Gerd R. Puin

Gerd R. Puin was the head of a restoration project commissioned by the Yemeni government, which spent a significant amount of time examining the ancient Quranic manuscripts discovered in the Great Mosque of Sanaa, Yemen in 1972, in order to find criteria for systematically cataloging them.

According to journalist Toby Lester, his examination revealed "unconventional verse orderings, minor textual variations, and rare styles of orthography and artistic embellishment.

[1] Some of Puin's initial remarks on his findings are found in his essay titled the "Observations on Early Qur'an Manuscripts in Sana'a", which has been republished in the book What the Koran Really Says (2002), written by the Ex-Muslim author and activist Ibn Warraq.

In January 2021, an interview with Puin regarding the discovery of the Sanaa manuscript was conducted by Robert M. Kerr, secretary of the INÂRAH Institute for Research on Early Islamic History and the Koran.

[4] In a 1999 article published in the American magazine The Atlantic, Gerd R. Puin has been interviewed and quoted as saying that:[1] My idea is that the Koran is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Muhammad.

Gerd R. Puin's photograph of one of the parchments preserved in the Sanaa manuscript

Page from the Sanaa manuscript . The "subtexts" revealed using UV light are very different from today's standard edition of the Quran . The German scholar of Quranic palaeography Gerd R. Puin affirms that these textual variants indicate an evolving text. ^{[

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]} A similar view has been expressed by the British historian of Near Eastern studies Lawrence Conrad regarding the early biographies of Muhammad ; according to him, Islamic views on the birth date of Muhammad until the 8 century CE had a diversity of 85 years span. ^{[

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