Recto side of the Stanford '07 folio. The upper text covers Quran 2 (al-Baqarah), verses 265–271.

The lower text of the above folio, recovered through X-Ray Fluorescence Imaging at Stanford University. The lower text covers Quran 2:191-196.

The Sanaa palimpsest (also Ṣanʽā’ 1 or DAM 01-27.1) or Sanaa Quran is one of the oldest Quranic manuscripts in existence.^[1] Part of a sizable cache of Quranic and non-Quranic fragments discovered in Yemen during a 1972 restoration of the Great Mosque of Sanaa, the manuscript was identified as a palimpsest Quran in 1981 as it is written on parchment and comprises two layers of text. The upper text largely conforms to the standard 'Uthmanic' Quran in text and in the standard order of chapters (suwar, singular sūrah), whereas the lower text (the original text that was erased and written over by the upper text, but can still be read with the help of ultraviolet light and computer processing) contains many variations from the standard text, and the sequence of its chapters corresponds to no known Quranic order. A partial reconstruction of the lower text was published in 2012,^[2] and a reconstruction of the legible portions of both lower and upper texts of the 38 folios in the Sana'a House of Manuscripts was published in 2017 utilising post-processed digital images of the lower text.^[3] A radiocarbon analysis has dated the parchment of one of the detached leaves sold at auction, and hence its lower text, to between 578 CE (44 BH) and 669 CE (49 AH) with a 95% accuracy.^[4] The earliest leaves have been tested at three laboratories and dated to 388-535 CE. Other folios have similar early dates.

History

Contents of the manuscript

The manuscript is a palimpsest, meaning the parchment was written over once. The original text (the "lower" text) was erased, and written over a second time (the "upper" text) with this process potentially being repeated over time with the same parchment. In the Sana'a palimpsest, both the upper and the lower text are the Qur'an written in the Hijazi script. The upper text appears to have been presented a complete text of the Qur'an, as did the lower text according to a codicological reconstruction by Éléonore Cellard (this had been a question of scholarly debate).^[8] In the standard Qur'an, the chapters (suras) are presented in an approximate sequence of decreasing length; hence a fragmentary Qur'an that follows the standard order of suras can generally be assumed to have once presented the complete text, but the contrary is not the case. Cellard's reconstruction has found that despite differences of sura sequence, the lower text too follows this same principle.

The manuscript that was discovered, however, is not complete. About 82 folios have been identified as possible sheets presenting the upper text, of which 38 are in Yemen's Dār al-Makhṭūṭāt (House of Manuscripts)^[2] and 4 in private collections (after being auctioned abroad).^[9] In addition in 2012, 40 palimpsest folios conserved in the Eastern Library of the Grand Mosque in Sana’a and published in 2004, were recognised as likely being detached folios of the upper text of DAM 01-27.1.^[10] Many of the folios in the House of Manuscripts are physically incomplete and in only 28 is the upper writing legible (due to damage),^[11] whereas those in private possession^[9] or held by the Eastern Library are generally in a better condition.^[10] These 82 folios comprise roughly half of the Quran. The parchment is of inferior quality, with many folios having holes around which both upper and lower text have been written. However, when the scale of the writing and the provision of marginal spaces is taken into account, the overall quantity of animal hides implied as being committed to the production of a full manuscript of the Qur'an would not have been less than for such high quality Qur'ans as the Codex Parisino-petropolitanus (BNF Arabe 328(ab)).

Historian Michael Cook, sums up preliminary work on the Sana'a fragments as of 2000 thusly:

First, the range of variants is said to be considerably greater than is attested in our literary sources, though in character the variation does not appear to be very different from the kind of thing these sources record.

Second, the orthography of these -- and -- other early fragments diverges from that with which we are familiar in one rather striking respect, namely the frequent failure to mark the long ā as part of the consonantal skeleton in such words as qāla, 'he said' (the spelling ql which appears in these fragments would in our text be read as qul, meaning 'say!').

