What does it mean when several of the
earliest Quran manuscripts are corrected in the very same spot?
Well, welcome back to Variant Qurʾan, and this is a special day and a day that some of you have
been waiting for. I'm going to be showing to you a spot in multiple early Quran manuscripts at which
there has been a correction. Now, what we're looking at today is one of the things that I set out to
hopefully find when I began the process of casting my net wide and surveying many, many manuscripts
for the corrections, and that is the possible emergence of some patterns and repetition, in
multiple manuscripts, of similar corrections or corrections of a similar
passage or spot in the quranic text. And so, as you can imagine, these things emerge over time. And in
the early time of my doctoral dissertation I had noticed that there were at least four
different manuscripts that had corrections at this particular spot, at this particular verse.
And since then, I've actually come across a couple of others that have corrections there
as well. So, I don't want to belabor this ... we'll jump right in and take a look at these manuscripts.
BnF arab 328. This is a manuscript written in the hijazi style, that is one of the earliest script
styles that we find Qurans written in, and this manuscript lives at the Bibliothéque nationale
de France in Paris. I have reviewed it personally on two occasions, at least, and have noted
the correction at this particular spot. Now, this is verse 9:109, Tawba 109, and the verse reads (and I'm
reading here from the Majid Fakhri translation) "Is one who founds his edifice upon the fear and good
pleasure of Allah better, or one who founds his edifice upon the brink of a crumbling precipice
that will tumble down with him into the fire of Hell? Allah does not guide the unjust people."
And so, in the Arabic of this verse, the portion that is overwritten in this particular
manuscript is "wa riḍwanin khayrun am." So, the first thing we're going to do is just look at what has
been done in these various manuscripts, and then at the end I'm going to tell you what I think
has happened to this particular spot. So, what you see here is the words
"and good pleasure better or," so the way that Majid Fakhri translates this has
a little bit of a different word order than the way it appears in the Arabic. The way it
appears in the Arabic is literally "is the one who builds his edifice upon the fear from allah and
good pleasure (meaning 'his good pleasure') better,
or the one who builds his edifice upon the brink of a crumbling precipice?" Okay, so that's
the word order as it appears in the Arabic, and what has happened here is the words
have been written over an erasure. Now, some of those words -- part of that may have existed before,
but was possibly erased. And, in order to make way for the new -- what was then written afterward.
Now, we're going to talk about the possible reasons for this, and there are various reasons commonly
known scribal errors, or causes of scribal error, and we will consider those, as I always try to do
initially when I'm looking at any correction, and we're going to consider those possible reasons
to rule them out and make sure that they aren't the cause of these multiple corrections in these
several Qurʾan manuscripts. Okay, so that is BnF arabe 328. This is a probably late mid- to
late 7th century manuscript, not long after the time of Muhammad. And, here is the second
one BnF arabe 330. This also is written in a form of a Hijazi script. And, as you can see in
this manuscript -- although you can tell it's a different scribe, it's clearly a different
handwriting style, and this is one of the interesting things about the Hijazi
scripts -- and at some point I will do a video on the different script styles
to give you an introduction to (I should do that soon), to give you an introduction to the what
the script styles generally looked like. And, you can see how the evolution of the script styles
progressed over time but both of these, so far, that we've looked, at are forms of the Hijazi script
style. And, as I started to mention, the Hijazi script style displays most evidently the
individual personality and writing style of the scribes. So, you can see this is
clearly a different person. Just as different people have different handwritings, the script
itself wasn't quite so formalized at this stage in the process, so different people are clearly
recognizable when you have a change of scribe. Alright, so what you see happening here is the ...
I believe at the end of the first line of text is the erasure of something that has been
overwritten, and it is the "wāw" of the word "taqwa" or "fear." Then, you see -- on the next line
you do see some shadows of what was first written, which would be out into the margin. There are
a couple things going on here; I'll talk about those as we progress, but the overwritten text
is the final "ʾālif maqsura" of "taqwa" and the word "mina llah wa ridwan,"
and I believe part of the word "khayrun," "better than." Okay, so this has been over an erasure. It does
look like the work of the original scribe to me. Now this -- the writing style is similar,
maybe it's not quite as confident, but I'm not willing to say that it was not
the original scribe. I think this does look like it is the work of the original scribe,
and probably near the time of first production of this manuscript, Although we can't be for sure
on that. But the ink color and nib width, and all the other factors, point toward
something that happened closer to the time of original production.
