History of The Quran - Oldest Surviving Copy

Oldest Surviving Copy

See also: Sana'a manuscript and Topkapi manuscript

Fragments from a large number of Qur'an codices were discovered in Yemen in 1972. They are now lodged in the House of Manuscript in Sana'a. Carbon-14 tests date some of the parchments to 645–690 AD. However, the text itself is somewhat younger, since carbon-14 estimates the year of the death of an organism, and the process from that to the final writing on the parchment involves an unknown amount of time. Calligraphic datings have pointed to 710–715 AD. It was common for parchment to be reused, older text having been shaved or washed off. This manuscript is yet to be recognised as a valid copy of the Qur'an.

One of the three Qur'ans issued by Uthman is, according to Islamic tradition, preserved at Tashkent. The Topkapi manuscript in Istanbul is also considered to have been commissioned by Uthman.

According to the Hadith (Al-Bukhari, Vol 6, #510), four Uthmanic manuscripts were prepared, after 653 AD and before Uthman's death 656 AD. Al-Kindi (died 850) wrote in the early 3rd century AH, that only the Damascus copy remained and that was currently in Malatja. Various dates have been given for when the Damascus manuscript perished, and various manuscripts at different times have claimed to be the Damascus manuscript. The last of these remaining alleged Damascus manuscripts with a traceable past was in Damascus until the fire of 1892.

There have also been large numbers of manuscripts alleged to be the Damascus manuscript—or even one of the other perished manuscripts. However, there is no sufficient evidence to prove such a link.

Having studied early Qur'an manuscripts, John Gilchrist states: "The oldest manuscripts of the Quran still in existence date from not earlier than about one hundred years after Muhammad's death." He comes to this conclusion by analysing the state of development of the script used in the two of the oldest manuscripts available at the time he is writing, the Samarkand and Topkapi codices. The codices are both written in the Kufic script. It "can generally be dated from the late eighth century depending on the extent of development in the character of the script in each case." This technique has been criticised by other scholars, who have cited many instances of early Kufic and pre-Kufic inscriptions. The most important of these is 240m of Qur'anic inscriptions in Kufic script from the founding of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (692 AD). Inscriptions on rock Hijaaze and early Kufic script may date as early as 646 AD. Clearly, early Kufic scripts existed in the 7th century. The debate between the scholars has moved from one over the date origin of the script to one over state of development of the Kufic script in the early manuscripts and in datable 7th-century inscriptions.

As for the copies that were destroyed, Islamic traditions say that Abdallah Ibn Masud, Ubay Ibn Ka'b, and Ali, Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, had preserved versions that differed in some ways from the Uthmanic text. Muslim scholars record certain of the differences between the versions; those recorded consist almost entirely of orthographic and lexical variants, or different verse counts. All three (Ibn Masud, Ubay Ibn Ka'b, and Ali) are recorded as having accepted the Uthmanic text as final, as there is no record of any of them objecting to the Uthmanic text and even when Ali was the Caliph, he made no move to impose any changes to the Uthmanic text.

Uthman's version was written in an older Arabic script that left out most vowel markings; thus the script could be interpreted and read in various ways. This basic Uthmanic script is called the rasm; it is the basis of several traditions of oral recitation, differing in minor points. The Qur'an is always written in the Uthmanic Rasm (Rasm al Uthman). In order to fix these oral recitations and prevent any mistakes, scribes and scholars began annotating the Uthmanic rasm with various diacritical marks indicating how the word was to be pronounced. It is believed that this process of annotation began around 700 AD, soon after Uthman's compilation, and finished by approximately 900 AD. The Qur'an text most widely used today is based on the Rasm Uthmani (Uthmanic way of writing the Qur'an) and in the Hafs tradition of recitation, as approved by Al-Azhar University in Cairo in 1922. (For more information regarding traditions of recitations, see Qur'anic recitation, below.)