Thread by @PhDniX

I'm about to start watching this.

As some of you may know, I don't have a particularly high opinion of Arabic101, but now he's wading into the manuscript fray...

Will be live-tweeting facepalms as I go through it.

0:14 "what you see is 100% identical today to any Muṣḥaf".

Minor gripe. It's identical to the Madani Muṣḥaf, but not really to the Kufan, Basran or Damascene. But still 99.9% so this is really nitpicky.

0:43 "Re-phrased Ayat/Removed words/Added words" is of course anachronistic. It implies that the text we have today is more original than the Sanaa Palimpsest. Not much to suggest that.

2:15 "Some where dated 10-15 years after the passing of the Prophet (pbuh)"
Er? None of these fragments were dated. Certainly not to that time.
After radio carbondating the Palimpsest comes close to that, but it's still a range.

2:20. That's... not the Sanaa Palimpsest. That's The Tübingen Manuscript. But not from Sanaa...
2:21 None of those are the Sanaa Palimpsest either. I see the Codex Parisino-Petropolitanus. I think Qāf 47, maybe DAM 01-29.1 (which would be the only Sanaani one)

2:24 Hey that's an actual photo of a folio of the Sanaa Palimpest! Happy that this one has the most screentime.

Calling it the "C-1" manuscript is not correct though.

Sadeghi & Goudarzi call it Codex Ṣanʿāʾ 1. It consists for a large part of DAM 01-27.1

C-1 is the term used to refer to the *text type* reflected in the lower text of the Codex Ṣanʿāʾ 1 (also colloquially called the Sanaa Palimpsest).

This is actually an important distinction...

2:40 "It became very famous because of how much it was talked about". lol.

2:44 "This one was written on a palimpsest"
??? What does that even mean.
2:49 "Which is a type of material that can be used several times"
HAHAHAHHAA. No. The Sanaa Palimpsest is written on Parchment just like every other Muṣḥaf from the 7th, 8th and 9th century...

What makes it a Palimpsest is not the *material*. It's a Palimpsest because the parchment was reused. An original text was written. It was erased. A new one was written over it.

Writing in a paper notebook with pencil and erasing and rewriting would also count as a palimpsest.

3:04 "by X-raying the parchments"
1. Oh so now it's parchment again! (this is correct)
2. X-raying? The Stanford folio has indeed been subjected to X-Ray fluorescence imaging. But most folios have been studied and read with plain old ultraviole photography.

3:20 "This news was celebrated by many attacker s of Islam"
- Eh? The chronology is completely confused here.
"Research papers started appearing all with the big claim the Quran has been changed"
- This is not an honest nor correct representation of the facts.

3:40 "So many Muslims got curious and decided to take a look, *which they musn't*"
Mufti Arabic101 has spoken.

4:00 "These are all just claims and usual lies"
Literally pointing arrows at a paper which he clearly got a lot of data from, written by Behnam Sadeghi and Mohsen Goudarzi. Not exactly names one typically associates with enemies of Islam. Character assassination of my colleagues.

4:13 "Their conclusions are simply outright lies"
A bold claim to make for someone who clearly does not seem to understand the contents or conclusions of the paper he's talking about...

4:40 "The Quran is an Audio Book"
This is really an insult to the thousands of extremely meticulous and very successful copies of the standard text of the Quran. The scribes went to EXTREME trouble to accurately copy the text *from a written copy*. No audio involved.

4:55 "The Quran was passed down orally from generation to generation"
This is kind of ancillary to the Sanaa Palimpsest discussion but... this is nonsense. The Quran is not transmitted (purely) orally. Not today, not in the past 10 centuries, and probably never was...

5:20 "The Quran has the highest level of authentication"
Sure this is true. But these *named* people through which the Quran got to us, actually reported a different text from the standard text today. Some of those variants actually show up in the Ṣanʿāʾ Palimpsest...

It's dishonest to suggest that the Islamic tradition claims that the text was always 100% identical to the Uthmanic text. The tradition admits that companions had different readings that were irreconcilable with the text, and those companions are *in* said transmission.

Gonna leave the rest of this argument aside. It's typical modernist Al-Azami-style gaslighting of 1000+ years of Islamic scholarship.
6:00 There's the T-word! Let's just ignore Tawātur wasn't mentioned for the first 5 centuries of Islam or that Ibn al-Ǧazarī didn't believe in it!

6:10 "Who do these parchments belong to?"
A question Arabic101 asks of the Ṣanʿāʾ palimpsest, very likely our *very earliest* text whose text-type has been plausibly argued to belong to a companion.
But of course doesn't ask that of early manuscripts that *are* Uthmanic...

6:22 "learner?" "child?"
I can see where this is going... I will anticipate the argument:
Nobody slaughters a herd of sheep to "practice". Parchment is not the type of material where you mess around on.

Even today there's a living tradition of practicing writng the Quran...

