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I wanted to link to this superb 2012 study out of Harvard and Stanford (I know these are Western institutions - ironically enough) that provides the following information that has become staple for lying bas-tards like Daniel Pipes and his best friend Robert Spencer. Many evangelical sites have picked up on this and tried to portray the Quran has having any sort of history equivalent to the New Testament (far from it!). This paper by Behnam Sadeghi and Mohsen Goudarzi. Sadeghi's first paper with Uwe Bergmann, out of Leiden Germany, linked to here in 2010 was landmark:
That paper discusses a companion codex parchment and the Uthmanic recension in great detail.
This 2012 paper
Was entitled Sana1 and the Origins of the Quran
page 31 begins a discussion called: The Media and Manuscripts
Unfortunately, even young educated Afghans like Mostafa do not take the time or the energy to utilize the skills they were supposed to have learned in school and training [ which entails scrutinizing sources ] and instead pass along erroneous work and stories like the above:
Instead they operate on confirmation bias and have already forged the opinion that anything to do with Islam must be ipso facto wrong and anything that might validate that view is to be processed and put out into the world as if it were gospel truth without any level of serious scrutiny.
That paper discusses a companion codex parchment and the Uthmanic recension in great detail.
This 2012 paper
Was entitled Sana1 and the Origins of the Quran
page 31 begins a discussion called: The Media and Manuscripts
The Media and Manuscripts
As much as we would like to disregard the media, it is difficult to do so. Academic publications increasingly rely on them, and professors as-sign newspaper articles for their classes. Moreover, it is instructive to take note of the rumors that circulate among modern academics and the journalistic articles that mirror and feed them. Stories, after all, spread better if they capture the worldviews, hopes, and fears of their host populations.In the late 1990s, a narrative swept a number of Western universities,and it can be epitomized by one word: suppression. One version was that Yemen was prone to concealing the precious newly-discovered manu-scripts in its possession, leading the Europeans who were restoring the parchments to keep their secrets under wraps for the time being. One journalist, Toby Lester, asserted as much based on interviews with G.Puin. He added that “detailed examination … is something the Yemeni authorities have seemed reluctant to allow.”
A more forward version of the motif had Yemen prevent the publication of manuscripts outright. In any case, the narrative implied that European academics had met the resistance and intolerance of people who are beholden to religious dogma and unaccustomed to rational inquiry.The media weaved the suppression motif within martyrologies and harrowing tales of victimization.
Reports touching the Ṣan‘ā’ manu-scripts mentioned the Rushdie affair and the persecution of Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd. The New York Times presented as fact hear say about a Palestinian scholar of early Islam, Suliman Bashear, being injured when his students threw him out of a second-story window. (Several people who were close to the late Bashear told us that the event never happened. For example, Bashear ’s wife, Dr. Lily Feidy, in an e-mail message dated August 14, 2011, wrote, “Please note that Suliman was never attacked or injured by his students; nor was he physically attacked by anybody else. I have been asked this question a million times”). The New York Times made much of a book of Christoph Luxenberg being turned down by a publisher. The Wall Street Journal related an account narrated by G. Puin about Yemen seizing the images of the Ṣan‘ā’ manuscripts that Bothmer had prepared. (In a telephone interview on August 26, 2011, Bothmer called the account “ri-diculous”and blamed the journalist). And the New York Times reported that Euro-American academia is experiencing a chill due to Muslim threats of violence.
The narrative of oppression resonates with the self-image of academ-ics as upholders of reason and with archetypical notions about the con-flict between rationality and traditional religion, a clash that is most commonly symbolized in modern culture by Galileo’s struggle with the Church. The suppression motif also seemed to resolve a conspicuous paradox: on the one hand, it was indicated that the Ṣan‘ā’ manuscripts refuted core religious doctrines; on the other hand, it was not explained how they did so, as nothing was revealed about the manuscripts beyond the finding that there are variants, a banal observation from the stand-point of traditional Muslim scholarship.
The mysterious information gap was explained by putting the responsibility at the door of Yemen and its presumed propensity for withholding purportedly embarrassing evidence.The suppression narrative is inaccurate. It is true that G. Puin did not share his photographs with scholars who asked for them, nor publish a great deal on them himself, but this was his personal choice (to which he was entitled), not the doing of Yemen. Furthermore, there was nothing to prevent other scholars from going to Yemen to study the folios and write about them. The manuscripts and microfilms remained available to visitors. In 2007, Sergio Noja Noseda and his erstwhile student Mounir Arbach freely prepared images of the DAM 01-27.1 folios as part of a project founded by Christian Robin. When we asked Robin whether Yemen tried to hinder such work, he answered in the negative and told us that they were granted greater access than would have been possible in some European libraries. Robin and his colleagues have the blessing of the Yemeni authorities to publish the images. We also asked Ursula Dreibholz, the conservator for the restoration project, whether theYemeni authorities hampered research. She said no, and described theYemeni authorities as supportive.
Moreover, other participants in the project in Yemen do not confirm G.Puin’s statement that Yemeni authorities “want to keep this thinglow-profile”or that “they don’t want it made public that there is work being done at all.” Ursula Dreibholz continued working on the pro-ject in Yemen for four more years after the end of Puin’s involvement.She spent more time on the project than anybody else, and for the last three years she was the only foreigner to work fulltime in the Dār al-Makhṭūṭāt. She told us that Yemeni authorities “were very grateful”forthe work done by the foreigners. They were “proud”of their treasures,and “they brought school children, university students, foreign delega-tions, religious dignitaries, and heads of state, like Franҫois Mitterrand, Gerhard Schröder, and Prince Klaus of the Netherlands, to see the col-lection.”
