bit of patience.
The actual dimensions are certainly worth reconsidering, as they extend far beyond the narrowly
defined topic of the Koran on the Internet.
They refer, starting from the military origin of the coding of the Internet, to the consequences

(01:01):
for current global cultural diversity.
But let us begin with the Dutchman Thomas Milo, our conversation partner, who initially studied
Slavic studies in Amsterdam, then philology at the famous Islamic studies faculty of Leiden University.
However, his interest there was from the very beginning in classical linguistics, that is, the linguistics of ancient languages.

(01:27):
This connected Thomas Milo with questions of typology on the Internet and he founded Dekotype
BV in the early years, a pioneer in the field of computer typography with a focus on Arabic script. So far, so special.
What is special about it?
Well, the realisation that every Koran text on the Internet is typographically defective, that

(01:53):
is, presented with errors, is not it yet, but Koran here stands only as a synonym.
So let us go back again.
We know that typology on the Internet originates from the Cold War.
This was meant to ensure that the command for a nuclear retaliation by the USA after a nuclear
attack would be executed automatically.

(02:14):
Logically, since the Internet can only read and reproduce what it understands as automated machine
language, typography was therefore initially limited to English.
Once defined this way, it was later adopted by a consortium of American industry.

(02:35):
Only when this realised that other cultures and countries were not ready to adopt English for
their Internet representation, as was the case with international air traffic after the end
of the Second World War, did the American consortium begin to recognise other writing systems.

(02:55):
Today, even hieroglyphs are coded, allowing two researchers to send texts in the ancient Egyptian script to each other.
And yet the Internet, through the coding dominated by the USA, is a kind of cultural shredder
that intentionally or unintentionally diminishes and simplifies cultural diversity and presents

(03:19):
it defectively, as in the case of the Koran.
For what is not codified cannot be represented on the Internet.
To make a daring comparison, the invention of writing over 5000 years ago is not only associated
with the emergence of the first advanced cultures.

(03:40):
Rather, through the invention of writing, over time everything that was not written down has disappeared.
Today, no one could quote from the overwhelming cultural diversity of oral traditions.
It has been erased by writing, except for a few narratives that have been passed down to the present day.

(04:03):
The same applies to the digital revolution.
Everything in existing written records that has not been digitised will eventually disappear over time.
To return once more to the Quran as an example of this process.
In its centuries-long existence, the Quran has been represented in countless writing systems with numerous peculiarities.

(04:30):
But these cannot be represented on the Internet because they have not been digitally codified and will not be.
They will therefore eventually disappear, along with their significance for the history of the Quran.
The same applies to languages that have no writing systems, to dialects and sociolects, etc.

(04:53):
Additionally, the Internet also has a dimension of dominance.
Neither African nor hardly any Asian cultures, societies, or states are involved in the codification.
From this perspective, the Internet serves as a continuing instrument of Western, and particularly
American, cultural dominance, and unwittingly makes us all, perhaps somewhat exaggeratedly put,

(05:20):
modern culture warriors every day. Quran on the Internet. What are the problems?
The Quran is a very old text with an unusual orthography.
And Arabic is everywhere on the net.
There are also many Qurans. Arabic is everywhere. The Qurans are everywhere.
But the understanding of orthography does not exist in the industry.

(05:44):
And therefore, one can only publish Qurans with errors.
Well-crafted Qurans with errors are not Qurans.
No, if one uses such a perfectionist criterion, then it cannot exist, because the industry is
not yet finished representing all the letters.
There is no coding and there is no formula. Perhaps technically.

(06:08):
There is a Unicode and this Unicode should actually cover everything, yes, Unicode is actually invisible.
This is an international protocol for information exchange.
But the information should also be represented.
For this, a completely new principle has been created, that is computer typography.

(06:31):
And computer typography can only do what is encoded.
One only encodes what one knows.
At the beginning, it was only English, Latin, the Latin as it was used by the Americans in the army, that is all.
The culture of technology was only 26 letters, that's how it starts.

(06:52):
And then it was extended to Icelandic, Dutch, German, French, Portuguese.
This is not a Latin script.
First, the Latin script was equipped with all extra critical signs and then, of course, there is Chinese.
At the beginning, this was not possible because initially there were only seven switches.

(07:14):
This means that one could only encode 128 characters.
And now there are 16 switches and also an extra switch, that is 32 switches, then there are millions.
And Chinese is now encoded, Arabic is also completely encoded, as far as it has been analysed.
But the Quran is a special case.