6:30 But even if it comes from a known source, we will reject Quran anyway! Can't have those pesky companion readings get in the way of orthodoxy!

6:45 "It's just a piece of history, and has no religious obligation"
The first sensible thing he's said so far! This is, of course, true.
Which makes it all the more galling to make out researchers who research this text as "liars" and "enemies of Islam".

6:56 Time for the Logic part of the argument. Can't wait to be blown away by his impeccable logic!!!1

"Why are they leaving 925 texts out"
Look! Arabic101 has reinvented the Biblical "Majority Text" argument! Needless to say no serious biblical scholar defends the majority text.

The Logic is actually simple: If all 925 witnesses descend from one original text, they should not be counted as 925 individual witnesses, they should be counted as a single witness of the text. They are *written* copies from an Archetype.

Thinks of it this way: if you would find a handwritten copy of Harry Potter written by the hand of the great transphobe herself, and the wording in there is different from the millions upon millions of copies made and printed. Should we take the "majority text" as more original?

Anyway, no need to dwell in the brilliant *logic* of a text critical argument of which Arabic101 is squarely on the losing end.

If you really want to go into this, dive into the now centuries old biblical debate I suppose...

7:25 It's a misrepresentation to suggest anyone is saying that C-1 is the original text. We must (and have!) text critically compare the Uthmanci text type (UT) with the C-1 text type with the Ibn Masʿūd text type (IM) and the ʾUbayy text type (U) etc.

Then you critically evaluate the variants and decide which of them is more original.
There is absolutely *zero* reason to think that what becomes the most popular, by definition is the more original.
7:28 "Is this logical? No, but it's a misrepresentation of what anyone says.

7:45 "one has some mistakes in it"
Terrible analogy. We would first have to establish the variants found in it *are* mistakes.

Arabic101 starts with his conclusion and then starts working backwards. That's not *LOGIC*.

7:50 "How does this make sense?"
Indeed...

8:13: "But is has some corrections in it"

This is a gross misrepresentation of the Sanaa Palimpsest.

There are plenty of manuscripts where some mistakes are made by copyists, and then corrected (sometimes even by the same scribe). That's not what is happening here.

Not some words have been corrected. The *full* (non-canonical) manuscript was erased and the rewritten.

Yes, it probably was rewritten because it didn't agree with the standard text. The standard text of ʿUṯmān was vigorously enforced. This confirms what the tradition tells us

8:36 Again Arabic101 thinks Palimpsest is a special type of material. Which will not stop being funny.

"You can compare it to a chalk board".
🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

If you're going to talk about the Ṣanʿāʾ Palimpsest you should probably understand what that is, hahaha.

9:10 O god, he's just going to continue isn't he? Arabic101 seems convinced that the Sanaa Palimpsest was written on a different type of material than all other Muṣḥafs and derives a stupid argument from it with *LOGIC*.

It's written on the same material as all other Musḥafs.

"So it's quite logical to conclude that the purpose of this manuscript is not preserving the text"

Yes much logical. Such brilliant!

Okay, I'm finally past the half way point. This cannot get any worse can it?

9:30 "A palimpsest was a popular choice for learners".
Our dear youtuber is still confused about what a Palimpsest is, and thinks it's a kind of chalkboard made of parchment. lol.

This misunderstanding ruins his "third" *LOGICAL* argument.

9:50 Now he's comparing a third century Kufi manuscript with the 1st century Sanaa Palimpsest and saying "it's not as neatly written".

Absurd comparison which doesn't prove his point. 1st century manuscripts are very similar (if not *messier*) than Codex Ṣanʿāʾ 1...

10:17 The transition from al-ʾanfāl to al-tawbah is indeed very messy and it's not so clear what is going on.
But It's not *at all* a given that it says لا تقل بسم الله.

What is the previous surah? الانفال. Which has the same rasm as لا تقل in early script.

It's actually quite likely that it read:
هده حٮمه سوره ا
لاٮڡل ٮسم الله
The section is extremely complicated and this short comment doesn't do justice what is going on here.

As a result the argument is also not the slam dunk he thinks it is.

11:00 Nothing about the presence of corrections say *anything* about the originality of the text type. It just means the copyist was sloppy. It obviously fails to explain why there are variants in the text that cannot be explained as "mistakes", of which there are many.

11:29 "Where did they get this?"

While sure, you probably shouldn't take your information about the Sanaa Palimpsest from Jay Smith and Al Fadi's slides... we do know where readings of the Ṣanʿāʾ Palimspest come from. Arabic101 even gives one of the sources in his doobleedoo.

Sadeghi & Goudarzi's edition of the text is still sublime, and done *extremely* meticulously. Taking extreme care to mark what they can and can't read and what they are unsure of. I've checked their work plenty of times, and their reconstructions have always been convincing.

