Page 116 - Tafsir of surat at tawba repentance

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An early manuscript on gazelle parchment exists in Dar al-Kutub as-
Sultaaneeyah in Egypt. It is written in Kufic script without dots or vowel
markings. It had been previously kept in the oldest mosque in Cairo, Masjid ‘Amr
Ibn al-‘Aas. It was brought there in 347 AH by a man from ‘Iraaq, who claimed it
was the mus-haf that ‘Uthmaan was reading when he was killed. This information
was reported by the historian al-Maqrizee, writing in 378 AH. There was
scepticism about the claim even at that time. There are bloodstains on some of the
pages, but many ancient Qur’aanic manuscripts had blood applied to them to
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support the claim that they were the mus-haf of ‘Uthmaan.
There is a manuscript in Tashkent that seems to be the best candidate for the
claim to be one of the copies com-missioned by ‘Uthmaan. It was purchased
during the late Middle Ages by a Muslim ruler in Central Asia, but eventually fell
into the hands of the Russians when they conquered the country. They took it to
St. Petersburg, but after the Bolshevik revolu-tion, in 1923, it was returned to
Samarqand. In the 1940s it was transferred to Tashkent, which is where it is
today. 90 Soviet authorities allowed Muslim scholars to photograph that manu-
script. Hyderabad House in Philadelphia published a copy of it, side by side with
the modern Arabic text with the added dots and vowel markings.

The same principles of analysis that were applied to Bible manuscripts by
Bible scholars, and which exposed its many flaws and changes, have been applied
to Qur’aanic manuscripts gathered from around the world. Ancient manu-scripts
from all periods of Islaamic history found in the Library of Congress in
Washington, the Chester Beatty Museum in Dublin, Ireland and at the London
Museum have been compared with those in museums in Tashkent, Turkey and
Egypt. The result of all such studies confirm that there has not been any change in
the text from its original writing. For example, the “Institute fur Koranforschung”
of the University of Munich, Germany, collected and collated over 42,000
complete or incomplete copies of the Qur’aan. After some fifty years of study,
they reported that in terms of differences between the various copies, there were
no variants, except occasional mistakes of copyists, which could easily be
ascertained. The institute was destroyed by American bombs during the Second
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World War.

89
Ibid., p. 114
90
Ibid., p. 117
91
Muhammad Rasullullah, p. 179.

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