Sanaa manuscript
In 1972, a construction workers renovating a wall in the attic of the Great Mosque of Sanaa in the Yemen Arab Republic came across large quantities of old manuscripts and parchments, many of which were deteriorated.
Not realizing their significance, the workers 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.
[5] Isma'il al-Akwa' bin Ali, then the president of the Yemeni Antiquities Authority, realized the potential importance of the find.
She also designed the permanent storage, collated many parchment fragments to identify distinct Quranic manuscripts, and directed the Yemeni staff in the same task.
[2] A selection of 651 images of fragments from the Sana'a cache - including several from DAM 01-27.1, has been issued on a CD-ROM through the UNESCO 'Memory of the World' programme.
From 2007, a joint Italian-French team under Sergio Noja Noseda and Christian Robin undertook to produce new high-resolution digital images of DAM 01-27.1 (and other selected manuscripts in the cache), under both natural and ultra-violet light, which have since been subject to extensive computerised post-processing by Alba Fedeli to separate upper from lower texts.
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).
[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.
[12]The upper text conforms entirely with that underlying the modern Quran in use, and has been dated as probably from sometime between the end of the 7th and the beginning of the 8th century CE.
The surviving lower text from 36 of the folio in the House of Manuscripts, together with the lower text from those auctioned abroad, were published in March 2012 in a long essay by Behnam Sadeghi (Professor of Islamic Studies at Stanford University) and Mohsen Goudarzi (PhD student at Harvard University).
[2] Prior to that, in 2010, Sadeghi had published an extensive study of the four folios auctioned abroad, and analyzed their variants using textual critical methods.
[9] The German scholar Elizabeth Puin (lecturer at Saarland University), whose husband was the local director of the restoration project until 1985, has also transcribed the lower text of several folios in five successive publications.
While transcription from Hamdoun's photographs are a particularly difficult challenge, Hythem Sidky has identified lower textual sequences in most of the Eastern Library folios.
[9] Parchment was expensive and durable, and so it was common practice to scrape the writing from disused and damaged texts for potential re-use.
Elizabeth Puin has termed this hand the 'lower modifier', and proposes that these corrections were undertaken before the whole lower text was erased or washed off.
(Note: In the above table, parentheses or brackets are left out if they appear at the very beginning or end of a phrase, to avoid text alignment issues.
Moreover, by setting out the basmala formula, and then countermanding its being recited out loud, the text as it stands would create an uncertainty in ritual use to a degree that the conventions of quranic writing are generally designed to prevent.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
"[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.
The American media amplified the erroneous words of G. Puin, purveying a narrative that belittled Yemen and misrepresented the work done there.
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.
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".
