Hi, I'm Dr. Daniel Brubaker. I'm here with you today to begin my first video on a
new YouTube channel called "Variant Quran," and on this channel -- I just want to
welcome you here -- on this channel, I hope to have it be a place where I can put my
material and that of others, and just talk about things relating to my primary
area of research, which is the early Quran manuscripts, and specifically
corrections and variants that exist within them. And it's been a pretty big
week. The reason I'm doing this right now is that I've received a number of
requests this week to consider putting some of my material up in bits and
pieces, specific examples, up online that people can look at because it is a topic
of a discussion right now in a way that it has not been in the past. And so, I'm
happy to do that. Actually, I created this channel a little
while ago thinking to to do something just like this, so it's a great time to
actually jump in and begin doing it. I've titled the channel "Variant Quran" just
because that's actually fairly easy to remember, and it's most descriptive of
what it is that I'm doing. I didn't title it that way to make it make it
sensational or anything, but actually very precisely that is that is what I'm
talking about with my work in my research, so it's not intended to be
offensive, but rather very truly descriptive of what it is that that I'm
working on and focusing my attention upon. Yeah, so this past week or two
there have been discussions around the questions of the traditional views of
the preservation of the Quran and the intersection of those with the academic
understanding of this, which shouldn't be that surprising, because when you think
of manuscripts being transmitted from person to person and by people who are
human and fallible and/or who sometimes disagree about things
it wouldn't be a surprise to see the kind of issues that certainly have been
studied in the area of biblical manuscripts for several hundred years,
New Testament and and Hebrew Bible manuscripts to find those in other books
that have been transmitted through such a means. I think the difference is that
there has developed, over time, a sense (mainly in in popular - at the popular
level) that the Quran is different, that the preservation of it was was not
merely a matter of confidence in the text being being as it was
delivered but also almost a doctrinal issue that this text can be trusted
because it was transmitted perfectly without a dot or letter changed, and so
forth, and in that final phrase that I just said that is not the view of the
earliest ... even the earliest Muslim scholars of the matter at
hand, but it is the view of many people today. So, yeah, I don't want to go too
much roundabout about this, but I will get into the manuscript in just a moment
that I want to show you today. First, I just will give a very brief review of of
who I am and what it is that I've done. I realize that some people watching this
may not know who I am and what I've done. My name is Dr. Daniel Brubaker. I did my
doctoral research at Rice University from 2006 to 2014, I defended my
doctoral dissertation there in 2014, and in the course of my doctoral work, I
settled on a topic which was the topic of corrections / intentional changes or
Corrections - physical Corrections - in early Qurʾan manuscripts.
This had captured my interest over, you know, at some point in time I was
interested generally and looked at textual critisism of the Quran. I
worked with observing a friend, Keith Small, and others, and just became
very interested in this and decided to focus my attention kind of narrowly, but
actually also very broadly on many many different manuscripts, narrowly on the
subject of corrections, and broadly by looking at many many different
manuscripts. So, to just cut a very long and interesting story (to me, at least)
short, I have traveled around the world and, you know, looked at these manuscripts
in pictures and in books, but also looked at many of them in person, and have
traveled all over the world and been shown great courtesy and respect and
an access to these things in many different institutions for which I'm
very appreciative they do not let just anybody walk in and look at these things,
thankfully, because they're delicate they're very special and precious.
They're 1,300 year-old documents and, in fact, usually even people who are
studying manuscripts don't always get a chance to handle them directly. Because
my work has been with the specific question of corrections in them that
required very close examination of the text sometimes holding it up to the
light and looking at, you know, looking at the very fine details of it, I have been
given access to a lot. It just blows me away, still, when I think about
it. But, that's the story behind that. So, the upshot is that there are
corrections in early Quran manuscripts. There are a lot of them. Some of them are
due to mistakes having been made at the time of first writing, some of them are
due to changes in orthography (the way that the certain words have been written),
and so not necessarily a substantive change in the
word that would have been pronounced but a difference in the way the word
would have been written, and so, over time sometimes these things were corrected.
