Would you like to see several early Quran manuscripts with corrections of
the word "Allah"? If so, stick around -- that's exactly what we're going to do today,
just after I answer a few of your questions from recent videos.
Well, welcome back to Variant Qurʾan, I'm Dr. Daniel Brubaker, and this is a channel
where I am speaking about my research with
Qurʾan manuscripts, corrections, and variations in the Qurʾan manuscripts, and
related to the larger conversation around these things. If you stick around
until the end today, I'm going to be speaking about
corrections involving the word "Allah." Hang around!
In this discussion, I wanted to answer a couple of your questions from the last
video that I put up about the unboxing. hope you enjoyed watching the unboxing
and I''m going to put a link to that video here at the
bottom. Thank you for being here, for being part of this community, and for
watching these videos. It's been fun to get to know some of you and to
hear from you that you are enjoying watching the things that I put up. It's
gratifying, I think, to anyone to have people appreciate their work. And, I do
appreciate you appreciating me. So, thanks so much.
Here is the first comment it says "Much love and respect
from Pakistan. Thank you sir for all you're doing. God
bless you," and it's from Jamal Khan. Thank you, Jamal. It's great to have you
here and it's great that people are watching all the way over in Pakistan.
Here's another one. It says, "Hi Sir, did you teach this stuff? How long
would you read a 300 to 400 pages of books?"
And, first of all, the books that I showed you the other day --
first of all, the common thing that people ask when they step into a
library like this is "Have you read all these books?" and the answer is no,
I have not read all of these books. But I have read many of the books and the
books that I showed you, in more direct answer to this question
from Miriam Buenaventura, is that
the books that I showed you on Saturday were not
editions meant for reading the entire book ... they were actually
many pages of transcription of Quran manuscripts, with
introductions. So, the introductions are for reading but the
books themselves are for reference. So, thankfully you can -- maybe
it was scary to see those books and think of me sitting here reading away at
them -- number one, I'm a fairly slow reader, so
it is not as though I can breeze through all these things any faster than anybody
else. Maybe faster than some people, but probably quite a bit slower than many
other people. It's just work. It's work like any
other work is, reading and studying and trying to
get a handle on a subject, and it takes time.
So, that's what I do. The next comment here is "Greetings from
Indonesia," from Anthony. Thank you so much, Anthony ...
Not only Pakistan, but we have Indonesia. Thank you. The next comment here is from
... well, it looks like a screen name libertatum habit
prescium. It says, "Good morning Daniel, I have been following your pages with
interest. I have noted a gentleman by the name of
Hythem sidky offer a critique of your work. Has there been a response to this?
Is it worthy of a response?" Those are two questions that are good
questions. There has not been a response, yet, from me. I don't know if anybody else
has made a response to it yet, Although, I have noticed that different people have
picked up his review and used it as a basis for
further critique of my work including Shabir Allyi in his response to my book.
Now, my response to it is forthcoming very
soon, and is not out yet but it's coming soon. Is
it worthy of a response? Well, actually, the
review has a number of flaws to it some of which I'll be mentioning in my
response to it. So, that's coming soon, and you can judge for yourself whether
it was worthy of a response. But, initially I didn't respond very quickly
because I didn't feel that it was necessarily
needed right away. But now I do feel that it is needed, because people are talking
about it, and so they do need to hear what I
think. Alright, so, the next comment here is from Romano Productions.
It says, "Hello Dr. B. Nice to see you and in good shape. I hope
you will be fine for a long time. This video is not extraordinary, but still the
unboxing is a mandatory style of video and you've done a proper job as a
YouTuber." Well, thank you for that. And then he continues on to say that the
thumbnail is okay because I have a pleasant smile, but
it could have been a little bit more click bait -- put an object, blur the object
and put a question mark over it or different type of objects with question
marks all over to spice up the thumbnail to push the user to watch the video.
"It's YouTube, it needs to be clickbait." And so, the reason
I share this with you is -- and the reason I respond to it is -- that
I understand I'm in a particular medium, but I wanted you all to understand that
it's kind of a tension for somebody like myself to be in this
environment. There is something that feels, although I
have worked in the past and in sales and I do recognize
the importance of marketing and merchandising your wares,
so to speak, and putting things out in a way that
they're attractive and draw people in to look at them, and so, I am trying to do
things like that. But, I also do not want to be artificial
in the way that I do things, or too disingenuous in in the way that I
go about this. So, I hope you'll bear with me as I sort of
strike my balance and find my stride, and my style, in this
in ways that don't compromise what I really want: to be a sense of being
genuine with you, and and honest, and so forth ... although I
hope you also, on the back -- on the flip side -- that you pardon me if you
do see things that look a little bit click-bait-ey, as I experiment around with
these things ... because I do, after all, want people to take the time
to click and to watch these videos. It's the reason I'm doing them,
so that people will watch. So, thank you for that, Romano, for those good
comments you're offering to me in order to help me to build and to expand
this channel. So, the last one I'm going to talk about
today is the om sa: "In our part of the world, we never see
these manuscripts let alone can afford it
yet Quran is still true and we never argue about it. We never heard sanna or
birmingham or topkapi manuscripts, let alone see them, yet our
Quran is the same as Quran of other muslims
this is because Quran is preserved by recitation and memorization."