(07:35):
It is not a text that one sees very often.
It is a very frequently quoted text.
But technically it is everywhere.
But when it appeared on the internet, it cannot be without errors because not all elements are technically realised.
They are theoretically realisable, but one can only do what one knows.

(07:56):
What does this mean for the different forms of representation?
It is somewhat like the sharp S in German.
If it did not exist, one simply writes something SS or SZ.
But one can do that in newspapers.
But here there is a cultural artifact.
This is actually the foundation of Islamic culture.

(08:18):
And now everything that is written is being digitised.
This means that the past, the present, and the future, entire cultures can disappear in this process.
There are indeed Qurans spanning centuries.
Yes, yes, the different script typologies.

(08:40):
Does this get lost on the internet? Will this be standardised?
Actually, the focus of technology is pragmatic.
Can one send invoices to each other or print newspapers?
Then such an exotic text is sufficient.
There are many extra details that one does not know.

(09:02):
For what one does not know simply is not coded.
What is not on the radar of technology is not visible, nor is it reproduced.
Now you have a research project.
What exactly are you doing there?
First, one should conduct the research and verify that such a thing really exists.
And then it is actually a diplomatic power process to extend the protocols so that they also

(09:29):
codify the new inventions and then convince the industry to recognise and implement them.
These are actually the three simple phases in a personal conversation I once had with your magnificent
culture; you can talk as much as you want about it.

(09:52):
But all of this will disappear because only those things that are understood in a small industrial
group will be coded and passed on.
And that is also retroactive.
One tries to decipher cuneiform; what is that called in German?
The ancient Mesopotamian writings, also writings that have long since passed, will be coded. Hieroglyphs will be coded.

(10:17):
And there are scholars who check all the information and observations and then provide the documentation
to the industry, and they will do it.
But you cannot write hieroglyphs on every computer.
But scholars have a protocol.
A man in Alaska can correspond with another hieroglyph specialist in Timbuktu, and they can

(10:39):
work on a project together.
And what does that mean in relation to the Quran?
What is special about the fact that one must do this for the Quran? For me?
The Quran is a work of art.
It is not just a holy text.
It is somewhat like the St Matthew Passion, which actually proves that holy texts are completely irrelevant.

(11:03):
It is actually the music that makes it interesting.
But that is my personal opinion.
There is something similar in Islam.
The Quran is just a text, but the Quran, presented by artists, calligraphers, and also book
makers, can be a very magnificent work of art.
What one sees on the internet is, first of all, there are errors.

(11:27):
It is not exactly the Quran.
It was the Quran, but not exactly.
And secondly, it is not beautiful.
Why is it not beautiful?
Because the script is very defective, not orthographically defective, but aesthetically defective.
And that is why there is a task in computer typography, to develop the techniques and designs

(11:48):
to such an extent that one can really create music, just as one can make music, that one can
also create music for the eye.
Do you also create calligraphies on the internet? No, I make music.
I have won several awards.
Yes, those are typographic, that is not calligraphy, that is typography.
But as European or Western typography is always based, the foundation is always classical script.

(12:14):
That is handwritten or how do you say, carved.
But all great typographic scripts have a very strong connection to tradition.
And such a thing does not actually exist in Arabic calligraphy and typography.
I should say, in Arabic typography, the calligraphic knowledge is very thin, very little, because

(12:37):
the calligraphers are often Sufis, who are somewhat mystics, they are more theologically or religiously motivated than technically.
And a dialogue between a technical person and a religiously motivated person is often very difficult.
And especially in the Middle East, where religion is a sensitive issue, it is not easy to create such cooperation.

(13:04):
You simply do not see that.
If one simply thinks about something classical regarding the Quran, Quran transmission, one
knows that the Quran was transmitted orally for much longer than in writing.
Various scripts of Rasen over various.
This is an Islamic theological assumption that there is actually no written, but an oral transmission.

(13:28):
But that is a mythology.
We can also assume that it is actually like all documents, that the Quran is actually a written transmission.
But if one now traces this in history, the last 100 years, the attempt at a unified Quran text is not that old.
It is not that old.

(13:49):
One can actually say the decision is Cairo 1924 where they tried to create a text edition that is authoritative.
And this model is actually also the model for an internet Quran.
And that is not yet possible.