Although the Yemeni authorities’ openness proved a boon to scholarship, they were to be punished for it. The American media ampli-fied the erroneous words of G. Puin, purveying a narrative that belittled Yemen and misrepresented the work done there. The Arab press in turnexaggerated the American story. The outcome was a media discourse in Yemen borne of three stages of misrepresentation. This embarrassed theYemeni authorities responsible for the House of Manuscripts, and the Head of the Antiquities Department had to defend before Parliament the decision to bring in the foreigners.
As much as we would like to disregard the media, it is difficult to do so. Academic publications increasingly rely on them, and professors as-sign newspaper articles for their classes. Moreover, it is instructive to take note of the rumors that circulate among modern academics and the journalistic articles that mirror and feed them. Stories, after all, spread better if they capture the worldviews, hopes, and fears of their host populations.In the late 1990s, a narrative swept a number of Western universities,and it can be epitomized by one word: suppression. One version was that Yemen was prone to concealing the precious newly-discovered manu-scripts in its possession, leading the Europeans who were restoring the parchments to keep their secrets under wraps for the time being. One journalist, Toby Lester, asserted as much based on interviews with G.Puin. He added that “detailed examination … is something the Yemeni authorities have seemed reluctant to allow.”
A more forward version of the motif had Yemen prevent the publication of manuscripts outright. In any case, the narrative implied that European academics had met the resistance and intolerance of people who are beholden to religious dogma and unaccustomed to rational inquiry.The media weaved the suppression motif within martyrologies and harrowing tales of victimization.
Reports touching the Ṣan‘ā’ manu-scripts mentioned the Rushdie affair and the persecution of Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd. The New York Times presented as fact hear say about a Palestinian scholar of early Islam, Suliman Bashear, being injured when his students threw him out of a second-story window. (Several people who were close to the late Bashear told us that the event never happened. For example, Bashear ’s wife, Dr. Lily Feidy, in an e-mail message dated August 14, 2011, wrote, “Please note that Suliman was never attacked or injured by his students; nor was he physically attacked by anybody else. I have been asked this question a million times”). The New York Times made much of a book of Christoph Luxenberg being turned down by a publisher. The Wall Street Journal related an account narrated by G. Puin about Yemen seizing the images of the Ṣan‘ā’ manuscripts that Bothmer had prepared. (In a telephone interview on August 26, 2011, Bothmer called the account “ri-diculous”and blamed the journalist). And the New York Times reported that Euro-American academia is experiencing a chill due to Muslim threats of violence.
The narrative of oppression resonates with the self-image of academ-ics as upholders of reason and with archetypical notions about the con-flict between rationality and traditional religion, a clash that is most commonly symbolized in modern culture by Galileo’s struggle with the Church. The suppression motif also seemed to resolve a conspicuous paradox: on the one hand, it was indicated that the Ṣan‘ā’ manuscripts refuted core religious doctrines; on the other hand, it was not explained how they did so, as nothing was revealed about the manuscripts beyond the finding that there are variants, a banal observation from the stand-point of traditional Muslim scholarship.
The mysterious information gap was explained by putting the responsibility at the door of Yemen and its presumed propensity for withholding purportedly embarrassing evidence.The suppression narrative is inaccurate. It is true that G. Puin did not share his photographs with scholars who asked for them, nor publish a great deal on them himself, but this was his personal choice (to which he was entitled), not the doing of Yemen. Furthermore, there was nothing to prevent other scholars from going to Yemen to study the folios and write about them. The manuscripts and microfilms remained available to visitors. In 2007, Sergio Noja Noseda and his erstwhile student Mounir Arbach freely prepared images of the DAM 01-27.1 folios as part of a project founded by Christian Robin. When we asked Robin whether Yemen tried to hinder such work, he answered in the negative and told us that they were granted greater access than would have been possible in some European libraries. Robin and his colleagues have the blessing of the Yemeni authorities to publish the images. We also asked Ursula Dreibholz, the conservator for the restoration project, whether theYemeni authorities hampered research. She said no, and described theYemeni authorities as supportive.
Moreover, other participants in the project in Yemen do not confirm G.Puin’s statement that Yemeni authorities “want to keep this thinglow-profile”or that “they don’t want it made public that there is work being done at all.” Ursula Dreibholz continued working on the pro-ject in Yemen for four more years after the end of Puin’s involvement.She spent more time on the project than anybody else, and for the last three years she was the only foreigner to work fulltime in the Dār al-Makhṭūṭāt. She told us that Yemeni authorities “were very grateful”forthe work done by the foreigners. They were “proud”of their treasures,and “they brought school children, university students, foreign delega-tions, religious dignitaries, and heads of state, like Franҫois Mitterrand, Gerhard Schröder, and Prince Klaus of the Netherlands, to see the col-lection.”
Although the Yemeni authorities’ openness proved a boon to scholarship, they were to be punished for it. The American media ampli-fied the erroneous words of G. Puin, purveying a narrative that belittled Yemen and misrepresented the work done there. The Arab press in turnexaggerated the American story. The outcome was a media discourse in Yemen borne of three stages of misrepresentation. This embarrassed theYemeni authorities responsible for the House of Manuscripts, and the Head of the Antiquities Department had to defend before Parliament the decision to bring in the foreigners.
Instead they operate on confirmation bias and have already forged the opinion that anything to do with Islam must be ipso facto wrong and anything that might validate that view is to be processed and put out into the world as if it were gospel truth without any level of serious scrutiny.
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