Alright, well, thank you for that comment, and I
don't want to get involved in argument around these things -- that's not the
reason that I'm up here doing this. But, I wanted to put
it up here and, number one, recognize that I understand
that the the feeling of orality -- that there's a
strong sense that the oral transmission of the Quran has
been the primary way that it has been passed down and I also understand the
strength of oral culture and the strength of
people's ability to memorize the Quran even today.
I'm not entirely convinced that the Quran was always
passed orally in the same way that it is today. It may well have been; I'm open to
all of these possibilities. But, I want to make clear that when I'm looking at the
manuscripts, what I am trying to ... the way that I'm using them,
just so that you'll understand, I may have said this before, but when I look ...
when we look at the manuscript what we have in the manuscripts is a
sort of a distillation, like if you were out on a vacation
and you see a beautiful sunset, and you decide to take out your camera, and you
take a picture of the sunset, and then the sun goes down, everybody
goes their different ways, you go on, and you're -- later on, you're
remembering your vacation, and maybe after your vacation you remember the
sunset one way, or or another way, but what you can do is
you look back at that photograph, and you can
catch the details of that moment. And so, what we see in the manuscripts, I think,
is a capturing of the details of a moment.
Now, later traditions relate to us certain things about the early
transmission of the Qurʾan, such as that it was transmitted orally,
and we have the isnads -- the chains of transmitters -- going back, that so-and-so
heard from so-and-so about these different things, and we have isnads
for the different verses, and so forth. But what we have in the manuscripts is
additional evidence that is a snapshot of
what somebody who was writing that down at that moment perceived
to be the text of the Quran at the moment that that was being written.
And so, any one manuscript is not necessarily
the end of the story, or a full picture, but
many manuscripts taken together, and the evidence that they contain, can help us
to validate the narrative that we've
heard through the secondary sources, such as the hadith, or to
give us increasing clarity about it in form of greater detail
about something that the hadith say, or possibly even, in some cases, let us know
that maybe what this hadith is saying is not strong in this spot, on this
particular point of detail, because we have manuscripts
that show us something a little bit different. So, I don't know, I haven't
fully unpacked these things, and one of the things in my response to the
review ... just to give you a little foretaste of
that, to the review of Sidky, that Sidky wrote, is that there was an
expectation on his part and the part of some other people that I
should unpack, that I should have done a full review
and thorough survey of every one of these corrections
before I ever announced that it existed to the public. And, that's
I -- just so that you know -- that's not what I've chosen to do I've
put out basic descriptions of many of these corrections,
"What verse is it?" "What is going on on the page?" "What portion of the text has been
erased?" "What portion has been overwritten?" "Is it a different ink?" "Does it look like
there was a passage of a good deal of time
between original composition of the page, the original production of the page
and the correction of it, or does it look like it was done
soon after the time of first production -- for example, with the text of the
correction matching the style and nib and ink of
the rest of the page?" And so, those are the kind of things that
I've looked to describe, and I've begun down the path of analyzing what's going
on, "Does this look like a scribal mistake?" and,
you know, I'm not going to say that I won't change my opinion, at some point, of
some of these things if I thought that something was not a mistake at some
point, and then later, either by have having it
pointed out to me by somebody that, oh, these details of it
do show that it was a mistake, then I would be open to
looking at that and re-evaluating, or, you know, or vice-versa, "These details show
that it probably wasn't a mistake," when maybe I thought it was a mistake.
So, that is something that happens over time, but the job of
thorough and deep analysis of all these thousands of changes
is not something that one person can necessarily take on. I could spend a lot
of my life doing it, but I'm not going to likely succeed in
plumbing the depths of every single one, and so
I've decided just begin publishing these things make them
known to you so that you also can have a look and think about what they might
mean in the meantime. So, I hope that makes
that clear, and I hope it's helpful to you.
Alright, so what I'm going to do now is jump
over into the substance of what we'll talk about today. I'm not going to go
extensively into the matter of a lot corrections in the Quran today.
