Gerd R Puin photo of one of his Sana'a
Qur'an parchments, showing layered revisions to the Qu'ran
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 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. Their
real age may be somewhat younger, since C-14 estimates the year of
the death of an organism, and the process from that to the final
writing on the parchment involves an unknown amount of time.
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."
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. They felt that
when the Yemeni authorities realize the implications of the find,
they would refuse further access - a prediction that soon came
through. 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 - a prospect that pleases Puin. "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:
Responses
In 2000,
The Guardian
interviewed a number of academics for their responses to Puin's
claims, including Dr
Tarif Khalidi, a
lecturer in Islamic Studies at Cambridge University, 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.
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
References
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