The rise of intellectual property - 0 views

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  #1 salma1504 on 01 Oct 14

   

  Throughout the Islamic lands, too, there was no concept of intellectual property for many hundreds of years. All knowledge was thought to come from God. The Koran was the single great scripture from which all other knowledge was derived. A text that embodied the word of Allah, it belonged to no one. There were guardians of its true meaning, to be sure-the great Imams who formed schools at the sites of the most important temples. But the principle means of transmitting Koranic knowledge was oral recitation from teacher to student, in an unbroken lineage from the profit Muhammad himself to his disciples, and from these chosen few forward through the generations.The word "Koran" itself means "recitation," and oral transmission of the living word was always to be preferred over a written transcription. The book was merely an instrument, a lowly tool, to facilitate faithful memorization of the word, and manuscripts were continuously checked and rechecked against oral memory to ensure their accuracy and the authority of their lineage. The Islamic belief that oral recitation, rather than written transcription, best preserved the word of God and kept it pure across the generations meant that the technology of printing was very slow to penetrate into Islamic lands, and it was only widely adopted throughout the Middle East with the advent of the mass newspaper press in the nineteenth century.(Carla Hesse on intellectual property )

   

  <div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">Throughout the Islamic lands, too, there was no concept of intellectual property for many hundreds of years. All knowledge was thought to come from God. The Koran was the single great scripture from which all other knowledge was derived. A text that embodied the word of Allah, it belonged to no one. There were guardians of its true meaning, to be sure-the great Imams who formed schools at the sites of the most important temples. But the principle means of transmitting Koranic knowledge was oral recitation from teacher to student, in an unbroken lineage from the profit Muhammad himself to his disciples, and from these chosen few forward through the generations.The word "Koran" itself means "recitation," and oral transmission of the living word was always to be preferred over a written transcription. The book was merely an instrument, a lowly tool, to facilitate faithful memorization of the word, and manuscripts were continuously checked and rechecked against oral memory to ensure their accuracy and the authority of their lineage. The Islamic belief that oral recitation, rather than written transcription, best preserved the word of God and kept it pure across the generations meant that the technology of printing was very slow to penetrate into Islamic lands, and it was only widely adopted throughout the Middle East with the advent of the mass newspaper press in the nineteenth century.(Carla Hesse on intellectual property )</div>

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