CIRA International discover late Quran manuscripts; Dating of Kufic script?

In answer to the video "Why are there over 30 different Arabic Qur’ans? - Quranic Corrections Ep. 3"

The script chosen for the Uthman compilation was Kufic, a script still readable today thanks to the dual preservation and transmission of the Quran, textual and oral. Some misinformed and misleading critics have tried arguing that the Kufic script did not appear until the late 8th century in an effort to push forth the dating of the Uthman codices exposed at Samarkand and Topkapi.

That assertion is totally devoid of any historical basis since it is known that Kufic is the earliest script from which the others developed. That assertion is mainly based on a misquote of Martin Lings who was actually referring to the calligraphic perfection of the script, not its genesis. The Kufic script was known in Mesapotamia at least 100 years before Kufa was even founded, which was during the period of Umar in the 17th year of hijra/638CE.

The reason for the layman confusion is because the script is named after the city of Kufa, though it did not originate there. The Kufic script in fact originated in the town of Hira and the Kufans inherited and took on that script that later became known as Kufic, the adopted script of the major learning center of the Islamic world.

Several rock inscriptions, as well as coinage, scattered throughout Egypt, Syria, Iraq or the Hijaz attest to the prominence of the Kufic script in Muslim lands already in the 1st century AH. To further coroborate the point, the manuscripts found in Sanaa were Kufan manuscript, and those are dated the first century hijra. It is also well known that early Quran manuscripts are present in museums worldwide, besides those that are in private collections in the west and those that were lost or destroyed. A huge collection was kept in Germany, but destroyed during the Second World War. Even the manuscripts present in Muslim museums are available as copies in the non-Muslim countries, such as the Uthman Samarkand codex that has numerous copies disseminated worldwide in private and public hands. There are countless 1st century Hijra (622-719CE) Quran fragments, as well as a 99% complete manuscript of that period, the Huseini mosque Cairo manuscript.

As to the Sanaa manuscripts, they were found along with non Quranic material during a dig at the Great Mosque of Sanaa that was built in the 6th year of hijra under the prophet's orders. The Sanaa manuscripts are there for all to see, some that were dated were compiled in a CD by the UNESCO as a part of their "Memory of the World" program. Other manuscripts are awaiting publication. These facts silence the unjustified conspiracy theorists among the critics who claim that the "embarrassing" manuscripts are somehow hidden by the Yemeni authorities. Sanaa did not reveal anything Muslim tradition did not already know, especially not in terms of variant readings among the early companions

(Nicolai Sinai)"Thus, the Sanaa Palimpsest would appear to provide us with an exciting glimpse at a moment in time at which the hegemony of the Quran’s standard rasm had not yet become fully established. This, it must be said, is in line with the general drift of the Islamic tradition, which reports that during the first decades after Muḥammad’s death a variety of quranic recensions were in circulation. Although none of the exact “companion codices” described by Islamic sources have yet been discovered in manuscript, the general types of textual variants ascribed to them correspond to the types of variants found in the lower layer of the Sanaa Palimpsest. 17 The latter thus lends credence to the idea that there was originally more than one recension of the Quran and that the Islamic literary sources preserve a broadly accurate view of the scale and character of textual variance between these different versions of the Arabic scripture".

The Islamic hadith corpus and scholarly works, although written late, turn out to be remarkably accurate in reporting the phenomenon of variants. This is significant as the issue could be deemed controversial in terms of the preservation of the Quran, yet the Muslim scholars related every aspect of it. What does it say on how faithful the Muslim community was in preserving their tradition, history, morals, prophetic example? Sadeghi who studied the Sanaa manuscripts and how they relate to the Islamic tradition conclude that:

 "It is now equally clear that recent works in the genre of historical fiction are of no help. By “historical fiction” I am referring to the work of authors who, contentedly ensconced next to the mountain of material in the premodern Muslim primary and secondary literature bearing on Islamic origins, say that there are no heights to scale, nothing to learn from the literature, and who speak of the paucity of evidence. Liberated from the requirement to analyze the literature critically, they can dream up imaginative historical narratives rooted in meager cherry-picked or irrelevant evidence, or in some cases no evidence at all. They write off the mountain as the illusory product of religious dogma or of empire-wide conspiracies or mass amnesia or deception, not realizing that literary sources need not always be taken at face value to prove a point; or they simply pass over the mass of the evidence in silence. A pioneering early example of such historical fiction was Hagarism, written by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook. While few specialists have accepted its narrative, the book has nevertheless profoundly shaped the outlook of scholars. It has given rise to a class of students and educators who will tell you not only that we do not know anything about Islamic origins, but also that we cannot learn anything about it from the literary sources. All this would be good and well if the mountain of evidence had been studied critically before being dismissed as a mole hill; but the modern critical reevaluation of the literary evidence has barely begun. And, significantly, any number of results have already demonstrated that if only one takes the trouble to do the work, positive results are forthcoming, and that the landscape of the literary evidence, far from being one of randomly-scattered debris, in fact often coheres in remarkable ways. A good example of such findings would be some of Michael Cook’s own fruitful recent studies in the literary sources in two essays of his already discussed here. It is not his confirmation of some elements of the traditional account of the standard Qurʾān that I wish to highlight here, noteworthy as it may be, but rather his demonstration that we can learn from the study of the literary sources".

