VERY Old Qur'an in Yemen's House of Manuscripts

[Michael]

I was going to post this in another thread but thought that thread was getting to perverse so I’ll start another one.

This is concerning the religious history of the Qur’an. I was wondering what some other people thought. Oh and I included an opinion from muslimedia.com to try and balance the view (although I have to say I was surprised by some of their article – see below)

Oh and this was what precipitated my curiosity (from this post by Proud_Syrian). And lastly, I know I say this again and again, but anyhow I’m agnostic atheist. I don’t have a religious agenda - other than trying to learn a little about religious history.

Originally posted by Proud_Syrian
Some Islamic scholars have said that the complete Qur’an was sent down from the Preserved Tablet (Al-Lawh Al-Mahfoozh) in the night of Al-Qadr to the House of Glory (Bayt Al-`Izzah) in the lowest heaven, from whence it was revealed piecemeal to the Prophet Muhammad according to events that took place during his life over a period of twenty-three years.

I was curious about how the Qur'an came to be. I have heard from my Muslim friends that it was sent directly from god and that not one thing has ever been changed. I have to say I really have no idea what that means exactly? Also, what is “the Preserved Tablet”? How did it come about? Was it compiled at the end of Muhammad’s life or was it written piecemeal during his lifetime or something else? Anyway, was there ever an original? Was it kept somewhere? If so, is it still around? I know that at some point it was canonized – what did that entail? Who decided what stayed and what didn’t stay – I mean who was in charge of that processes?

*sorry about all the questions*

What are your thoughts on this article:
What is the Koran? Because it was related to Islamic history and the Qur’an I gave it a read.

Here’s how it starts:

IN 1972, during the restoration of the Great Mosque of Sana'a, in Yemen, laborers working in a loft between the structure's inner and outer roofs stumbled across a remarkable gravesite, although they did not realize it at the time. Their ignorance was excusable: mosques do not normally house graves, and this site contained no tombstones, no human remains, no funereal jewelry. It contained nothing more, in fact, than an unappealing mash of old parchment and paper documents -- damaged books and individual pages of Arabic text, fused together by centuries of rain and dampness, gnawed into over the years by rats and insects. Intent on completing the task at hand, the laborers gathered up the manuscripts, pressed them into some twenty potato sacks, and set them aside on the staircase of one of the mosque's minarets, where they were locked away -- and where they would probably have been forgotten once again, were it not for Qadhi Isma'il al-Akwa', then the president of the Yemeni Antiquities Authority, who realized the potential importance of the find.

This seems quite specific:

THE first person to spend a significant amount of time examining the Yemeni fragments, in 1981, was Gerd-R. Puin, a specialist in Arabic calligraphy and Koranic paleography based at Saarland University, in Saarbrücken, Germany.

….

Since the early 1980s more than 15,000 sheets of the Yemeni Korans have painstakingly been flattened, cleaned, treated, sorted, and assembled; they now sit ("preserved for another thousand years," Puin says) in Yemen's House of Manuscripts, awaiting detailed examination. That is something the Yemeni authorities have seemed reluctant to allow, however. "They want to keep this thing low-profile, as we do too, although for different reasons," Puin explains. "They don't want attention drawn to the fact that there are Germans and others working on the Korans. They don't want it made public that there is work being done at all, since the Muslim position is that everything that needs to be said about the Koran's history was said a thousand years ago."

To date just two scholars have been granted extensive access to the Yemeni fragments: Puin and his colleague H.-C. Graf von Bothmer, an Islamic-art historian also based at Saarland University. Puin and Von Bothmer have published only a few tantalizingly brief articles in scholarly publications on what they have discovered in the Yemeni fragments. They have been reluctant to publish partly because until recently they were more concerned with sorting and classifying the fragments than with systematically examining them, and partly because they felt that the Yemeni authorities, if they realized the possible implications of the discovery, might refuse them further access. Von Bothmer, however, in 1997 finished taking more than 35,000 microfilm pictures of the fragments, and has recently brought the pictures back to Germany. This means that soon Von Bothmer, Puin, and other scholars will finally have a chance to scrutinize the texts and to publish their findings freely -- a prospect that thrills Puin. "So many Muslims have this belief that everything between the two covers of the Koran is just God's unaltered word," he says. "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 Koran has been out of this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Koran has a history too. The Sana'a fragments will help us to do this."

Sorry about the long quote – but that should summarize the 3 pages.

What are these “Sana’a fragments? I got the impression they were not “exactly” the same text as the canonized Qur’an? I mean if these Germans have microfilmed the entire thing, as well as the original is in Yemen's House of Manuscripts, what happens if there are major differences between this Qur’an and the canonized Qur’an? Also, why are the Yemeni so reluctant to share this information? It seems like it would be a good thing – I mean historical information is usually a good thing right?

I looked around for a balancing argument and from http://www.muslimedia.com/mainpage.htm
I got a second online article commenting on the above article:

Orientalists plot against the Qur'an under the guise of academic study and archive preservation

But what I find interesting is how easily this article (written by Aisha Geissinger) easily agrees that there simply were differences in early Qur’an and that no Islamic scholar would be slightly surprised by this (although they feel that the purpose of the Germans’ research is to undercut the authority of the Qur’an)? Well, they (Germans) did it to the Bible - so that may be the case. Or it may be that Germans have a fascination for history and that what they find contradicts established history/religious authority?

Anyway,

The fact is that the existence of minor differences in wording and in the ordering of the surahs in the earliest masahif (manuscripts) is no surprise to Muslims familiar with classical Islamic scholarship of the Qur'an. Such variations occurred for several reasons. One factor is the dialectical differences then existing in different regions of Arabia. Another is that some of the Sahaba kiram (Companions) recorded such masahif for their own personal use. As these persons had either memorised the Qur'an in its entirety or large portions of it, such masahif were written merely as an aid to memory. Therefore, notes in the margins such as the wording of du'as (supplications) occurred, and the order of surahs varied. Books written by classical Muslim scholars, such as al-Suyuti's Itqan, go into great detail about such issues. [/b]

On another note, I'm going to a friends (who is Muslim) wedding in a few months and was wondering what I should bring? Like food or what is an appropriate gift. My closest friend that is Muslim is the one getting married and so I can't ask him! Any ideas? Thanks
MII