Sana'a manuscripts

Sana'a Qur'an parchments

The Sana'a manuscripts, found in Yemen in 1972, are considered by some to be the oldest existent version of the Qur'an. Although the text has been dated to the first two decades of the eighth century (i.e. 70 or so years after the death of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad), carbon-14 tests indicate that some of the parchments in this collection date back to the 7th and 8th centuries.

Discovery and assessment

In 1972, construction workers renovating a wall in the attic of the Great Mosque of Sana'a in Yemen came across large quantities of old manuscripts and parchments. They didn't realize what they had found and gathered up the documents, packed them away into some twenty potato sacks, and left them on the staircase of one of the mosque's minarets.

Qadhi Isma'il al-Akwa', then the president of the Yemeni Antiquities Authority realized the potential importance of the find. Al-Akwa' sought international assistance in examining and preserving the fragments, and in 1979 managed to interest a visiting German scholar, who in turn persuaded the West German government to organize and fund a restoration project.

Carbon-14 tests date some of the parchments to 645-690 AD. This period may be quite long, especially if the parchment is re-used, a common practice in ancient times. Calligraphic datings have pointed to 710-715 AD. Generally, it is accepted that "no extant manuscript has been unequivocally dated to a period before the ninth century on the basis of firm external evidence."

About the manuscript

The above piece of the palimpsest codex shows two layers of script. Both scripts are of the Hijazi type: Firstly, a dark brown script is part of surah 20:1-10 (surah Taahaa or al-kamiyl).

Secondly, with some patience you will realize that under the dark brown script traces of a light brown script are recognizable. This latter original script was washed off from the parchment so that it might be used again. The chess board-like pattern of the substrate is an artifact of the scanning procedure.

Without applying special technical means the older script is not readable, but it is undoubtedly a Qur'anic text, too. This is to be seen easily by a peculiarity of both layers of writing: The washed off script as well as the second writing display verse separators, i.e. some simple geometrical point patterns. Even in the above small piece of the palimpsest one may recognize such separators in both layers of writing. Additionally at least one separator of surahs (two parallel lines crossing the page from right to left, again with some patterns between them) clearly can be recognized in the original script of the palimpsest codex (to be seen in the above piece). Such separators were used only in Qur’ans. There seems to be not any exception in non-Qur'anic texts within other early-Islamic writings.

Why the older layer was wiped out cannot be said definitely until it can be read in detail. This doesn't necessarily imply an alteration of the very text, since the formative period of the Qur'anic text already may have been completed, when the first script was written. Most probably the arrangement of the surahs was altered. And this hypothesis is corroborated by the fact that amongst the findings in Sanaa there are indeed Qur'ans with an arrangement of surahs different from the transmitted Qur'an.

Restoration project

Restoration of the manuscript has been organized and overseen by Arabic calligraphy and Koranic paleography specialist Gerd R. Puin of Saarland University, in Saarbrücken, Germany. Puin has extensively examined the parchment fragments found in this collection. It reveals unconventional verse orderings, minor textual variations, and rare styles of orthography and artistic embellishment. Some of the manuscripts are rare examples of those written in early Hijazi Arabic script. Although these pieces are from the earliest Qur'an known to exist, they are also palimpsests -- versions written over even earlier, scraped-off versions.

A substantial amount of material has been retrieved from the site, as the work continues. From 1983 to 1996, around 15,000 of 40,000 pages were restored, including 12,000 parchment fragments some dating to the 8th century.

In 1999, Toby Lester, the executive editor of the website of The Atlantic Monthly reported on Puin's discoveries: "Some of the parchment pages in the Yemeni hoard seemed to date back to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., or Islam's first two centuries—they were fragments, in other words, of perhaps the oldest Korans in existence. What's more, some of these fragments revealed small but intriguing aberrations from the standard Koranic text. Such aberrations, though not surprising to textual historians, are troublingly at odds with the orthodox Muslim belief that the Koran as it has reached us today is quite simply the perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God."

Yemeni attitudes

More than 15,000 sheets of the Yemeni Qur'ans have been flattened, cleaned, treated, sorted, and assembled. They await further examination in Yemen's House of Manuscripts. Yet that is something Islamic authorities seem unwilling to allow. Puin suggests, "They want to keep this thing low-profile, as we do, although for different reasons."

Puin, and his colleague Graf von Bothmer, an Islamic historian, have published short essays on what they discovered. Von Bothmer, however, in 1997 shot 35,000 microfilm pictures of the fragments, and has brought the pictures back to Germany. The texts will soon be scrutinized and the findings published freely. Puin wrote: "So many Muslims have this belief that everything between the two covers of the Qur'an is Allah's unaltered word. They like to quote the textual work that shows that the Bible has a history and did not fall straight out of the sky, but until now the Qur'an has been out of this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Qur'an has a history too. The Sana'a fragments will help us accomplish this."

Puin's comments and conclusions

In a 1999 Atlantic Monthly article, Gerd Puin is quoted as saying that:

My idea is that the Koran is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Muhammad. Many of them may even be a hundred years older than Islam itself. Even within the Islamic traditions there is a huge body of contradictory information, including a significant Christian substrate; one can derive a whole Islamic anti-history from them if one wants. The Koran claims for itself that it is 'mubeen,' or 'clear,' but if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn't make sense. Many Muslims—and Orientalists—will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Koran is not comprehensible—if it can't even be understood in Arabic—then it's not translatable. People fear that. And since the Koran claims repeatedly to be clear but obviously is not—as even speakers of Arabic will tell you—there is a contradiction. Something else must be going on.

Quote from the letter Puin wrote to Al-Qadi Ismail al-Akwa of Yemen:

"The important thing, thank God, is that these Yemeni Qur'anic fragments do not differ from those found in museums and libraries elsewhere, with the exception of details that do not touch the Qur'an itself, but are rather differences in the way words are spelled. This phenomenon is well-known, even in the Qur'an published in Cairo in which is written:

Ibrhim next to Ibrhm

Quran next to Qrn

Simahum next to Simhum

In the oldest Yemeni Qur'anic fragments, for example, the phenomenon of not writing the vowel alif is rather common."

Responses

In 2000, The Guardian interviewed a number of academics for their responses to Puin's claims, including Dr Tarif Khalidi, and Professor Allen Jones, a lecturer in Koranic Studies at Oxford University. In regard to Puin's claim that certain words and pronunciations in the Koran were not standardized until the ninth century, the article notes.

Jones admits there have been 'trifling' changes made to the Uthmanic recension. Khalidi says the traditional Muslim account of the Koran's development is still more or less true. 'I haven't yet seen anything to radically alter my view,' he says. [Jones] believes that the San'a Koran could just be a bad copy that was being used by people to whom the Uthmanic text had not reached yet. 'It's not inconceivable that after the promulgation of the Uthmanic text, it took a long time to filter down.'

However, the article notes some positive Muslim reaction to Puin's research. Salim Abdullah, director of the German Islamic Archives, affiliated to the Muslim World League, commented when he was warned of the controversy Puin's work might generate –"I am longing for this kind of discussion on this topic."

See also

• Historiography of early Islam
• History of the Qur'an
• Textual criticism
• Uthman Quran
• Topkapi manuscript
• Abdul Alhazred

External links

• The UNESCO Restoration Project
• Islamic Collections from the Museum (pdf)
• Islamic Awareness, The Qur'anic Manuscripts
• Codex Ṣanʿāʾ – Inv. No. 01-27.1: Mid-1st Century Of Hijra, Islamic Awareness, April–August 2008. (Accessed January 2009)