The Sana'a manuscripts, found in Yemen

Yemen

The Republic of Yemen , commonly known as Yemen , is a country located in the Middle East, occupying the southwestern to southern end of the Arabian Peninsula. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the north, the Red Sea to the west, and Oman to the east....

 in 1972, are considered by some to be the oldest existent version of the Qur'an

Qur'an

The Quran , also transliterated Qur'an, Koran, Alcoran, Qur’ān, Coran, Kuran, and al-Qur’ān, is the central religious text of Islam, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God . It is regarded widely as the finest piece of literature in the Arabic language...

. 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 Prophet Muhammad), carbon-14

Carbon-14

Carbon-14, 14C, or radiocarbon, is a radioactive isotope of carbon with a nucleus containing 6 protons and 8 neutrons. Its presence in organic materials is the basis of the radiocarbon dating method pioneered by Willard Libby and colleagues , to date archaeological, geological, and hydrogeological...

 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

Sana'a

-Districts:*Al Wahdah District*As Sabain District*Assafi'yah District*At Tahrir District*Ath'thaorah District*Az'zal District*Bani Al Harith District*Ma'ain District*Old City District*Shu'aub District-Old City:...

 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

West Germany

West Germany is the common English, but not official, name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG in the period between its creation in May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990....

 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

Calligraphy

Calligraphy is a type of visual art. It is often called the art of fancy lettering . A contemporary definition of calligraphic practice is "the art of giving form to signs in an expressive, harmonious and skillful manner"...

 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. But there is hardly any other explanation for this replacement of a Qur'anic text by another one conceivable than that the older text version might have scandalized theologians or other people in power or charge. 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

Gerd R. Puin

Gerd Rüdiger Puin is a German scholar and an authority on Qur'anic historical orthography, the study and scholarly interpretation of ancient manuscripts. He is also specialist in Arabic paleography...

 of Saarland University

Saarland University

Saarland University is a university located in Saarbrücken, the capital of the German state of Saarland, and Homburg. It was founded in 1948 in Homburg in co-operation with France and is organized in 8 faculties that cover all major fields of science...

, in Saarbrücken

Saarbrücken

Saarbrücken is the capital of the state of Saarland in Germany. The city is situated at the heart of a metropolitan area that borders on the west on Dillingen and to the north-east on Neunkirchen, where most of the people of the Saarland live....

, 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 palimpsest

Palimpsest

A palimpsest is a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped off and which can be used again. The word "palimpsest" comes through Latin palimpsēstus from Ancient Greek παλίμψηστος originally compounded from πάλιν and ψάω literally meaning “scraped...

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

Responses

In 2000, The Guardian

The Guardian

The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

interviewed a number of academics for their responses to Puin's claims, including Dr Tarif Khalidi

Tarif Khalidi

Tarif Khalidi , born January 24, 1938 in Jerusalem, is a Palestinian historian who now holds the Shaykh Zayid Chair in Islamic and Arabic Studies at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon.-Family:...

, and Professor Allen Jones

Allen Jones

Allen Jones is the name of:*Allen T Jones ceo*Allen Jones , Continental Congress delegate*Allen Jones , British pop artist...

, 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.
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

Muslim World League

The Muslim World League is one of the largest Islamic non-governmental organizations. Muslim religious figures from 22 states founded it in Makkah in 1962.-Structure:...

, commented when he was warned of the controversy Puin's work might generate –"I am longing for this kind of discussion on this topic."

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)