Last but not least, those framents which show the end of one Sura and the beginning of another reveal some clear deviations from the standard order of the Sūras; these deviations are comparable to those reported by the literary sources for a couple of the versions superseded by the Uthmanic codex, but they do not regularly coincide with them.^[12]

Issues in current scholarship

Media coverage

A fragment showing part of Surat Ta-Ha

Puin and his colleague Graf von Bothmer have published only short essays on the Ṣana'a find. In a 1999 interview with Toby Lester, the executive editor of The Atlantic Monthly website, Puin described the preserved fragments by the following:

So many Muslims have this belief that everything between the two covers of the Quran 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 Quran has been out of this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Quran has a history too. The Sana'a fragments will help us accomplish this.^[5]

Puin claimed that the Yemeni authorities want to keep work on the Ṣana'a manuscripts "low-profile".^[5]

In 2000, The Guardian interviewed a number of academics for their responses to Puin's remarks, including 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 Guardian reported:

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.'^[33]

The article noted 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."^[33]

Based on interviews with several scholars, Sadeghi and Goudarzi question Puin's claims regarding Yemeni suppression of research on the manuscripts and Puin's statement that the Yemenis did not want others to know that work was being done on them. For instance, they note that in 2007 Sergio Noja Noseda (an Italian scholar) and Christian Robin (a French archaeologist) were allowed to take pictures of the Sana'a palimpsest. They write that according to Robin, his colleagues were "granted greater access than would have been possible in some European libraries."^[34] They report a similar view from Ursula Dreibholz, the conservator for the restoration project, who describes the Yemenis as supportive.^[34] They quote Dreibholz as saying that the Yemenis "brought school children, university students, foreign delegations, religious dignitaries, and heads of state, like François Mitterrand, Gerhard Schröder, and Prince Claus of the Netherlands, to see the collection."^[34]

Sadeghi and Goudarzi conclude:

Although the Yemeni authorities' openness proved a boon to scholarship, they were to be punished for it. The American media amplified the erroneous words of G. Puin, purveying a narrative that belittled Yemen and misrepresented the work done there. The Arab press, in turn, exaggerated the American story. The outcome was a media discourse in Yemen borne of three stages of misrepresentation. This embarrassed the Yemeni authorities responsible for the House of Manuscripts, and the Head of the Antiquities Department had to defend before Parliament the decision to bring in the foreigners.^[34]

The Sana'a palimpsest/lower text is one of several of the earliest Quranic manuscripts to be highlighted in the media in recent years.

• Its date (estimated to be between 578 CE and 669 CE with a 95% accuracy);^[4] compares with
• the Birmingham Quran manuscript (radiocarbon dated slightly earlier -- to between 568 and 645 CE with a 95.4% accuracy),^[35][36] which became a news story in 2015;
• a Quran manuscript examined by the University of Tübingen in 2014 is estimated to be more recent, dated from the early second half of the 7th century^[37] (649–675);^[38]
• the Codex Parisino-petropolitanus, also dated to the early second half of the 7th century,^[39] containing 46% of the text of the Quran, studied by François Déroche that made news in 2009.^[40]

In the wake of the Birmingham Quran manuscript news story of 2015, Gabriel Said Reynolds, professor of Islamic Studies and Theology, published a commentary on the differences between extant ancient Qur'an copies, speculating that the lower script of the Sana'a palimpsest, which not only "does not agree with the standard text read around the world today", but whose variants "do not match the variants reported in medieval literature for those codices kept by companions" of Muhammad, and "has so many variants that one might imagine it is a vestige of an ancient version that somehow survived Uthman’s burning of all versions of the Qur’an except his own". Radiocarbon dating notwithstanding, Reynolds asserts that the "Sanaa manuscript... is almost certainly the most ancient Qur’an manuscript."^[41]

See also

• Early Quranic manuscripts
• Codex Parisino-petropolitanus
• Topkapi manuscript
• Samarkand Kufic Quran
• Birmingham Quran manuscript
• History of the Quran
• Criticism of the Quran
• Historiography of early Islam
• Textual criticism
• Gerd R. Puin

