What was inside me, It Searched for, on the Trail: Some Suggestions on the Terms of the Text Correction

The purpose of the text correction is to use the information found in the text’s various manuscripts as well as in its related resources to rewrite the version from which all the existing copies are derived, not to rewrite the original text. Because rewriting the original text, that is the author’s copy, is not possible at all. The main purpose of the academic correction is to rewrite a text which is more or less similar to the text of a lost version which can be called the oldest version of the available manuscripts. However, the older the text and the more corrupted its derived manuscripts; the lower would be the quality of the rewritten version. After reaching the hypothetical manuscript or a similar text, the editor is permitted to clean and correct the ypothetical version applying his personal reasoning and using other resources and information. Then, he would come to the last possible step of correction that is the phase of rewriting a text, which based on the evidences seen in its manuscripts and his personal reasoning, is closer to the author’s original text than the manuscript from which all the available copies are assumed to be derived. This text is a completely theoretical and hypothetical text, and it is possible to change constantly with the discovery of new manuscripts or other information. In this paper, the author tries to present the western ideas in the field of text correction. He first briefly speaks about Muslims’ activities in the area of text correction, and then he goes on to the western techniques of text correction.