(14:11):
There are two missing codes, one error code is actually too many and there are missing registered
additions in the Koran, which should of course be able to be reproduced accurately.
Yes, but they are normally upper or lower case letters, but these are between connected letters

(14:33):
and the model for connected letters does not exist in Unicode and therefore does not exist in computer typography.
That is actually the weakest point.
How do users, Arabic believing users of the Koran, do this?
They write it like in the newspaper.
Often there are words that one usually knows, but the Koranic writing is different from newspaper writing.

(14:58):
And one is not even aware of that.
No, no, I think so. Or one is pragmatic.
There is no open communication between the end users and the technologies on the American West Coast.
And actually my job is to represent such communication between Arabia and America.

(15:18):
May I understand that correctly? What does that mean?
The people who represent a Koran and discover that it is not possible, but somewhat possible,
they make a Koran, but they have no communication to convey that to the people who develop all the technology.

(15:40):
And these are not things that one can develop oneself.
One can write a program oneself or something like that, but this computer typography is deeply embedded in the system. That is something elementary.
Every system has an operating system and computer typography is part of that.
And therefore one can only work with Apple specialists or Microsoft specialists, but then one

(16:06):
has only solved it with Apple or Microsoft or Unix specialists.
The problem is very deep and therefore one also needs to engage with eight new core industries that define everything.
And Oman is the tenth member of the Unicode Consortium now.
Oman thus speaks for the entire Arab world.

(16:29):
Yes, if the other Arab countries do not do something like this, Oman is the only country, of
course for a Zaheditic, but again with a different understanding of the Koran.
They are trying to reach a kind of Islam, they are Ibadis and they are indeed very, they have
a good sense of humour and they are on the ball, as one says in English.

(16:52):
They are also not narrowly nationalistic.
This is not just an Arab thing or an Arab nation or just Islamic. They see it globally.
How did you come to do that exactly? It's quite simple.
I studied Slavic studies because I was actually into ancient Indo-European comparative linguistics. I was interested.

(17:18):
A bit of a mistake, one could say.
Is there a problem awareness in the Islamic world for this history outside of Oman? No.
Therefore, I actually have the mental tools to conduct such analyses.
And when I shifted my focus from Slavic studies to Turkology and later Semitic languages, I
saw that Turkish, for example, is not a Turkic language.

(17:43):
In the academic world in Holland, when I studied, it was an Islamic language.
And Islam is really not a linguistic criterion, and all normal linguistic principles were absent.
It was more a theologically, legally, and anthropologically oriented field without a foundation.

(18:06):
And therefore, the department also does not have a strong tradition, as is the case in European
studies, simply searching like an academic machine until it cannot anymore.
You go until the Arabs might not want to love that or the Muslims might be very angry if one finds something like that.

(18:28):
But that is of course not a good intellectual or academic criterion.
The technology itself is indeed a dramatic process of change also in its representation.
The technology is actually not well designed because there is a cultural problem, where one
is convinced that there is a certain history of Islam, but there are many groups that all think

(18:52):
that their Islam is the only one.
And that is also reflected in Unicode.
There were Arabs who did that, there were Iranians who did that, and Pakistanis.
And they all have their own perceptions.
Therefore, there are simple letters for letters, like the last Kef, which is pronounced as K,

(19:13):
with two or three different codes.
When you write Kef in Persian in a Persian word, it is something different than when you write
it in an Arabic word and in Mecca, for example.
Therefore, there are two codings for the word Mecca, but the H exists in Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, and Pakistani.

(19:35):
So, those are four possibilities for H and two for M.
That makes eight theoretical codings for simply Mecca.
And then we actually have a core concept, just to make it clear for a listener.
If I have eight different encodings of the word Mecca, what does that ultimately mean for the user?
OK, think about Google, I search for Mecca and I don't know that there are certain areas where

(20:02):
it is simply encoded differently, so I only find Mecca where I think I only find Arabic texts that mention Mecca.
Or if I do this from an Iranist perspective, then I forget that there are also Pakistani and Arabic variations.
And then one can only say it is actually a narrowing.

(20:23):
One cannot use global computing.
And how does this apply to the Quran?
There is also the sound that one calls a letter. There are two variants.
There is an Arabic variant and a Persian variant.
And you would naturally think that an Arabic Quran has the Arabic variant.

(20:46):
No, actually there is a modern and an archaic variant.
And the Iranians retain the archaic form while the Arabs have modernised it.
The difference is two dots below the J.
In the final position, which is not used in older texts.
The Quran is of course an older text and there are never two dots in the final position. In the Quran.