So, if we look underneath here, what we can see is that there is a shadow, actually that first
"ʾālif maqsura" and the word "min," it seems to be kind of faded. And so, if you were looking at it
initially (as does the "wāw" that ends the final line), it looks a little bit faded, as well, so we want to
think about what is going on there, but underneath the word "Allah" here, there is a shadow of the final
"ʾālif maqsura" of "taqwa," so you can actually see quite clearly what has happened here:
The final "ʾālif maqsura" of the word "taqwa" was first written right at the beginning of this
line underneath the word where the word "Allah" is written at this moment. And, you can see that
the word "Allah" was initially written after that underneath where the word "riḍwan" is written. So,
clearly this text was first written without the word "riḍwan," and was read "is one who founds his
edifice upon the fear of Allah better, or one who founds his edifice upon the brink of a crumbling
precipice?" And, there's no question in my mind that that's what was first written in this manuscript .
All right, so the word "riḍwan" was left out, and then it was later erased and extended out into the
margin to make room for that word. All right, let's take a look at our third example here. This is
from E20, and this is in the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in Saint Petersburg, Russia. This verse
has, interestingly, a correction at the very same spot. It is a little bit bunched. I am not sure
that this is the original scribe who made this correction, and you can see that the text is
angled to the right ... particularly the upward extenders of the text are angled to the right.
And, a couple things that have happened here, but it does look like it's a different ink
and possibly a different nib, and I think a different scribe, who wrote this corrected
portion. And, also, you can see it's a little bit bunched-in, although not terribly so. So,
once again, we have the words covering the word -- "riḍwan" is written over an erasure here,
and the word "mina llah." Okay, and we cannot see the word "taqwa" in this case because the
part of that page has been lost but we -- I assume that the word "taqwa" existed there first.
Alright, so this correction has been made over an erasure, and after the fact. You can see one
other thing, but it's not the focus of my attention here, is that the insertion of a red "ʾālif" here
that exists as a dagger "ʾālif" in the quranic text today. It's a little "ʾālif," it's written above the
text, above the line, in order to show that this is to be pronounced as a long "ʾālif," even though
the long "ʾālif" is not explicitly written in the word. And so, at some point in the development of
the way that Quran manuscripts were written "alifs" were inserted, and sometimes they're written in red
like this. And so, that would be corresponding to what we would see as a "dagger ʾālif" today. That
is not the focus here; I just want to show you that there is a correction over this spot including the
word "riḍwan," "good pleasure." Here's the third one. This is Marcel 9. It is at the National Library
of Russia, also an early manuscript -- this probably is, well, probably an early 8th century manuscript.
It is a horizontal-format manuscript, versus the Hijazi manuscripts, which are almost always in a
vertical format. And so, the page dimensions changed over time. The style for producing
pages changed, and so the initial pages were a vertical format, much like the format of how most
books are produced today, with the page being taller than it is wide, and then at some point, in
time -- maybe the early 8th century -- they went to a horizontal, predominantly a horizontal, format,
meaning they're wider than they are tall. And that is the case with this one, even though I
don't show you the entire manuscript page here. Alright, so once again we see the word "riḍwan" being
a part of this erasure overwritten. And so, the word "Allah" in this case is not the word "riḍwan"
and in this case "man" is also part of it, as you can tell by the upward extending letter which was
erased under the under the "min" of that and also there's an "ʾālif," the initial "ʾālif" of "asasa" is
written after the fact in this case too, so in each of these instances, the exact portion has not been
erased, but I think the same thing has probably been happening and that is the insertion
of the word "riḍwan," where it was initially omitted. You can see that the text is also
a little bit bunched here, as well, and so I think that's -- I think that's probably what happened
here. Alright, so those are four examples of correction at the same spot, in the same verse,
9:109. Alright, so here is just a simple side by side of the four manuscripts that we
just looked at, to help you visualize a little bit more clearly how they line up with one
another, what corresponds between the four. And, as you can see, the exact area of correction is not
identical, but they do have overlap. So, the red boxes are drawn around the corrected portions.
The second one down, of course, has one letter corrected on the -- possibly corrected -- on the
previous line. The third one down may have a correction that extends off to the right
side, but that part of the page has been lost. But what is corrected on the existing manuscripts,
on these lines, is shown by the red squares. And, here you can see the common portion between all
four of the manuscripts, and it is the letters, the word "wa-riḍwanin khayr" in each case.
Now, the other question to ask is what would be the cause, or "Is this merely a
scribal error in all four of these cases?" And, there are some known causes of scribal error
in early manuscripts, and so we're going to take a look at those at this moment.
(Two) of the most common types of mistake are called "dittography" or "haplography." Dittography
is the writing of something twice, and haplography is the omission of something, and
moving on to the next -- to a later portion in the text -- when copying a text, and just continuing from
there, so it causes an omission of something that ought to have been there. And, both dittography
and haplography are caused by something called "parablepsis." Now, parablepsis is not
a scribal error in itself. It is something that happens. And, parablepsis means a skip of the eye.
