The Qur'anic Manuscripts

There has been a polemic going on that the Qur'an does not have manuscripts from the first century of hijra. However, this is not true. Many fragments of early Qur'anic manuscripts were shown by Orientalists notably Nabia Abbott in her work The Rise of the North Arabic script and its Kur'anic development, with a full description of the Kur'an manuscripts in the Oriental Institute (1939, University of Chicago Press). There she discusses some of the Quranic manuscripts, dated from second half of the first century hijra onwards, at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago. The aim of this page is to highlight some of the early Qur'anic manuscripts to refute the claim that the Qur'an lacks manuscripts from the first century of hijra.

The dig at the Great Mosque in Ṣanʿāʾ, Yemen, had found a large number of manuscripts of the Qur'an dating from first century of hijra. The date of building the Great Mosque in Ṣanʿāʾ goes back to 6th year of hijra when the Prophet Muhammad entrusted one of his companions to build a mosque. The mosque was extended and enlarged by Islamic rulers from time to time. In 1385 H/1965 CE heavy rains fell on Ṣanʿāʾ. The Great Mosque was affected and the ceiling in the north west corner was damaged. During the survey, the workers discovered a large vault full of parchment and paper manuscripts of both the Qur'an and non-Qur'anic material.

The UNESCO, an arm of the United Nations, had compiled a CD containing some of the dated Ṣanʿāʾ manuscripts as a part of "Memory of the World" programme. In this CD there are many Qur'anic manuscripts written in the hijazi script which are dated from 1st century of hijra, one of them belonging to early 1st century. Many more manuscripts have been dated from the period 1st / 2nd century of hijra. We will be showing only a few examples below.

A few more examples of the 1st and 1st / 2nd century hijra Qur'anic manuscripts can be found in the book Maṣāḥif Ṣanʿāʾ (1985, Dār al-Athar al-Islāmiyyah). This book is a catalogue of an exhibition at the Kuwait National Museum, with articles by Hussa Sabah Salim al-Sabah, G. R. Puin, M. Jenkins, U. Dreibholz in both Arabic and English. It is expected that the Ṣanʿāʾ manuscripts will throw a great deal of light on the early Islamic history of calligraphy and illumination and even the various ahruf (they were seven) in which the Qur'an was revealed.

A few words of caution concerning the dating of the Qur'anic manuscripts need to be mentioned. It is to be remembered that assigning a date to an undated early Qur'anic manuscript is rarely simple especially in the absence of wakf marking. There is a tendency to assume that those in large scripts and without vowels are of the earliest date. This assumption, true to some extent, is nevertheless misleading in two respects. It ignores that fact that small as well as large maṣāḥif of the Qur'an were among the earliest written and that both types continued to be written thereafter. Though the assumption that manuscripts with the vowels must be considered later than those without is true in some cases, it is not always so, for some very early manuscripts of the Qur'an, originally written without vowels, may well have been voweled later. Furthermore, the first vowel system came into use shortly after the first maṣāḥif were written. There are also examples of later maṣāḥif which were unvoweled even after 3 centuries after hijra!

As a matter of caution, we stress the fact that we are only showing a single leaf of the manuscripts in the cases below. A manuscript may contain additional sūrahs. The reader is advised to go through the references for additional information.

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The Arabic Papyri | Arabic & Islamic Inscriptions | The Islamic Coins

The Dotting Of A Script And The Dating Of An Era: The Strange Neglect Of PERF 558, A. Jones, Islamic Culture, 1998, Volume LXXII, No. 4, pp. 95-103. It is usually assumed that the dotting of the Arabic script began with the advent of dotting of Qur'anic manuscripts. However, recent observation on a 70 year old Arabic papyri has shown conclusively that dotting was available as early as 22 AH, perhaps even earlier. From Alphonse Mingana To Christoph Luxenberg: Arabic Script & The Alleged Syriac Origins Of The Qur'an A path-breaking discourse or is it yet another headline grabbing exercise? You decide! Concise List Of Arabic Manuscripts Of The Qur'ān Attributable To The First Century Hijra. The study of ancient manuscripts of the Qur'an is steadily gathering pace. In decades past, a few scholars have compiled lists of Qur'anic manuscripts attributable to the 1st century hijra. Although helpful, these lists contain only the barest details, usually only the name of the manuscript concerned or sometimes even less. With this in mind, we have constructed this document that contains additional details providing further insights into these valuable manuscripts, accompanied by full bibliographic references. A discussion of how scholars date early Qur'anic manuscripts and an assessment of the value of these manuscripts is also provided along with some detailed mathematical calculations. Should one ponder over this list, they will come to the appreciation scholars involved in this field of study suffer from an embarrassment of riches. Quite simply, there is no other work from the Late Antiquity that comes close to the Qur'an in terms of the number of their earliest manuscripts including textual content. Radiocarbon (Carbon-14) Dating Of The Manuscripts Of The Qur'ān. Radiocarbon dating of ancient Qur'anic manuscripts in the literature is very rare. Can radiocarbon dating provide more accurate results than traditional palaeographic techniques and associated methods? A discussion of the scientific principles underpinning this radiometric dating technique, together with some practical examples from actual Qur'anic manuscripts, highlights the strengths and weaknesses of this procedure as compared to more traditional palaeographic based methods. Dated Texts Containing The Qur’an From 1-100 AH / 622-719 CE. The corpus of dated texts containing the Qur'an from 1-100 AH / 622-719 CE proving the early codification of the Qur'an in Arabic.

