#Sana a manuscripts movie#
#Sana a manuscripts full#

Verse 112 of the Quran contains the exhortation: “Say: He is God, one.” The word used for “one” is ‘ahad’, rather than the Arabic ‘wahid’ which would have been expected according to the rules of grammar.

The comparative textual passages in the Corpus Coranicum make those linkages clear. Instead, the Sana’a manuscript was born in a world filled with vibrant debates between Christian, Judaic and pre-Islamic monotheistic and pagan traditions, with which the Quran engaged. Muhammad’s parched Arabia, the work at the Corpus Coranicum shows, was no intellectual desert. Part of that history lies in Christian and Rabbinic traditions.” “The Quran did not arise in a vacuum,” says Michael Marx, research director at the Corpus Coranicum, “it has a history. Perhaps the largest digital repository of its kind, the Corpus Coranicum database examines ancient Islamic manuscripts beside the varying ways in which they are read, and examine their relationship with religious texts in Syriac, Hebrew and Greek: traditions the earliest audiences of the Quran would have considered their own. But in recovering the words of God, the scholars also hope to rediscover something more precious: the world in which those words were born and first gained meaning.

#Sana a manuscripts full#

Though Islamic tradition refers to variant readings of the Quran, these scholarly disputations have been erased from popular imagination by a rising tide of literalism. Historians and textual scholars will make the full text of the Sana’a manuscript available to the world for the first time, in a study to be published under the Corpus Coranicum. Each character has had to be retraced by hand, sometimes using ultraviolet imaging to render the washed-away lower text visible. Inside, scholars have been using state-of-the-art digital tools to reconstruct the Sana’a manuscript.

#Sana a manuscripts movie#

No movie scriptwriter could have imagined the incredible story that has since quietly unfolded at universities worldwide: a plot involving priceless, centuries-old manuscripts secreted away by scholars, the extraction of meaning from code-like texts, Nazis and global geopolitics.įive thousand kilometres from the Grand Mosque in Sana’a, the Corpus Coranicum, a project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Humanities and Sciences, is housed in a nondescript building in Potsdam - a city itself horribly bombed in April, 1945, by the Royal Air Force, in raids that claimed the lives of over 7,000 civilians.

Some years after it was first written, scholarly investigation showed that a scribe had scrubbed off the writing and replaced it with the text believers now revere. But there’s also this twist: Islam’s urtext wasn’t quite the same as the Quran we know today. There is a three-to-one chance that it is older than 646CE, which means it was likely written within 15 years after Muhammad’s death, conceivably by someone who had heard the divine revelation from his own lips. Radiocarbon dating shows the Sana’a manuscript was almost certainly prepared between 578CE and 668CE: the era of Muhammad bin Abdullah, the Prophet of Islam. Years would pass before it transpired that the parchment in the hidden room was the very earliest Quran to be discovered. The manuscripts were stuffed into sacks and forgotten. No one had any idea what they had just discovered.