Otto Pretzl (

Ingolstadt Ingolstadt (, Austro-Bavarian: ) is an independent city on the Danube in Upper Bavaria with 139,553 inhabitants (as of June 30, 2022). Around half a million people live in the metropolitan area. Ingolstadt is the second largest city in Upper Bav ...

, 20 April 1893 –

Sevastopol Sevastopol (; uk, Севасто́поль, Sevastópolʹ, ; gkm, Σεβαστούπολις, Sevastoúpolis, ; crh, Акъя́р, Aqyár, ), sometimes written Sebastopol, is the largest city in Crimea, and a major port on the Black Sea ...

, 28 October 1941) was a German

Arabist An Arabist is someone, often but not always from outside the Arab world, who specialises in the study of the Arabic language and culture (usually including Arabic literature). Origins Arabists began in medieval Muslim Spain, which lay on the ...

- orientalist, who specialized in Koranic studies. From 1912 he studied at the

Pontifical Gregorian University The Pontifical Gregorian University ( it, Pontificia Università Gregoriana; also known as the Gregorian or Gregoriana,) is a higher education ecclesiastical school ( pontifical university) located in Rome, Italy. The Gregorian originated as ...

in Rome, and in 1920 was ordained as a priest in

Freising Freising () is a university town in Bavaria, Germany, and the capital of the Freising ''Landkreis'' (district), with a population of about 50,000. Location Freising is the oldest town between Regensburg and Bolzano, and is located on the Is ...

. Afterwards, he studied

theology Theology is the systematic study of the nature of the divine and, more broadly, of religious belief. It is taught as an academic discipline, typically in universities and seminaries. It occupies itself with the unique content of analyzing the ...

and

Oriental languages A wide variety of languages are spoken throughout Asia, comprising different language families and some unrelated isolates. The major language families include Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Caucasian, Dravidian, Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Turk ...

at the

University of Munich The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (simply University of Munich or LMU; german: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) is a public research university in Munich, Germany. It is Germany's List of universities in Germany, sixth-oldest u ...

, where he later qualified as a lecturer in

Old Testament The Old Testament (often abbreviated OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew writings by the Israelites. The ...

exegesis (1928) and Islamic and Semitic languages (1933). In 1934 he became an associate professor at the university, attaining a full professorship during the following year. In 1937 he became a member of the

Bavarian Academy of Sciences The Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (german: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften) is an independent public institution, located in Munich. It appoints scholars whose research has contributed considerably to the increase of knowledg ...

. In 1938 Pretzl documented the emergence of a de facto islamic canonical text, namely the

1924 Cairo edition The Cairo edition (, "the Amiri Mus'haf"), or the King Fu'ād Quran () or the Azhar Quran, is an edition of the Quran printed by the Amiri Press in the Bulaq district of Cairo on July 10, 1924. It is the first printed Quran to be accepted by a Mus ...

of the Quran. Pretzl listed the variants between the orthography of the Cairo text and the recommendations of Andalusian Qurʾān reciter, Abu ‘Amr al-Dani (d. 1053). Otto Pretzl died in a plane crash in 1941.Plett - Schmidseder
/ edited by

Walther Killy Walther Killy (26 August 191728 December 1995) was a German literary scholar who specialised in poetry, especially that of Friedrich Hölderlin and Georg Trakl. He taught at the Free University of Berlin, the Georg-August-Universität Göttinge ...

Dictionary of German Biography

Selected works

* ''Die frühislamische Attributenlehre'', 1940 – Early Islamic attributes doctrine. * ''Die Fortführung des Apparatus Criticus zum Koran'' 1934; Continuation of the critical apparatus of the Koran.

References

German orientalists German Arabists People from Ingolstadt Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich alumni Academic staff of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich 1893 births 1941 deaths German male non-fiction writers {{Germany-academic-bio-stub