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Qurans of the Umayyads – A First Overview

By François Déroche

QURANS OF THE UMAYYADS

Book preface

The present book is the result of the invitation extended to me by Prof. Léon Buskens to give a series of four conferences at LUCIS (Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society) while I was Visiting Scaliger Professor in Leiden in April 2010.

 I want to thank him for this wonderful opportunity to make a first assessment of our knowledge about the history of the muṣḥaf in Umayyad times.

 I also express my gratitude to Prof. Jan Just Witkam who was at the origin of my very pleasant and fruitful stay in Leiden. I extend my thanks to all those who allowed me over the years to study the manuscripts kept in the collections over which they presided:

Muhammad al-Khumari (Sanaa), Nazan Ölçer (Istanbul), Murad Rammah (Kairouan), Olga Vasilyeva (Saint Petersburg) and Elaine Wright (Dublin) as well as my colleagues in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Marie-Geneviève-Guesdon and Annie Vernay-Nouri. The final version of the text was revised by Hannah Mason, thanks to the support of LUCIS and Brill: I am very grateful for her help.

Much of the information on which this book is based was collected in Istanbul where I could spend a few years studying the collection kept in the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum, first as a member of the French research institute (IFEA), then with a scholarship of the Max van Berchem Foundation in Geneva: I am deeply indebted to both institutions for their support. The publication of most of the illustrations was made possible thanks to the French-German project Coranica.

The following essay, which retains its original division into four talks, focuses on a selection of material that seemed especially relevant to a presentation of the main trends I suggest identifying during the Umayyad period.

The variable state of the evidence, from almost complete manuscripts to isolated fragments, from copies that have been thoroughly investigated to others that are either unpublished or only known through a photograph, makes the comparative approach difficult.

I hope that, in spite of its many shortcomings, this book will contribute to our understanding of Islamic culture in Umayyad times and to the inclusion of this still little-known material in our representations of this period.

Introduction

The early copies of the Qurʾan emerged as a possible object for scientific inves-tigation towards the middle of the nineteenth century. By the end of the eigh-teenth century, a Danish scholar, Johann Christian Georg Adler had already examined a few Qurʾanic manuscripts kept in the Royal Library in Copenhagen but concluded that there was little to be gained from their study.1

Things had apparently changed substantially when the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres organised in 1858 a scholarly competition with the follow-ing subject matter: “faire l’histoire critique du texte du Coran”.2 The advice offered to the prospective candidates hinted at the early copies as a possible source of evidence.

The acquisition in 1833 by the then Royal Library in Paris of the early Qurʾanic fragments collected by Jean-Louis Asselin de Cherville from the ʿAmr mosque in Fustat explains the suggestion of the committee of the Academy who formulated the subject matter.

Its members, Ernest Renan, Joseph Reinaud, Armand-Pierre Caussin de Perceval and Jules Mohl, may also have been aware of the leaves, which were in the possession of Jean-Joseph Mar-cel, a member of the French expedition to Egypt who brought back with him a handsome sample of fragments taken from the same source.3

Three essays were sent to the Academy. One dealt handsomely with the peculiarities of the early Qurʾanic manuscripts. Its author, Michele Amari, had actually been work-ing on the Parisian collection.4

However, its contribution was eclipsed by that of Theodor Nöldeke, which was translated into German and became the standard work on the Qurʾan: the Geschichte des Qorâns [History of the Qurʾan].5

Nöldeke had been able to look at early fragments, in Berlin and Gotha, but they were later than those in Paris and their peculiarities were minor in comparison with the standard text of the Qurʾan. He therefore came to the conclusion already reached a century earlier by Adler.

In the second edition of the Geschichte des Qorâns, this view was qualified by Gotthelf Bergsträsser and Otto Pretzl who used the evidence gained from the earliest copies of the Qurʾan in their presentation of the later history of the text.6

 They actually started collecting photographs, which were long thought to have disappeared and are now part of the Corpus coranicum project led by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften.7

This effort, launched in the 1930s, did actually only bring limited results and the research in this field came to an almost complete halt for half a century. The debate started at the end of the 1970s by John Wansbrough’s iconoclast views about the date at which the Qurʾan was compiled as a text, brought about a keener interest for any kind of evidence of the Qurʾanic text existence before the third (ah)/ninth (ad) century.8

What kind of argument supports earlier dates for manuscripts in general and Qurʾanic copies in particular?

 In the Islamic tradition, the question was to some extent answered by the various copies, which were related to the third caliph, ʿUthmān. In addition to those which are known through sources to have been preserved in various places in pre-modern times and have sometimes drawn the scholarly interest they deserve,9 a few manuscripts are today said to be the caliph’s own copy.10 The argument can be extended to other copies attributed to other prominent figures of the same period, like ʿAli b. Abī Ṭālib or his son, Ḥusayn.

 In some cases, the attribution relies on a colophon, but in other cases, we are just dealing with a word-of-mouth attribution—as with the copy in Tashkent for instance.

One should add that it is not always clear whether these copies are a manuscript in the hand of the caliph—the copy ʿUthmān is said to have been reading when he was killed—or one of the maṣāḥif al-amṣār, in other words, the copies he sent to the main cities of his empire.

Salah al-din al-Munajjid devoted a chapter of his Dirāsāt to the question and came to the conclusion that, in spite of their age, they were not linked to ʿUthmān or any of the persons mentioned.11

More recently, Tayyar Altıkulaç published a facsimile of three such copies, kept one in the Topkapı Sarayı Library,12 the second one in the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum13—also in Istanbul—and the third one in Cairo.14

Using the information found in the specialized treatises devoted to the rasm ʿuthmāni, he also concluded that the three copies could not be those of ʿUthmān, even if the latter’s name appeared in the colophon of the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum copy—which is actually a gross forgery.

 As far as ʿUthmān’s own copy is concerned, the question was actually answered at an early date by Mālik b. Anas who, when asked about it, answered flatly that it had disappeared.15

Do we have extant copies contemporary with the reign of the caliph?

This question is difficult to answer. The doubt which has been cast on the date of the Qurʾan, for instance by John Wansbrough, may explain the caution with which some scholars viewed the possibility that manuscripts or fragments of the Qurʾan of an early date might have survived.

However, traditional Arabic sources insist on the fact that the Qurʾan was transcribed before the middle of the first century of Islam. The accounts about the writing down of the Qurʾan