Among the aspects of the known variant readings confirmed by the most recent scholarly observations is the phenomenon of qira'at tafsiriyya/exegetical recitation. According to Hilali’s general characterization,

“[m]ost of the variations in the lower text include more lengthy text than the corresponding passages in the Cairo edition”. This has led the major works of Hilali and Sadeghi to conclude that "the lower text of the palimpsest is derivative from the standard recension".

Hilali further reflects exactly what the Muslim authorities have stated concerning the shaad qiraat. She opines that the authors of the palimpsest integrated interpretative passages into the text without clearly demarcating the 2 because they did not consider their writings to be transmitted to the general public. Their works were meant for personal use. Ibn al Jazari says that some companions would

“insert exegesis into recitation by way of explanation and clarification because they were endeavoring to ascertain the true meaning of what they received from the Prophet by way of recitation; they were safe from confusion [between the text of scripture and the explanations added to it], but some of them may have written it [the explanations] down together with it [the recitation].”

It is important keeping in view that in many cases there is disagreement among scholars in deciphering the lower text. Successive scholars that have studied images of the lower layer have had different conclusions on what is readable and what isnt. With that being said, an interesting observation is that the sub-text, which was erased and then written over, not only corroborates some of the variant readings known and reported among the companions, but also attests to the truthfulness of the Islamic traditions. These traditions have reported much more variations in readings in the companions' codices in comparison to the ones found in Sanaa. That is why the scholars that have studied the manuscripts, such as Sadeghi and Goudarzi, have observed that the Uthmanic recension, in the minor places where it disagrees with the Sanaa manuscripts, was because it was compiled from a critical examination of other sources and is thus a more faithful reproduction of the prophetic prototype. In other words Uthman did not "invent" a new Quran and especially not "change it", given the nature of the differences between the standard rasm and the Sanaa variants, but instead represents the prophetic recital accurately.

This gives further weight to the already well established Muslim tradition concerning the early companions having their own compilations of the Quran even before Uthman's standardized copy, and Uthman's compilation effort motivated by the need to accommodate all of the variant readings in his skeletal structure.

Other types of noted differences have no bearing on the text, but relate to the order of suras and aya separations, as well as a faulty writing of the hamza letter. Even today for academic reasons, both Muslims and non Muslims have rearranged Quranic suras in their own studies. Many times and especially in those days, mosques were used as study spaces. Sometimes a copyist can make mistakes in reproducing certain letters, his own style and writing level may also be erroneous. These variations, some of which could be deliberate for personal studies, memorization or prayers, do not undermine the integrity of the Quranic text. Puin's main observation of those differences is that eventually, these manuscripts will show that the medieval Muslim scholars who improved upon the primitive orthography of the text so as to make it more accessible, misread certain vowels, writing a long alef instead of the ya. This again, is irrelevant to determining textual corruption as the vowels are known to have been added so as to conform to different readings.

Another interesting way in which the Sanaa manuscripts confirm the Muslim tradition is through the use of near-synonyms with certain passages from the Uthmanic recension. These near symonyms, known and listed in the Islamic tradition as parts of the prophetic approved readings, have led scholars that do not give much weight to the Muslim tradition, to actually confirm it once more as truthful. Commenting on various studies of the Sanaa manuscripts, Nicolai Sinai says

"The phenomenon (that is, of near symonyms) does, however, shed valuable light on the initial stage of the Quran’s transmission history, insofar as it suggests some degree of oral transmission in which transmitters were forced to rely on their memory of the gist of what was being said, rather than being able to check a written original. As Sadeghi has highlighted, the fact that an examination of the lower layer of the palimpsest yields a fair number but not a downright overabundance of such synonymic substitutions is best explained by an admixture of oral and written transmission. One may accordingly follow him in conceiving of the Quran’s textual transmission as being ultimately rooted in the transcription of oral proclamations recited at speed, thus accounting for the original transcribers’ occasional disagreement about whether a given verse employed, say, alnār or jahannam. The fact that Islamic works ascribe similar synonymic substitutions to some of the non-ʿUthmānic codices of the Quran reportedly com- piled by certain companions of the Prophet adds further weight to this hypothesis".

Kohlberg and Amir-Moezzi claimed that the Sanaa manuscripts contain “significant variants in relation to the official version of the Qur’an”. But an examination of their source, a statement by von Bothmer, shows that in actuality they have very badly misread him. What von Bothmer said is that approximately 22% of the 926 Quranic manuscripts of Sanaa, 208 manuscripts in total, contain a varying number of lines per page. This has nothing to do with their claims concerning the order of the suras. Furthermore, von Bothmer argues that the Sanaa fragments prove that a complete standard text of the Quran, including the Fatiha and the final two suras, existed in the first Islamic century, all the while acknowledging that the only dated fragment is from AH 357/AD 968.

Another important thing to be kept in mind is that there exist numerous partially written copies of the Quran dating well into medieval times that contain a variety of sura orders. This is simply due to the fact, as stated earlier, that some people only wanted a few or partial suras for personal or public use, without consideration for their chronological order. Thus one must carefully consider to what extent the manuscript in question was originally a full or partial copy.

Other Kufic Quranic manuscripts from 1st and early 2nd century hijra are found in museums today, like the ones of Austria and Bahrein. In fact even the style of the script of the Samarkand codex which the missionaries want to push the dating as far as the late 8th century is found in inscriptions from the 1st century of hijra in the form of dated Kufic inscriptions, predating Uthman's collection of the Quran.