Islam, friend or foe?

Emilio Platti IDEO, Professor Emeritus of the Catholic University of Leuven icon-calendar Tuesday January 24ᵗʰ, 2017 Following the discovery of extremely old manuscripts of the Qurʾān, and the Birmingham folios having been dated between 568 and 645 AD (56 before Hiǧra and 25 after) with Carbon 14 techniques, scholars largely refuse today the late dating of the earliest copies of the Qurʾān proposed for example by John Wansbrough in his book entitled Quranic studies (Oxford University Press, 1977). See also Patricia Crone and Michael Cook who suggested that there was no indication of the existence of the Qurʾān before the end of the 1st/7th century (Hagarism, Cambridge University Press, 1977). It now seems that a better dating should be closer to the middle of the 1st/7th century, or even earlier. The discovery in 1972 of very old Qurʾānic manuscripts in Ṣanʿāʾ elicited new studies, and the ultraviolet techniques that are now available revealed that one of the codices is actually a palimpsest, i.e. it contains an older text that has been washed away and replaced by a later one. A first edition of this older text was published by Behnam Sadeghi and Mohsen Goudarzi in Der Islam 87 (2010) under the title “Ṣanʿāʾ 1 and the origin of the Qurʾān” and an analysis of the manuscript was published between 2008 and 2014 by Elizabeth Puin under the title “Ein früher Koranpalimpsest aus Ṣanʿāʾ”. A new edition of the text is due to be published on February 28, 2017 by Asma Hilali at the Oxford University Press under the title The Sanaa palimpsest. Unfortunately, these two editions only contain the text of the 36 folios from the manuscript of Dār al-Maḫṭūṭāt (Ṣanʿāʾ) and not the 40 other folios of the same codex that were found recently in al-Maktaba al-Šarqiyya (also in Ṣanʿāʾ). Interestingly, this older version that has been washed away seems to be, until now, the only one among all the copies of the Qurʾān to differ from the ʿUṯmānic canonical version. After the ʿUṯmānic unification of the Qurʾānic text, variant versions have indeed been erased and replaced by the canonical text. The Ṣanʿāʾ palimpsest is a convincing proof that different versions from the time of the Pophet’s companions did actually exist, a fact that was common knowledge in the Islamic medieval tradition represented among others by Ibn Abī Dāwūd’s book Kitāb al-maṣāḥif.

Emilio Platti University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium icon-calendar Wednesday February 17ᵗʰ, 2016 at 5:00 p.m Emilio Platti, member of IDEO, presented the works of Christian Robin on the inscriptions that are found in the Arabian Peninsula and date back to the beginning of the 4th century. Through his research, Robin brings archeological evidence to answer a question posed by Islamic scholars: how could the Prophet’s auditors ever understand the very numerous Biblical allusions that the Quran contains? Indeed, the traditional vision tends to present the Arabs as polytheistic pagans without any Biblical culture. When the Ethiopian general Abraha seizes power in the south of the Arabian Peninsula between 525 and 530, he defeats the Ethiopian Christian vice-king who had been put to power by the Ethiopian king who came to revenge the massacre of the Christians of Najran in November523, and launches the conquest of the entire Arabian Peninsula, imposing a new form of Christianity. By doing so, Abraha repeats the conquest of the Himyarite Jewish kings at the beginning of the 4th century. This very reign of Abraha witnesses a change in the Arabic inscriptions in the Peninsula, from the Trinitarian formula (“In the name of Raḥmān, and of his son Christos and of the Holy spirit”) to formulas more compatible with the message of the Quran that will appear later, mentioning “the mercy of Raḥmān, of his Messiah and the Spirit of holiness”. This probably judaizing Christianism of Abraha could be the missing link between the Palestinian Judeo-Christianism of the first centuries and Islam, in a land that had been deeply influenced by Christianity and Judaism for more than three centuries when the Prophet Muḥammad started his mission in Mecca in 610.