Are you interested in knowing more about the
Sanaa Palimpsest? Do you know what the Sanaa Palimpsest is?
Welcome back to Variant Qurʾan. This is just a very short status update video in which
I want to let you know of what we're up to this week. And, as I mentioned to you earlier
last month, and then again through some other channels this week, I
am having a conversation with Asma Hilali who has worked with the Sanaa Palimpsest, one of the
important manuscripts, one of, probably the most important manuscripts that was discovered in
the Sanaa Mosque in 1972, and that was worked on and photographed, has been, since then. And so,
as I mentioned before, Asma has agreed to come on and talk with us about her research,
not only related to that, but her general research. And, I think it's a great thing to
have the opportunity to have her come on. So, the original plan was to have her here
at the end of August or the beginning of September, which is where we are now, and I
just had a conversation with her this morning. What we decided to do was to have, to make a
plan about how we're going to go about this, and have the conversation. We're going to do it next week, and
that will also give some time for you all, if you have questions that you'd like to ask of her, and
you want to submit those in the comments section below, we can take those all into consideration and
put them up there for that conversation that we have and record then next week. And, my hope,
just by way of background, I want to do a couple things right now before we continue, on the first
one, is to talk about what my hope is for talking about this particular manuscript, because this
is one that has been has been studied by several people in fairly good detail, partly because of how
interesting and important it is, because of its age and because of some of the interesting textual
features that it contains. And so, I have extended invitations to various of the people who have
worked on it. Now, nobody's obligated, obviously, to come come on and have a discussion on this
channel but this is a great space for people to talk about these things, I think,
and so ... but I want to let you know who has done significant work on this
manuscript. The people who have written on it and researched about it recently have been,
well, Asma Hilali wrote the book "The Sanaa Palimpsest." Elisabeth Puin, the wife of Gerd
Puin, is a scholar in her own right and has done a number of publications on the Sanaa
Palimpsest, and they're in the German Inârah series -- most of them are published there. Behnam Sadeghi
is one of the other people who has done important work on this. Now, I haven't focused much of my
attention on it because, as you can see, many other people have given it a lot of attention but it is
one of probably the most important examples of major -- I won't say major correction, but major
well, I mean if you look at a Palimpsest in a particular way (and that's going to bring
me around to the second thing that I want to talk about today: What is a palimpsest?),
So, if you understand what a palimpsest is then you will know why it is important when we talk about
corrections -- or, if "correction" is too loaded a term, just the progression of the text,
of the form of the text of the Quran over time -- and the reason it is so, is what a palimpsest is.
A palimpsest is a page of manuscript that was written once at the time of original
production, and then at some time after that the entire page was washed off or cleaned off,
and then it was rewritten again with new text. And palimpsests
do not only occur with Qurʾan manuscripts, but with other types of manuscripts -- there's one
palimpsest in the Cambridge University Library manuscript collection that has
a washed off text that has some quranic text, it has some biblical-related, biblical text, and
it's actually at a right angle to each other on the text. So, one was washed off and rewritten.
And so, these things happen because ... and the reason that they happen, usually on a parchment, is because
parchment is a valuable writing material. It takes a lot to kill the animal and prepare the hide to
write on. And so, sometimes they would be recycled in that way. The Sanaa Palimpsest is interesting
because it contains quranic text on the lower part, in other words, the part that has been erased, and
also has been erased and overwritten in the new, or washed off and then written on the top, part.
And it's also interesting because that lower part, with the aid of ultraviolet light and
other methods, can actually be recovered to a great extent, and therefore studied for what it contains.
The lower text, that is, the earlier text, has a variant ... well, among its features are the
varying orders of the surahs. So, they're not in the order that they are today.
And, it also contains other interesting textual variations from the from the modern text, or from
the from the current text, and so it does appear to represent an earlier text type. I'm not going to go
too much into this at this very moment, because we can have that conversation with Asma Hilali,
but I want to prepare you for the subject because we're going to have conversation
with at least one of the subject matter experts here next week, and hopefully
if Elisabeth Puin ever wants to come on, or if Alba Fedeli wants to come on (she's also done
work with palimpsests), or have Behnam Sadeghi, who is also -- I'm in a regular conversation with him, from time to time --
all these people are possibilities to have come on here, so we'll see ... there's no pressure
for anybody but it would be great to have this channel be a place where we can have this sort
of discussion over time. It certainly would be wonderful because I know
many of you are very interested in these things and certainly they are very important for
a clarity about what was the early transmission history of the Quran, how did the text --
what does the distillation (if we can ... let's see how we talked about this) the oral text, if
you will, has been distilled into these documents, into these physical objects. And so, these objects
tell us something about the transmission history of the text. So, that's it ... that's all I want to
talk to you about today. I want to finish up with a comment from an earlier video. The screen name is
presumably not the name of the person who left the comments the screen name is "hello hello hello,"
so maybe that is your name. If that's your name, "hello hello hello," then "helloI"
But the comment is "This is very interesting in an age where apologetics is purely about
backbiting each other, your channel brings a fresh of new era with pure education."
So, it's very encouraging to hear that, yeah, this channel is being received as a breath of
new air, or breath of fresh air, and educational, because that's what I'm hoping it to be.
So, thanks again for watching. Sorry for the little bit of a delay, but again I want to be sure that
what we put up here is quality rather than just focusing on putting out a bunch of videos. I don't
want to waste your time, but I hope that when you do come and watch these videos, you'll find
that this is quality content. Thanks so much; I appreciate you watching, and we'll talk to you again soon. Bye!