But you know, you don't actually need to take their word for it. Hi resolution photos of both the standard AND UV photos can be downloaded on the Islamic Awareness website and you can check for yourself.

islamic-awareness.org/quran/text/mss…

Of course you can disagree with the reading but just handwaving it away is not an argument from *LOGIC*.

11:35 "they made it up"
This is a lie.
11:41 "guess work"
Show why the "guesses" are faulty or shut up.

This is *extremely* disrespectful towards the hundreds of hours spent by Sadeghi & Goudarzi deciphering it.

Just because you aren't interested in what the text says, and don't want Muslims to be interested in it either, doesn't mean that you get to just talk crap like this.

12:17 "it is conjectural. In other words, they have no proof for it".

That is *not* a good paraphrase of what "conjectural" means. Again, very dishonest.

12:47: "And they come out and say with a straight face that they found new Ayat"

Who is this "they"? Arabic101 implies that the picture on the right was presented by the same authors of the picture on the left. This is a malicious lie.

That being said: Using *LOGIC* if you find a word in a place in the text, where the standard text clearly does not *have* that word, whatever is going on, certainly the text is *not* in line with the standard text. That's not guess work, that's just facts.

12:54 "If any word could describe this perfectly it would be desperation".
Indeed. But it's not Sadeghi & Goudarzi that are desperately flailing here.

Finally at the last part! "Testimony of Researchers".

13:26 "Non-muslims scholars, one of them is an orientalist"

The O-word! What kind of other scholar do you expect to research Oriental manuscripts? An Americanist? Romanist? Africanist? Idiocy.

That being said: Puin certainly has some unorthodox revisionist views

14:32 Scholer and Dreibholz are pulled into the fray. If they *really* said there were no non-Uthmanic variants in the Sanaa Texts, they were simply wrong. Puin is right on that front, as anyone can easily check.

If Arabic101 really believes this, which I sincerely doubt, I don't know why I've been watching this silly video for 14+ minutes now. It could've just been the past 2 minutes, the end.

15:10 "Based their entire claims on some traces of erased letters from a student's training sheet".

Not a training sheet, not just traces, and not made up. But Arabic 101 is being obviously dishonest here.

15:30 "Since The Bible cannot be memorized, it only relies on manuscripts"
Why on earth could the Bible not be Memorized? Christians do it less than Muslims, but it's not magically impossible...

16:00 Yes, we definitely have more Quranic manuscripts from the 1st Islamic century than we have New Testament texts from the 1st Christian century!

And... believe it or not the Ṣanʿāʾ Palimpsest is one of them! A rather large fragment even!

16:16 "Every time they found a new manuscript throughout this (sic) thousand years they updated their holy book"

???????????? WHAT?! Hahahaha. That's not how any of this works.

16:28 After talking about the New Testament, he then goes on to cite Joshua, famously not a book of the New Testament, lol.

16:49 Well, definitely other people than Muslims can say that their text has remained the same for more than 14 centuries. For some of them their claims would be at least as credible (e.g. the Masoretic Text of the OLD testament)

Honestly, even though it takes a couple of centuries for the New Testament text to stabilize. It does eventually stabilize and remain unchanged for every Jot and Tittle after that.

That's the whole point though: we're interested what happened *before* that stability.

The Ṣanʿāʾ Palimpsest is our *only* physical witness of a text type that predates the standard text. The Quran was standardized much earlier relative to the founding of the religion than the New Testament, but it wasn't instantaneous.

It famously happened about 20 years after the death of of the prophet, under the auspices of the third caliph ʿUṯmān b. ʿAffān.

Beside the Ṣanʿāʾ Palimpsest, the Islamic tradition *also* contains and preserves witnesses of pre-standardization times.

It's one of the great achievements of the tradition that, even under such centralizing pressures a real attempt was made to retain some of the pre-ʿUṯmānic variation, and actually succeeds in doing so.

Pretending like this didn't happen is an insult to the tradition.

I made it to the end!

So, that was basically as terrible as I feared it would be. 😅

Now don't be shy @ZaadFather! Give us a live tweet of you watching this one !

@Rurouni_Phoenix But every now and then he wades into topics he knows even less about. Recently he made a hilarious video about how all languages descend from Arabic. (did you see this btw @arabic_bad ?)

@MustefaT There's some historical information on those controversies in Sadeghi's articles. Asma Hilali published her book on the Sanaa Palimpsest in 2017 (which is in every way inferior to the Sadeghi & Goudarzi edition in my opinion). Eléonore Cellard published on it in 2021!

@MustefaT I believe a new edition should be in prepration with the Corpus Coranicum people. Not sure if that'll ever come out.

So yes, research is definitely still ongoing. But consider the situation in Yemen it's not very easy to get first hand access besides the photos we have already.

@SufyanBM I wouldn't call Muṣḥaf Ibn Masʿūd a "student version of the Quran". It was a real Muṣḥaf, intended to be a Muṣḥaf. Just not the Muṣḥaf that becomes the standard text.