Abstract
AbstractThis paper takes a novel approach to the question of when and how the text of the Quran was codified into its present form, usually referred to as the Uthmanic text type. In the Quran the phrase niʿmat allāh/rabbi-ka “the grace of god/your lord” can spell niʿmat “grace” either with tāʾ or tāʾ marbūṭah. By examining 14 early Quranic manuscripts, it is shown that this phrase is consistently spelled using only one of the two spellings in the same position in all of these different manuscripts. It is argued that such consistency can only be explained by assuming that all these manuscripts come from a single written archetype, meaning there must have been a codification project sometime in the first century. The results also imply that these manuscripts, and by extension, Quran manuscripts in general, were copied from written exemplars since the earliest days.
Highlights
Throughout the history of Quranic studies, a general unease about the date of the codification of the textus receptus ne varietur can be perceived
The orthography we find in the early Quranic manuscripts as well as in the Cairo edition of the Quran seems to be in a transitional period towards the plene writing of such nouns, where it seems to be essentially optional whether ā is written plene or not
When we compare such spellings across early Quranic manuscripts, e.g. one of the nouns that Déroche studied for the Codex Parisino-Petropolitanus, ʿibād, we find that even manuscripts that are all part of the Syrian manuscript type (i.e. Codex ParisinoPetropolitanus, Or. 2165 and We II 1913) there appears to be free variation across the manuscripts, and the positions where they show up do not seem to correlate at all
Summary
Throughout the history of Quranic studies, a general unease about the date of the codification of the textus receptus ne varietur can be perceived. ʿAffān who codified the rasm, or consonantal skeleton, of the text as we have it today. This was famously challenged by Wansbrough (1977), who posited that the collection of the canonical text can only have taken place as late as two or three centuries after the date traditionally assigned to it. Many of the reasons for scepticism about an early date for the compilation of the text have not been dispelled, and a general unease remains in the field of Quranic studies. This paper aims to show that all the early Quran manuscripts descend from a single written archetype, and that the text was clearly spread. Considering the early date of some of the many Quranic manuscripts discussed here (many of which must date from the early Umayyad period), it seems highly unlikely that this written archetype was standardized much later than the time ofUthmān’s reign, and the data can be seen to corroborate very precisely the traditional Muslim account
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