Manuscripts of the Quran Daniel A. Brubaker The existence and study of Bible manuscripts is by now widely known. In recent years, interest in Quran manuscripts has begun to grow. The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament proliferated in manuscript over many centuries with various scribal issues that have by now been well-studied, but neither set of writings was ever apparently systematically and comprehensively revised, with variants destroyed. In contrast, the physical Quran weathered at least two major campaigns of suppression in its first century. These campaigns, if the earliest narrative accounts of them are substantially correct, destroyed evidence that would have been valuable to scholars today. They proceeded under the pretext of standardization, in the first case at the direction of the third caliph, ‘Uthmān, within twenty years of the reported death of Muhammad. For reasons that require more elaboration than possible in this short article, it is evident to scholars that the central stated motivations for the suppression – namely variations in the manuscripts relating to dialect – could hardly have been the actual motivating factors since quranic materials written from this early stage did not supply the short vowels that would have indicated dialect variations. If these campaigns did happen, the removal of dialect variants is most likely a façade for a larger and more problematic motivating cause or causes. These circumstances notwithstanding, there is today no shortage of extant manuscripts of the Quran, including some appearing to predate even ‘Uthmān’s suppression. In particular, many surviving Quran manuscripts date back to the early centuries of its history, and some of them have been very well preserved. Their endurance in large numbers owes partly to the fact that by the seventh century AD, parchment, which is quite durable, had generally supplanted papyrus as the most commonly used writing material. Radiocarbon dating of one Quran fragment has recently returned a date range that includes or even precedes the reported lifetime of Muhammad. This does not necessarily mean that this manuscript predates Muhammad, but it does open the possibility. Nevertheless, most believe that several of these manuscripts, including the palimpsests studied by quranic scholars Elisabeth Puin, Alba Fedeli, and Asma Hilali, for example, are reasonably attributed to the latter part of the seventh century, in the decades following Muhammad’s reported death. Quran manuscripts are important to historians and theologians since they stand as witnesses from the time of their production and have the potential to answer questions that the earliest narrative accounts, which were written more than a century after the events they describe, cannot. Today early Quran fragments exist in both public and private collections as well as in some notable institutions around the world. Important, early, near-complete Qurans are held in Cairo, Istanbul, Tashkent, and Sana‘ā. Further important collections of early manuscript fragments exist in the National Library of France in Paris, the British Library in London, the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg, the Oriental Institute in St. Petersburg, the Dar alMakhtutāt in Sana‘ā, the private Nasser D. Khalili Collection, the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, the Dar Museum and Sabah Collection in Kuwait, the Beit al-Quran in Manama, the Tareq Rajab Museum in Kuwait, the Cambridge University Library, the Oxford Bodleian Library, the Topkapi Palace Library, the Biruni Institute in Tashkent, and the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham. This is a partial list but highlights many of the important collections. Access to Quran manuscripts in facsimile is increasing as many institutions, sometimes aided by government funding, are digitizing their collections. Online technology has recently made possible the digital reunion of fragments that belonged originally to the same codex despite being now physically separated between different institutions or collections. There remains much work to be done in the study of early Quran manuscripts, but the increasing availability of, accessibility of, interest in, and openness to their study will permit this field of study to grow and flourish in the coming years. Key questions surround the nature of the transmission and development of the physical representation of the Quran text, the relationship of the written word to its oral transmission, the development of the pluralities of readings (both canonical and noncanonical), and the ordinary study of variants and corrections for what they may tell us about the Quran as a tangible object situated in history. The Quran Gateway website, qurangateway.org, developed by myself and Andy Bannister, features research on physical corrections that exist in early Quran manuscripts, including detailed descriptions and many photographs.