Sometimes they're due to differences in the readings or the "ahruf," which are
different things but, and so, maybe somebody was ... the manuscript was
first written by somebody who was following one particular
line, and then was corrected by somebody who was wanting that manuscript to conform to a different reading, or something like that. So, those
kind of things exist as well, but beyond that there also a number of corrections
and other textual issues, other variations that don't seem to fit into
any of these categories, and those are the ones, obviously, that are most
interesting. Now, I've cast my net fairly wide and have found thousands by now,
many, many that are sitting in photographs that I have still yet to
document and put in, and those will be coming out in forthcoming books,
hopefully very soon. But, yeah, so that, the task
next at hand is to make sense of the using to evaluate them and sort of sift
through the ones that are our most potentially significant, most, perhaps,
theologically or doctrinally significant, and begin to look at those more closely.
And, that's a work, not just for me, but for other people to look at as well.
Right, so here I am going on and on, so, but I don't want to jump in just yet to
the manuscript before saying that
I understand this, you know, topic is sensitive. Even when I was ... the
most common question that I had when I was doing my doctoral work was, and
traveling to countries -- not only the UK, Cambridge, Oxford, and these
places, British Library, and Paris, and so forth -- but also to some of the countries
that are Muslim majority countries. And, the question was, "Is it safe to be
doing this kind of research?" and in fact, I didn't know. I didn't know. I hoped
that it was, and I thought, you know, I'm an honest person doing honest
research and not trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes, or anything like that,
which I wasn't, so ... and, in fact it turned out that way. But of course, at the time
when you're doing something new and these are questions that are not asked,
and they're in sensitive areas, we don't know. So, I would go and on my
travels and I would email my notes back to my wife every night,
and we're not knowing what's around the corner. People have very
strong feelings about things, so that is sort of, part of a glimpse into the
adventure that we've ... that I've been on over these past years. Now, the manuscript
I want to show you today, I'm going to step into it. I'm going to transfer over to a
slideshow of it in just a moment so you can see it directly, but I wrote a paper
on this in 2009, I believe. I presented it at MESA in San Diego, the Middle East
Studies Association, and I was looking through it and I noticed a couple of
corrections on the page, but when I was trying to locate what the text was, what
the actual verse was, I came across this issue at the bottom of the page which
you are going to see in a moment. The point that I want to emphasize about
that will be clear in a moment, but I just want to also say that the question
of how widespread the corrections and, you know, what the breadth and depth of
the issue of corrections were in manuscripts, is something that's
relatively new. I don't think anybody has really gauged that before, even Keith
Small, who was a dear friend and who showed me and sort of sent me along this
track I don't think he had any real sense or a realization of this. People
like Keith Small, François Déroche, Alba Fedeli, and others, many others,
actually ... well, a number of others, a handful of other people doing
work today, and who've been working for, in some cases for quite some time, have done
great work. But I don't think anybody had a sense of how wide and deep the matter
of corrections really was, because nobody had actually focused attention on that,
directly, before. Alright, well, that's enough of that. Thank you for watching
this. I hope that you will, if you're interested in this topic and want to
hear more, that you will "like" and subscribe. Please leave comments at the
bottom, and I'm going to transfer over now to the other section. We're just
going to show you what we're looking at. Thanks for watching; we'll see you soon.
