Would you like to see an early Quran manuscript that has 11 Corrections or
variants on a single page? If so, stick around -- that's what we're
going to talk about today, and the last example I'll show you is actually an
alternate word in the verse. Well, you're going to enjoy the manuscript page that
I'm showing you today. It is from, I think, from the early 8th century (A.D), so, within about a
hundred years of Muhammad's death. It is a fragment,
and by "fragment" I just want to clarify -- that term is a technical term --
obviously, when we think of a fragment we sometimes think of just a little tiny
piece of something. But in terms of manuscripts and Qurʾan manuscripts, when
we say the word "fragment," it is a term that refers to anything that is less
than a full Qurʾan. So, a fragment could be, indeed, a tiny little piece, or it could
be one single page, a couple pages, or 50 pages, as long as it's not a full Qurʾan.
So, the one that we're looking at today is one of the pages of a fragment of 11
pages. Let's go ahead and get going here. It is a page, it is the front side of page
8 of this manuscript, that lives at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. I went and
saw it in 2015 as a post doctoral Rice Rockwell Scholar, photographed all its
pages as well as many others. This, however, is a picture from the
Museum itself. I'm going to show you 13 different things that are going on on
this page, and let's take a look at the first one. It is here and it's Surah 6:99 in
the text today. It reads "fa-dhalika la-ayatin li-qawmin yu'minun" which means
"Here, indeed, are signs for a people who believe." However, as it was written in
this manuscript, it says "la-ayatin lakum in kuntum
yu'minun" "here, indeed, are signs for you (plural) if you (plural) believe."
So, it is a difference. It does make sense, but it is not the way
the text stands today. And I've checked the a couple of the earliest tafsirs,
and the things I'm going to talk to you about today, I haven't done a
thorough survey of every single one, so I'm going to leave some of this to those
of you out there who are very familiar with the materials. If anybody wants to
add in the comment section anything that you have found on some of these things
that would be so helpful to me so we can crowdsource some of this, but I've looked
in Tafsir Muqatil, which is an early tafsir (commentary). I see mention of this phrase
"la ayatin li-qawmin yu'minun," but it's only, he only tells what he
clarifies the meaning of it; he doesn't mention any alternate reading there. And
similarly with Tafseer Mujahid which is one of the earliest tafsirs that we have, there's no mention of this
verse. So, there we go, that's the first one we're looking at.
Let's move on to the next. Okay, this is a place near the top
of the page where there is the word bihi. It's in 6:99, and I can see what's
going on here, because this word "bihi" does follow the previous instance - it follows
the word "fa-akhrajna" and the word "akhrajna," "from it," it occurs twice in this verse
and the word "bihi" does follow the previous instance of this word in the
verse. So, it seems possible that the scribe got to the second instance of the
word and then wrote the word "bihi," thinking and that he was following the
first instance - first occurrence of the word perhaps. The strange thing about
it, however, is that instead of continuing, then, with following what follows the
word "bihi" in the text as we have it in the Hafs, he instead continues on with
the verse as it occurs after the word "minhum," "from it" in the Hafs text. So, I'm not
entirely sure what's going on here, but that is what is existing in this
manuscript. Okay, here's the next one, and I've added some color here so you
can see a little bit of what's going on. It's also from verse 6:99, and the text
today reads "anzuru thamarihi idha athmara," and there
are two things missing in the manuscript that are present Hafs text, and that is
the third person singular pronoun, possessive, of "thamara," which is
"their fruits," but it would be "his fruit," I suppose, more literally. The
upshot is that there is one fewer alif in this space than there is in the
standard text the Hafs text, so, crowdsource this out to you ... If you can
see the sequence of letters as they occur in this manuscript and think how
you think the scribe was reading or intending this, please leave a comment
below and we'll take a look at that, and see if we get some good answers there.
Alright, here's the next one. And in this spot, what has happened, and
what you see inside the box there is the place where an alif initially stood (and
that was the initial ʾālif of the word "Allah." The effect of taking this ʾālif away
away is to convert the name, or the word, "Allah" to the word "lillahi," which has
the meaning of "to Allah," and that is in fact how it stands in the Hafs text. And
the verse reads why "ja'alū li-llāhi shurakā'a al-jinn" and this means "they yet
they ascribed as partners to Allah the jinn." "Ja'ala," the verb in this, has the
sense of "bringing;" in other words they more literally brought the jinn as
partners to Allah. This exact phrase "ja'alū li-llāhi" occurs in three other
places in the Quran, in 13:16, 13:33, and 14:30, and "lahu," "to him," is found in 43:15.
