Sana'a Manuscript

The Sana'a manuscript or Sana'a palimpsest, dubbed Ṣanʿā’ 1 or DAM 01-27.1, is one of the oldest copies of the Quran in existence. It was found in 1972 in the loft of the grand mosque of Sana'a, Yemen, along with many other old manuscripts. A palimpsest is a parchment whose original text has been scraped clean so that it can be reused. After some centuries, a faint trace of the underlying text can sometimes resurface due to metals in the ink. The lower text of the Sana'a palimpsest, which was subsequently overwritten with the standard Uthmanic Quran, is dated to the 7th Century CE and has many variations from that later standard. It is the only known surviving example of a Quran manuscript that is not of the Uthmanic text type. It is considered to be a physical exemplar of the kinds of relatively substantial variations reported of the readings and codices of Muhammad's companions before such variety was constrained under Uthman around 650 CE. See the article Textual History of the Quran for a discussion about how Muslim scholars explain the existence of such variants and the responses of critics.

Notable academic findings

In a 2010 paper based on two parchment "leaves" of the Sana'a palimpsest (i.e. two pages, each with a front and back "folio", or side), Behnam Sadeghi and Uwe Bergmann applied a methodological approach which suggested that the variants in their sample could plausibly be explained as dictation errors, and that the standard Uthmanic text was closer to the original.^[1] Revisiting the topic in a 2012 paper transcribing far more folios, Sadeghi identified numerous variants that were also reportedly recited by companions of Muhammad.^[2] Moreover, Dr Marijn van Putten has noted that in this much larger data set there are variants which Sadeghi's earlier methodology would best explain as being more authentic than we find in the Uthmanic Quran.^[3]

Éléonore Cellard, a noted expert on early Quranic manuscripts who studied under Francois Deroche, published in 2021 her detailed study of the physical nature of the manuscript and its folios, demonstrating that it was once a complete Quran codex, with a surah order having some similarites to that reported of the early companion Quran codices of Ubayy b. Ka'b and Ibn Mas'ud.^[4] Cellard's paper also includes work by Hythem Sidky identifying verse ranges visible in numerous additional folios (the 'Eastern Library' folios), which are not yet possible to transcribe in detail due to the quality of available photographs.

Asma Hilali's thesis that Sana'a 1 was just a practise book

Asma Hilali has argued that the lower text of the palimpsest might have actually been a student exercise book, in an attempt to explain the many differences to the standard Uthmanic text. However, leading Quranic manuscript expert Hythem Sidky refers to a paper by Nicolai Sinai for "criticism of her reading of the lower text and overall thesis"^[5] and to a paper by another Quranic manuscript expert, Éléonore Cellard, "for a codicological reconstruction of portions of the undertext demonstrating the document’s status as a codex and the product of professional scribes".^[4] For these reasons Hilali's thesis is now widely considered to be completely untenable.