Okay, so we've transferred over to the slides now. You hopefully can see the
screen here, and this manuscript ... you can't see the entire thing here, but it
is a horizontal page on parchment. It's probably from the 8th century,
early 8th century, I would say ... within about a hundred years of Muhammad's
death, possibly earlier than that, and it is one of the pages from the Sanaa
manuscripts that were discovered between the inner and outer dome of the Sanaa
Mosque in Yemen in 1972. I believe this photograph was made by either Puin or
Von Bothmer, and it was published as part of the
UNESCO CD-ROM of Sanaa Manuscripts, which I believe was one of the fruits of that
project. What you see happening here, and if you look where the arrow is pointing
you can see an inserted alif in the right margin. This is not all that
striking, but I want to show you two corrections on the page before I get to
my third issue on the page, which is my main point. This is the final alif of
the word kafaru, "they disbelieved," of Sura 9:74. It represents a not uncommon issue
with the developing orthography (or way of writing) the third-person plural form
of verbs. Alright, so the second thing I want to show you is this insertion of an
"Allah" that's several lines down. this one has been discussed ... it's one of the ones
that was discussed in my book "Corrections in Early Qur'an Manuscripts"
that was published about a year ago, among nine others. And by the way, I have
a forthcoming chapter in another book through the Inârah series that is
discussing more of these corrections involving "allah," twenty-seven corrections
and/or other insertions of Allah, or other corrections involving the
word "Allah," altogether, so it's a more extensive discussion if you found
that interesting and want to be on your lookout for more. Alright, so this
is the final "Allah" of Surah 9:78 ... again, not all that unusual to see these kind
of things. They occur elsewhere, but the main point that I'm making here is
this page has been corrected in two spots, and so when we come to the last
line of the page, this is the main point that I want to illustrate, we
notice that the scribe who first wrote the page actually left out three words
if we're comparing it to the text that is now in common use today
around the world, in the Ḥafṣ text, and the Cairo edition. So, and that
all the traditions point back toward. And so, this manuscript is variant. Not
only was it variant at the time of first writing, but the other interesting thing
to note, and the reason I showed you their other two corrections on the page
is that somebody came back to this page at a later time, after production, and
corrected it, and whoever that was, however, did not correct, or did not see a
need to correct, the omission at this spot. So, I thought ... I find that very
interesting. So, these words stand as they were first
written. So, two people (at least), possibly one of them made a mistake by omitting
something, or possibly didn't ... possibly thought that that was the way that it
was supposed to be written, and possibly the second one, the corrector, either made
a mistake and didn't see it, or once again reviewed it and thought that that
was the way that it was supposed to be written. So, I find that interesting. Now,
let's take another look, before we finish up here, at the verse itself, and read it there.
It says, "It is the same whether or not you beg forgiveness for them. Though
you ask forgiveness for them seventy times, Allah will not forgive them. That
is because they disbelieved in Allah and in His Messenger." That last little bit is
cut off, but that's what it says. So, this verse can be read sensibly, grammatically
correct, with or without the "sab'īn marratan fa." If you read it without it,
it would say "It is the same whether or not you beg forgiveness for them. Though
you ask forgiveness for them, Allah will not forgive them." So, that makes sense. But
it also makes sense, of course, the way that it stands today. Now, let's take a
look over here at something else, which sprung to my mind when I
looked at this, and I thought, "Well, that sounds very familiar ... those themes sound
familiar." And, if we look at Matthew 18:20-21, we (and some of you may have actually
already noticed this as I read the verse), we're reminded of the time when
Peter was speaking to Jesus and the text tells us that Peter came
and said to him, "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him?
Up to seven times? Jesus says to him, 'I do not say to you up
to seven times but up to seventy times seven,'" and so what do you notice here it
is the instance of the asking for forgiveness,
or the need to forgive and the requirement or a call to do so, up to
seventy times seven in this case but the seventy times and the idea of
forgiveness both exist side-by-side in this very well-known account just as
they do in the Quran text as it stands today ... but not as it stood at the time
that this particular manuscript was first written. It lacked that idea of the
seventy times. Now, the idea of seventy, and the number, the motif of seventy
and seven, is very important in the New Testament and in the Hebrew Bible.
It's of great significance. It occurs very frequently. It's not really that much so
in the Quran. It does not occur that frequently in the Quran. So, what are we
to make of this? What happened here? Well, we don't know. But, there are interesting
questions in this. I hope that you can notice that and see that. Is it possible
that the scribe that first thought that this was not supposed to be here
actually was onto, or thought that it was not supposed to be here because
there was a tradition that varied from what we have today? I don't know if
that's the case or not. All we have is a single manuscript here that says it. If
we ever have a second manuscript that reads the same way, then we'll be able to
have a bit more clarity to the picture. But these are things to think about, and
I hope it has started to provoke your thought a little bit. I will end right
there, and let you think some more. Please, again, "like" and subscribe to the channel,
and leave comments below. I'll take a look at those, and we'll talk to you
again soon thanks so much.