Now, when the verb "ja'ala" has a noun following it in the accusative, it conveys a sense of
acting upon the object. And, it does have this causative a sense in 15:91 where it
is said that "they divided the Quran into parts," in 27:34 where the Kings were
acting upon the inhabitants of his city, in 43:19 ... it can also carry the sense of
putting the object somewhere, such as in 71:7, where it said that they put their
fingers into their ears. The verb there is "ja'alū." It can also have the sense of
alleging something, as in 37:158. When it comes to having God be the direct object,
however, it's obviously problematic, because it it means acting upon God,
doing something to God. One can understand why we don't see the word
"Allah" in the accusative sense anywhere else
in the Quran following "ja'alū." So, that all to say that I don't see how this would
have made sense at all. I don't see any other place in the Quran where that sort
of formulation exists. So, this is most likely just an error, and we'll move on
to the next one now. Alright, so in this case, this is kind of interesting, because
here, later on in the same verse, there is a spot where the word "yasifūn" exists
today. However, in this manuscript the word "yashrikun" was clearly first
written here. Now, the words have a similar sense, and the effect of the
verse is similar, but it is a different word. So, you can see what the scribe did
here, and I don't have pointers here to go on the screen, but you can see that,
where the darker ink is, a little vertical line there has closed the
front end of the kāf to convert it into a ṣād, and the little tooth at the
front end of that has been put in and the fā' and the rā' have been inserted,
there, as well, what is interesting here is that the preceding letters, the four
teeth followed by the rā', the first letters of "yashrikun" have not been
erased. So, as it stands, there are extra letters in this manuscript that don't
seem to belong there, and we do see erasures elsewhere on this page, so I'm
not sure why the corrector did not go to the effort of erasing those other
letters. Let's move on to the next one. Going back up near the top of the page,
here we're back to 6:99, I believe, and the word is "mushtabihā." There is one more
tooth here in this word in the "F1924" text (which is my abbreviation for the
standard text, the Ḥafs text) than there is in this manuscript, so it's just a
variant. It's one missing letter in this manuscript if we consider the
standard to be the correct text. I'm not sure exactly what is intended here,
what's going on. I'm happy, again, to have comments at the bottom. All right, and so,
we want to move through without taking too much time ... the next one I'm showing
you is 6:106. The verse says "follow that which has been revealed to you," "'uḥiya,"
however, in this manuscript, the word "yūḥā" is written instead, and it's the same
word, but in the present tense. In other words, "follow that which is
being revealed to you from your Lord," so it works, but it is
different from the standard text today. Alright, so let's move on to the next
one. This is the following verse, 6:107, which reads in the Ḥafṣ text "law shā
allahu mā ashrakū," "had Allah willed, they would not have been polytheists." As
it is written in this manuscript, the final two letters of the verb are nūn-
ʾālif, instead of wāw-ʾālif, with the reading of "law sha'a allāhu mā ashraknā,"
"If Allah had willed, they would not have ascribed partners to Us." Not a huge
difference in the meaning, some difference, but not a huge difference in
the overall sense of the verse. But, definitely a substantive difference in
the rasm. Okay, we're just going to move a few words later in the verse, here, and
in the Ḥafṣ text this verse reads "ja'alnakā alayhim," "We have brought (or 'We
have appointed'), you as a watcher over them." The word "watcher" is
the next word, "ḥāfiz," in this manuscript. However, the final letter, the mīm, is
absent, so it reads "alayhi," which has the effect of making the verse read, "We have
appointed you a watcher over him." If we look down two lies further, we find another
place where this manuscript does not quite match what is in the Ḥafṣ text, and the
verse as it reads today says "kadhālika zayyanā li-kulli ummatin 'amalahum," "to
every people or nation, we have made their deeds seem fair." Now, the manuscript
has an extra ʾālif, when compared to the standard text, before the word "'amalahum,"
and the effect of this ʾālif is to make it plural, so: "their works," or "their
deeds." So, that's how it exists in the manuscript, but it is not the way it exists
in the text today. Okay, here are a couple of others that ...
I'm not going to go into in detail, because I want to get to the last one
that I promised you. In 6:105, there's an inserted ʾālif, and in 6:106,
there's, at the beginning of that verse, there's an erasure leaving a gap.
And in my experience, this is -- and from all appearance on the page -- the shape of
the erasure, and possibly some of the shadow of what is remaining, this looks
like it would have been a while. If you were translating it would be "and," and
then the verse continues. So, that's not at all unusual; it's very common to see
that erased at the beginning of a verse, because it so commonly starts so many
verses of the Quran that often it's written where it's not supposed to be
written and then they erase it afterwards. Okay, and here we are right at the very
end with the moment that I promised you, which is an alternate word. It's not the
first alternate word that we've seen on the page, but I think it's one of the
more interesting ones. This is verse 6:110. This part of the verse reads "fī
ṭughyānihim ya'mahun," "We let them wander blindly on in their insolence." And
I've circled there the words that roughly correspond to the word that
we're looking at, "fī ṭughyānihim," because in this manuscript the word
"ṭughyānihim" does not exist. Rather, its place is taken by the word "khawẓihim."
So, it is an alternate word. "fī khawẓihim" actually is used, as you can see, in
another verse not too far from here in the same sura, "then leave them plunged in
their foolish talk," so here at 6:110, with this alternate word, it has the
reading of "We let them remain plunged in their blindness," or "remain immersed,"
perhaps, "in their blindness." It makes sense, to my understanding of the
Arabic, it does make sense; it's just an alternate reading, a different
word from what we have today. Alright, so that's it I hope you've enjoyed what
I've shown you today. If you have ideas or comments about what could have been
going on at any point in the discussion please do leave those at the
bottom of the page, or if you have questions about anything else, I will be putting up
a video -- I'll be spending some time to answer your questions and
comments sometime the coming week, I hope, so look out for that
and I want to make one additional remark about this particular manuscript. The density
of Corrections and variants in it is unusually high, more so than many other manuscripts I've looked at,
and for this reason I've made it the subject of a couple of further publications
the first one that will be released is this one called "A Variant Qurʾan: Fragment MS.474.2003,"
which will be coming out hopefully very soon, and that'll be geared toward a very general audience
probably most of you who are watching this video. I've tried in it
to make the material very accessible to folks who may not have language skills
in Arabic or the technical background in manuscript and textual criticism so be
on the lookout for that if it's interesting to you it's gonna have
full-page pictures of every single page full transcription and all those things
but the second edition which I'm working on is for brill publishers in a series
of books it's geared much more toward scholarly audience. So, that's it! Thanks
so much for watching this video. I hope you'll take the time to subscribe to
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