2. Examples Of The Qur'anic Manuscripts

THE ʿUTHMĀNIC MANUSCRIPTS

THE QUR'ANIC MANUSCRIPTS ATTRIBUTED TO ʿALI B. ABI ṬALIB

The third and fourth caliphs, i.e., ʿUthmān and ʿAlī, share a very interesting aspect – attribution of ‘authorship’ of numerous manuscripts of the Qur'an. In this section, we will present the manuscripts attributed to ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib. The “Qur'ān Of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib” (The Ṣanʿāʾ Muṣḥaf) From 1st / 2nd Century Hijra. This manuscript was written in kufic script and contains 275 folios. The extant folios contain about 86% of the text of the Qur'an. The script is slightly sloping backwards and is reminiscent of the type of well-executed kufic script exhibited during the Umayyad period. Single dots were placed above, beside or below the letters. Two dots were placed to indicate the nunation known as tanwīn. Diacritical marks are represented by dashes. The ending of verses is indicated by a series of 5 or 6 dashes. The sūrahs are separated by wide horizontal bands in the form of rectangles. The inside of the band is decorated differently for every sūrah separator. The sequence of the sūrahs is just like what is seen in modern day copies of the Qur'an. The codex is contains large ornamentaled circles to indicate every 10 verses. Ornamented rectangular shaped signs are used to indicate every 100 verses.

FIRST CENTURY HIJRA

Written in the ḥijāzī script. Yellowish, thin parchment with strong damage. Located at the Austrian National Library, Vienna A Perg. 213 – A Qur'anic Manuscript From 1st Century Hijra. Manuscript from the Austrian National Library, Vienna. Written in the ḥijāzī script. Two folios extant. P. Michaélidès No. 32 – A Qur'ānic Manuscript From First Century Hijra. Manuscript from the Collection George Michaélidès, Cairo (Egypt) written in the Kufic(?) script.

FIRST / SECOND CENTURY HIJRA

SECOND CENTURY HIJRA

SECOND / THIRD CENTURY HIJRA

SOME UNIQUE MANUSCRIPTS

EXTERNAL LINKS TO THE QUR'ANIC MANUSCRIPTS

Professor Brannon Wheeler's Qur'an Manuscripts Page It contains a healthy collection of Qur'anic manuscripts dated from 1st century of hijra onwards till 14th century of hijra in various scripts such as ma'il, kufic, thuluth, bihari, diwani, andalusi, maghribi and nastaliq. The Schøyen Collection, National Library Of Norway It has some good collection of Qur'anic manuscripts dating from as early as 2nd century of hijra.

Early Qur'anic manuscripts, unlike the modern printed editions, rarely contain information of the Qira'at in which they were written. Deciphering the Qira'at in the Qur'anic manuscripts is a recent endeavour and a very tedious task. Scholars like Nabia Abbott had only mentioned about Qira'at in the manuscripts in a very cursory way. Recently, in-depth studies have been undertaken to decipher the Qira'at in the Qur'anic manuscripts by Dr. Yasin Dutton of University of Edinburgh. He has been looking into various Qur'anic manuscripts to understand the purpose of using various coloured dots in the writing of the Qur'an and studying the consonantal structure (where dotting is nearly absent as in early Qur'ans written in ḥijāzī or ma'il script) to find out the Qira'at in which the Qur'an manuscript was written. Here are a few examples of the manuscripts in which the Qira'at has been identified.

We will also mention Dr. Dutton's publications and provide a brief overview. This section is primarily for those who have access to journals in their libraries.