Juan Cole makes an excellent point here: while people (like me) are excited about the very early folios of Qurʾan text that were recently discovered in Birmingham, some of the oldest more complete manuscripts of the Qurʾan are sitting in the Sanaa Manuscript Library and therefore are at risk of being blown to smithereens at pretty much any moment.
Back in the 1960s a trove of old manuscripts was uncovered in Sanaa’s Great Mosque, and many of them, after being studied by a team of German scholars, turned out to be manuscripts of the Qurʾan that could be reliably dated (because they were on papyrus and written in what’s known as Kufic Script) to the late 7th century. This in itself was a huge find, but one of the manuscripts turned out to be even more amazing. Cole:
What the German team did not know then was that one of the copies of the Qurʾan they had found was a palimpsest. That is a manuscript that has been written over and so replaced with a later text. But nowadays ultraviolet photography can reveal the original manuscript underneath.
The original manuscript was the Qurʾan, but it wasn’t in the order prescribed by the Caliph Uthman (r. 644-656). That Caliph had issued an official version of the Qurʾan in manuscript and had it copied out and spread around. It arranged the chapters (surahs) in order of length, with the longest first. This way of doing it meant that the book was more or less arranged backward from a chronological point of view, since the earliest chapters tended to be shorter than later ones. Westerners trying to read the Qurʾan should thus begin at the back and read forward, and should read it along with a good biography of the Prophet Muhammad for context (I’ve always liked Montgomery Watts’ “Muhammad Prophet and Statesman”).
So the palimpsest Qurʾan was likely older than 650 CE, when ʿUthman’s official version was promulgated. Later on, radiocarbon dating showed a high likelihood that this book was at least as old as the 640s and so certainly the oldest Qurʾan known to exist, going back to within a decade of the Prophet Muhammad’s death. By the way, although the order of the chapters is different from the later standard, the text itself doesn’t show significant variants from today’s Qurʾan. It shows that the religion of Islam has a firm grounding in history.
The palimpsest Qurʾan is far more extensive than the few folios that were found in Birmingham and dates to roughly the same time. This doesn’t diminish the value of the Birmingham discovery and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be interested in or excited about that find. But the fact that this even more important text is currently at grave risk due to a war that has been a disaster in almost every way, and for almost every participant, would be funny, if it weren’t so unfortunate.
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