Following repeated appeals by the people of Turkestan, the Qur’an was returned to Central Asia in 1924, where it has since remained. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Lenin, in an act of goodwill to the Muslims of Russia, reportedly gave the Qur’an to the people of Ufa, in modern Bashkortostan. Petersburg in 1868 after the Russian conquest of Central Asia and housed in the Imperial Library there (now the Russian National Library), at which time a number of pages were separated from the rest, including this one. The story of how it arrived there is not entirely clear, but most likely it was carried along the Silk Road from the Near East or North Africa via Merv, Bukhara, and Samarqand. The largest portion of the manuscript to which this folio belongs is presently kept in a madrasa library attached to the Tellya-Shaikh Mosque in an area of old Tashkent. One scholar has drawn parallels between the rows of arches in the surviving illuminated folio in Paris and those in a folio of the Sana‘a Qur’an, contending that these images resemble the shimmering mosaics of the Dome of the Rock and the Great Mosque of Damascus and were, in all likelihood, illuminated and executed by outstanding artisans trained in Byzantine (or Syriac) scriptoria. Based on orthographic studies and carbon dating, a number of scholars have dated this manuscript of the Qur’an to the end of the eighth and the beginning of the ninth century. Although its origin remains uncertain, we do know that hijazi was still in use in Cairo, Damascus, or Sana‘a during the late eighth or early ninth century. In fact, the verticality and the slight slant of the shafts of the letters and their position on the baseline demonstrate possible traces of the hijazi script (a script used before the development of kufic). The script used here is an early version of kufic. Only two illuminated folios from this manuscript survive (one in Paris, the other in Gotha) the remainder of the folios, like this one, are devoid of both illumination and diacritical marks. The text, which is from Sura 21 (al-Anbiya,"The Prophets"), verses 103–111, contains twelve lines in kufic script. Often referred to as the ‘Uthman or Tashkent Qur’an, this monumental manuscript is possibly the largest extant Qur’an on parchment. Based on her own decade-long study of the Sana‘a Palimpsest, she presents a new hypothesis regarding the context of transmission for the texts in both layers of the manuscript.Īt the roundtable Approaching Religious Texts in Early Islam the participating scholars critically acclaimed Dr Hilali's work on the Sana'a Palimpsest, and shared views on how early Qur'anic manuscripts, such as the Sana'a Palimpsest, help to further the academic research on the early periods of Islam.Monumental Qur'an Folio This oversize folio comes from one of the oldest Qur’an manuscripts in existence. ![]() The author, Dr Asma Hilali, provides a comprehensive introduction to the Sana‘a Palimpsest, with systematic reference to previous studies and partial editions of the same manuscript. In 2017, IIS published The Sana‘a Palimpsest: The Transmission of the Qur’an in the first centuries AH presenting a new annotated edition of the two layers of the Sana‘a Palimpsest (Manuscript 0127-1 from Dar al-Makhtutat, Sana‘a). The two layers were photographically separated by a French–Italian scientific mission in 2007 enabling a study showing that both the Qur’anic texts are fragmentary and present aspects of work in progress, with incomplete decorative elements in the upper text and in the lower text an early reading instruction being rendered visible. The lower text dates back to the 7th century CE, and was subsequently erased for a second text of the Qur’an to be written on it around the 8th century CE. The manuscript has 38 leaves on which two superimposed Qur’anic texts are written. The manuscript was discovered in Yemen, during the 1972 restoration of the Great Mosque of Sana'a. ![]() This short video introduces one of the oldest manuscripts of the Qur’an, the Sana‘a Palimpsest, dating back to the 1st-2nd century AH / 7th century CE.
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