So, the eye skips over to another portion in the text when somebody is copying -- you're copying, you're
writing down, and then you look away to fill the ink, or some other thing, and then you look back
at the text that you're copying from, and your eye falls upon the place in the text where you
think you are supposed to be moving on from. Now, what would cause your eye to fall upon a place
in the text that is different from the one that you are moving on from, that you are actually at?
And, the answer to that is something that is the same as what you just wrote. And so, the common
cause for perablepis is the existence in the text that you're copying from of two instances of the
same word or sequence of words in close proximity to each other. So, let's say the word was "mina llah"
"from Allah." In this case, if that sequence of words, if "allah" or "mina llah" occurred somewhere
else in close proximity, maybe I wrote the words "mina llah," I went to refill my ink, I looked back,
and I saw the instance of "mina llah," but it wasn't the right one. It was maybe the one earlier, or the
one later, and I continued writing, that would be a cause of me writing the wrong thing after that,
if there was something different after those two instances of "mina llah." So,
that having been said, the first question, then, to ask on this page is, "Did the word 'allah' occur
elsewhere on this page, or "mina llah," or "taqwa mina llah," in close proximity? And, there is another instance
of "allah" later in this same verse, but it's preceded by "wāw," and so because, of this, I don't
think it's likely the scribe would have confused this instance of "allah" with that instance of "allah."
And, furthermore, that second instance of "allah" is not followed by the word "riḍwan," so that's a further
reason to be quite certain that this is not an instance of parablepsis causing either
dittography or haplography. Okay, how about the words "mina llah?" Well, the word "mina llah" does
not exist anywhere else in close proximity. The next instance is, well it is two verses later, in
Q 9:11. And so, if we look over at that the word, "mina llah" is likewise not followed by the word
"riḍwan." So -- or "wa-riḍwan." So, once again, we don't have anything that could account for what
is happening here. And then, finally, how about the words "taqwa min-allah," "fear of Allah"? Does that occur
anywhere else in proximity? And no, it does not exist anywhere else in proximity. In fact, it does
not exist anywhere else in the Quran at all. And so, I think we've completely ruled out the possibility
of dittography or haplography due to parablepsis in this case. Now, one other thing that I would look
at ordinarily, if I wanted to be very thorough and look and rule out the possibility -- particularly if
there was a correction in a spot that looked like there was something kind of formulaic, and
there are many -- the Quran is very very repetitive and has many, sort of, stock phrases that get repeated
again and again -- is, I would consider whether there is the possibility that the scribe had in
mind, came upon one of those, common phrases in the Qurʾan, and wrote it the way that it is elsewhere
commonly written in the Quran even though at the particular spot in question it was not
supposed to be written that way. And so, in order to do that, there are different ways that you
would look at that, but the way that I ordinarily would look at something like that is to look at
a concordance. And I would look up one of the words in it, in this case maybe the word "khayr," look it
up and look through all the instances that exist in the Quran to see where and how many
places that word exists in a particular common phrase, and that could help me rule out
whether it is likely, or possibly, a cause, in a particular instance, of correction. In this case,
I don't think that applies, because I don't see this phrase as being something that is formulaic,
especially because, as I mentioned, the words "taqwa mina llah" do not occur elsewhere in the Qurʾan. So,
that is it. But, I just wanted to mention it to --
part of what I'm doing here is teaching teaching you, sort of, enabling you, to understand
the craft that I've learned all these, over this time, and how to analyze and look at a text. Okay, so
we've reviewed the four manuscripts that have the overlapping corrections at this particular verse.
As I have mentioned previously, there are a total of, well, six manuscripts that I've come across, so
far, that have corrections at this verse, 9:109. The other ones, however, don't have corrections that
overlap the four that I just showed you. In this case, I'm just going to show you one additional
one. This is the manuscript in Berlin, and it does have corrections of the two instances of
"bunyānahu," and it looks like it was probably the insertion of the long "ʾālif" in the middle, there.
And, there is additionally, just after the word "shafā," an erasure of some letter, and leaving a
gap, so you can see that I've placed boxes around those three if you look up. However, at the spot
that we have just found corrected in the other manuscripts, that appears to have been written
originally in this manuscript. It's a little bit hard to tell on this manuscript, because it has
been re-inked, and that's what you see with the darker lines over the top there, but it is still
possible to see what parts of it were original, for the most part, and it doesn't look like there
was anything unusual going on up there. The only other thing I will mention today is that
obviously you're trying to look at other manuscripts to compare that have this verse
represented in them and haven't reviewed all of them for this video, but I have looked at
the Topkapı -- In my opinion, and that of the others who have edited it, a later manuscript. So, that is
that! Thanks so much for watching this video today, and I hope it's interesting. There's much
more, obviously, that could be said. But, that is enough for now. We'll talk to you again soon, and
thanks for liking and subscribing, and leaving comments, and we will continue the discussion. Thank you!