(21:10):
But how can one now create an Arabic text without Arabic text encoding elements? This is an example.
One cannot actually, as it is now, use Arabic encoding for the Arabic Quran.
And that is actually because one did not work from the beginning with linguists and Islamic

(21:32):
specialists, but with hired specialists.
These are American companies that take one or two engineers who happen to know Arabic.
A good example is a word for letter elongation, which one can do between two connected letters.
It is called that in Arabic, but in Unicode, the Arabic name is Tatwil.

(21:58):
But Tatwil is about describing a steering wheel in a vehicle as a round thing.
It is a very precise description, but it shows that one is not professionally familiar with the terminologies.
Therefore, one should not play with all principles.
Also, for example, newer developments such as the representation on smartphones, the representation

(22:24):
on Yes, actually we are not talking about the Quran, we are talking about cultural technology.
The technology is now completely finished for Anglo-American culture.
And if one wants something different, then that is possible.
But that is more like what the Americans call a courtesy.

(22:45):
However, one should not expect too much.
If one takes an object like the Quran, then there is a very high criterion and that is actually a metaphor.
There is also Arabic literature, Arabic poetry, all these things, Arabic historical texts, which

(23:05):
cannot be well represented like the Quran.
And now we are talking about Arabic, but we are also talking about Kurdish, Persian, Urdu, Hindi.
So far, these have only been Islamic languages.
Hindi is actually a Hindu language.
Unicode is how can one exchange all the languages of the world and history as a file? That is Unicode.

(23:31):
But how can all these things also be represented as file culture historically accurately?
That is computer typography and one tries to do that.
And all the problems that I am now outlining as Quran problems are actually cultural technology problems.
The Quran is actually just a metaphor or a good example.

(23:52):
We have, so to speak, an American Western hegemony in cultural interpretation, cultural representation.
Yes, yes, and actually computer technology is something that does not need humans.
It is actually automation, self-thinking, automatism.

(24:13):
And one does not need humans.
The human or the cultural element was only six and twenty American English Latin letters.
And why were they used at all?
Because they were built during the Cold War, so that one could give the last command, for example.
When the Russian rockets arrive, we can also send our rockets back.

(24:36):
One really does not need many letters to give the command.
But now there is no Cold War.
And now the secret network is a public network.
There is a World Wide Web.
And all the conditions have changed.
For quite a long time, it was thought that all members, all participants should simply learn English.

(25:00):
The older network is aviation communication.
In the Second World War, the global flight network was developed to bomb Germany or Japan.
And after the war, it was simply an infrastructure that was implemented more or less unchanged.
And if now two pilots are flying over Turkey and one is Romanian, the other is Greek, then they

(25:23):
speak in English with the Turkish control.
And when I land with KLM, Dutch flying Dutchmen in Arabia, then it is a few minutes before landing,
the captain says to cabin crew, please take your seats in English, because it is about unchanged.
Captain to crew, take your guns.

(25:46):
But one really thought that it would remain unchanged in the computer world, everything would become English.
And then the Americans found the concrete wall, how do you say, boundaries.
In Timbuktu or Mongolia, one will never speak English.
And then they changed direction.
And that is actually Unicode, that the industry recognises that there are multiple scripts and cultures.

(26:08):
But the basic emotion is really still that it is a courtesy and not that it is a fundamental
condition that every culture has the right to have a completely correct system.
All decisions are still made in the USA in these particular battles.
Yes, everything is decided there.

(26:31):
They just said, when we were off the record, it is cultural imperialism.
Yes, but imperialism is planned, but what you see now is more of an evolution.
And I think more and more.
The principle of evolution explains such things very well.
If you wait and sort of sit in the backseat waiting for how evolution goes, then it will never be as you hope.

(26:57):
But if you take the steering wheel yourself and work with it, then it can go as you wish. But that is politics.
You can express your opinion, but you cannot dictate your opinion. The awareness is extensive.
So I have not heard of it for the first time.
It is very strongly absent.
For example, in Germany, there was an attempt to change the billing system to make it easier for computers.

(27:24):
That is of course gossip.
Computers can reproduce anything that is well represented.
The task should be how can we provide an accurate description of how German correctly breaks off?
Then the computer technologists can reproduce that.
But if one does not communicate with the computer technologists, but makes independent orthographic

(27:45):
changes here, then that is a miscommunication and actually also counterproductive.
Thank you for being with Audio Archive.
Follow us, then you won't miss an episode and don't forget the like button.
Until next week, your Audio Archive team.

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Thomas Milo: "Koran im Internet - القرآن على الإنترنت - Quran on the Internet."

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