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 funeral 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.

So begins a remarkable saga of intrigue, censorship and murder. The background:

Within twelve years of Muhammad’s death, chaos reigned. It was a time of shifting alegiances and cultural uncertainty.  Three of the first four Caliphs (successors to Muhammad) were assassinated.  Countless variations of the Qur’an were circulating in the Arabian penninsula. Under the caliphate of Uthman, the variant transcripts were gathered. One version was selected as being the most politically correct and the rest were burned. Ironically, the versions authored by Muhammad’s closest confidants were among those rejected.

Since Yemen was an early center of Islam, the Yemeni transcripts may be the only extant texts to survive the Uthman purge and may provide a glimse into how difficult it is to invent a new theology that hangs together with no inconsistencies.  But they may never see the light of day.  As Ravi Zacharias notes in Light in the Shadow of Jihad; The Struggle between Truth and Falsehood,

“Notable scholars such as Ali Dashti from Iran; Nasr Abu Zaid, Egyptian professor of Arabic; Pakistani scholar Fazlur Rahman; Egyptian journalist Farag Foda; Algerian professor of law at the University of Paris, Mohammed Arkoun; and Egyptian government minister and university professor Taha Hussein voiced some honest concerns about the [Yemeni] texts and their meaning.  These devout Muslim men have paid dearly for questioning the authenticity of the primary sources.  Ali Dashti mysteriously disappeared during the revolution in Iran. Abu Zaid was branded apostate and forced to flee the country with his wife. Farag Foda was assassinated, and so runs the list of those silenced by death or fear.”

Here is the account of the remarkable manuscripts:

What is the Qur’an?

This is a PDF file and is safe for download.

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Liam Roberts

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