Instead, I'm going to give you a couple of examples
to give you a sense of the nature of it. If you'd like to read more about it, you
can see it in my book and you can also see
it in a chapter that is forthcoming, that I
just finished up this past week, and submitted the final form, approved the
final form, for the forthcoming edition of
the German Inarah books. In my book, "Corrections in Early Qurʾan Manuscripts," I
speak about, in example three, corrections involving the word Allah,
and there I give nine examples of corrections involving the word "Allah,"
pages 34 to 44, and give some discussion about
those. The reason I included that in my book is that I had
come across about a dozen examples involving
corrections, insertions of "Allah," and there are many other places, numerous
other places where there are corrections involving the word "Allah." Now, that should
not be at all surprising, given the fact that the word "Allah"
occurs in the quran over 2800 times - it's a very frequently occurring word - so, we
shouldn't be necessarily surprised that it's
corrected frequently. However, there were interesting
features about the corrections that I had found, in particular a number of
places in a single manuscript, or several
manuscript fragments coming originally from the same
manuscript, from the same bound to book, had insertions of "Allah,"
after the fact, that had been omitted at the time of first writing.
And, the density of those was surprising to me. I'm not going to go into all those
things today. I am, however, going to give you several
examples of the types of corrections involving "Allah," one
involving the replacement of the word "Allah" with, or where the word "Allah"
replaces the pronoun. So, the first one we're looking
at today is from Marcel 5, folio 11r. This is in St.
Petersburg, and this comes from Surah 34:27. It is the only
instance of "Allah" in this verse, and as it was written in this manuscript, it
looks like it was omitted at the time of first writing, and
the huwa, "he is," was the only thing written. So, the
verse as it was first written appears to have said, "Say: Show me those
you have attached to Him as associates; He is, rather, the almighty
the all-wise," as opposed to how it reads today, which is
"Show me those you have attached to Him as associates. Allah
is, rather, the Mighty the all-Wise." So, that is one example of
the replacement of the pronoun with the word "Allah," and there are several
others in this chapter that I just submitted for this volume. The second
manuscript I'm going to show you today is
an insertion of "Allah." As you can see, it was later than the
time of original production. It's clearly a different nib and ink. It looks almost
as though it could have been done in modern times, and the verse
is Al-Araf 44. The word preceding the correction here, so the
"Allah" is written in as superscript, but the word just slightly to the right of
that is the word "la'natu," which means "curse," so
as it's written now in this manuscript, it reads "la'natu llahi 'ala al-ẓalimīn,"
meaning, "the curse of Allah is upon the wrongdoers," or
"may Allah's curse be upon the wrongdoers," and as it was first written in this
manuscript, without the word "Allah," it would have said "la'natu 'ala al-ẓalimīn," "a
curse is upon-," or "may a curse be upon the wrongdoers."
and so, it makes sense -- and, by the way, the
way it exists in this manuscript now, with the "Allah"
there, is the way that it exists in the Hafs text.
Alright, moving on, we're going to go to the last pair
of corrections and different manuscripts at the same verse, and
that verse is Surat Al-Ahzab 73, and both of these have the word -- well, the
first one is Marcel 11, which is in St. Petersburg.
It's on 10 verso, and you can see that there has been an insertion
of the word "Allah" here, and as I believe it first read in this manuscript,
it was written,
"that He might pardon the believing men and the believing women," and
I believe what was done is, it was erased, and the word "Allah" was written in here,
because that is the explicit object, and it is now in conformity with
what is the standard Hafs text. So, the second -- and that was actually the second
correction of this verse that I came across --
the first one we'll flip over to now is in BnF arabe 340, and I mentioned this one
in my doctoral dissertation; it's on folio 23
verso, at line 16, and the superior text here
starts in the same verse, actually, of Al-Mushrikīn,
at the, earlier in the verse, and it goes through the word
"Allah," which is right after the word "Allah" that was inserted above here, and
that is the right -- I'm sorry, leftmost word in the
previous slide. So, this whole portion of text -- it is the
last line of the page -- has been erased and overwritten. It's a
little bit bunched-in, although you see it is stretched out - the word
"''ala" ("upon") is stretched out there at the end of the
line - the word "Allah" is a little bit bunched in there, too, but not too much
compared to the rest of the page. But you can
see that this is a narrower nib, probably a different,
a different scribe, and sometime post production, although it's not
entirely certain. It's possible that it was
something that was done by a second scribe
somewhere as part of the original production process.
So, that's all that I'm going to show you today, and I just wanted to
run that example of two verses by you, that are corrected in the same spot,
not to suggest that the same issue is going on here (because I don't think it
necessarily was -- in fact, I would be surprised that it
was because it would have been to correct
it without erasing the whole line, if what was done in the operation in the
first instance was similarly what was done in
the second one, but we do have an overlap of corrections at the same spot,
and I just wanted to whet your appetite a little bit, because
in coming weeks ... and I'm not sure if it'll be the next video, but in coming
weeks I do have a verse in the Quran that has been
corrected in at least four different manuscripts, the same
portion of text or an overlapping portion,
corrected in multiple manuscripts. So, I will be going over that in some future
video, maybe soon, and I do want to remind you
that we have now set up the Patreon account if you
are interested in helping me out and doing this, making
this work possible for me. I do appreciate your help and you can see the
link below in the description box. Thanks so
much; we'll talk to you again next time!