References

Sources

• Cook, Michael (2000). The Koran; A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-285344-8. Retrieved 24 September 2019.
• Hilali, Asma (2017). The Sanaa Palimpsest: The Transmission of the Qur'an in the First Centuries AH. Qur'anic Studies Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press/Institute of Ismaili Studies. ISBN 978-0-19-879379-3. S2CID 193902896.
• Hilali, Asma (2015). "Was the Ṣanʿāʾ Qurʾān Palimpsest a Work in Progress?". In Hollenberg, David; Rauch, Christoph; Schmidtke, Sabine (eds.). The Yemeni Manuscript Tradition. Islamic Manuscripts and Books. Vol. 7. Leiden and Boston: Brill Publishers. pp. 12–27. doi:10.1163/9789004289765_003. ISBN 978-90-04-28825-6. ISSN 1877-9964. LCCN 2014049554. S2CID 191082736.
• Hilali, Asma (2010). "Le palimpseste de Ṣanʿā' et la canonisation du Coran: nouveaux éléments". Cahiers du Centre Gustave Glotz (in French). Paris: Éditions de Boccard. 21: 443–448. doi:10.3406/CCGG.2010.1742. JSTOR 24360016. S2CID 160655817. Retrieved 15 January 2021 – via Persée.fr.
• Sadeghi, Behnam; Goudarzi, Mohsen (2012). "Ṣan'ā' 1 and the Origins of the Qur'ān". Der Islam. Berlin: De Gruyter. 87 (1–2): 1–129. doi:10.1515/islam-2011-0025. S2CID 164120434.
• Sadeghi, Behnam; Bergmann, Uwe (2010). "The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qurʾān of the Prophet". Arabica. Leiden: Brill Publishers. 57 (4): 343–436. doi:10.1163/157005810X504518.
• Puin, Elisabeth (2011). "Ein früher Koranpalimpsest aus Ṣan'ā' (DAM 01-27.1) – Teil IV". Die Entstehung einer Weltreligion II. Hans Schiller. ISBN 978-3899303452.
• Puin, Elisabeth (2010). "Ein früher Koranpalimpsest aus Ṣan'ā' (DAM 01-27.1): Teil III: Ein nicht-'uṯmānischer Koran". Die Entstehung einer Weltreligion I: von der koranischen Bewegung zum Frühislam. Hans Schiller. ISBN 978-3899303186.
• Puin, Elisabeth (2009). "Ein früher Koranpalimpsest aus Ṣan'ā' (DAM 01-27.1): Teil II". Vom Koran zum Islam. Hans Schiller. ISBN 978-3899302691.
• Puin, Elisabeth (2008). "Ein früher Koranpalimpsest aus Ṣan'ā' (DAM 01-27.1)". Schlaglichter: Die beiden ersten islamischen Jahrhunderte. Hans Schiller. ISBN 978-3899302240.
• Hamdoun, Razan Ghassan (2004). The Qur'ānic Manuscripts In Ṣan'ā' From The First Century Hijra And The Preservation Of The Qur'ān.
• Taher, Abul (2000-08-08). "Querying the Koran". Guardian. Retrieved 2014-11-25.
• Lang, Jeffrey (2000). "Response on the article "What is the Koran"". The Atlantic Monthly. Archived from the original on March 1, 2001. Retrieved 2014-11-25.
• Lester, Toby (1999-01-01). "What is the Koran?". The Atlantic Monthly. Retrieved 2014-11-25.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Sanaa manuscript.

• Codex Ṣanʿāʾ – Inv. No. 01-27.1: Mid-1st Century Of Hijra, Islamic Awareness
• Early Qur'anic Manuscripts, Islamic Awareness
• The UNESCO Restoration Project
• Islamic Collections from the Museum, (pdf) UNESCO
• "A Qur’an written over the Qur’an – why making the effort?"
• Behnam, Sadeghi; Goudarzi, Mohsen (16 October 2017) [2012]. "Ṣan'ā'1 and the Origins of the Qur'ān" [Sanaa and the Origins of the Quran] (PDF). Stanford/Harvard Universities. Archive.org. Walter de Gruytur. ISSN 0021-1818. Retrieved 13 April 2019.