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Abd Allah ibn Mas'ud was a companion of the Islamic prophet Muhammad whom Islamic tradition regards the greatest interpreter of the Quran of his time and the second ever. He was also known by the kuniyaAbu Abd al-Rahman.
Mushaf is an Arabic word for a codex or collection of sheets, but also refers to a written copy of the Quran. The chapters of the Quran, which Muslims believe was revealed during a 23-year period in Muhammad's lifetime, were written on various pieces of paper during Muhammad's era. Two decades later, these papers were assembled into one volume under the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, and this collection has formed the basis of all written copies of the Quran to the present day.
The Samarkand Kufic Quran is a manuscript Quran, or mushaf, and is one of the 6 manuscripts which were penned under the caliphate of Uthman ibn Affan. They represented an effort to compile the Qur'an into a standardized version. It is not exactly known to which area the Samarkand codex was originally dispatched or whether it was Uthman's personal manuscript.
Ubayy ibn Ka'b, also known as Abu Mundhir, was a companion of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and a person of high esteem in the early Muslim community.
The history of the Quran, the holy book of Islam, is the timeline ranging from the inception of the Quran during the lifetime of Muhammad, to the emergence, transmission, and canonization of its written copies. The history of the Quran is a major focus in the field of Quranic studies.
In Islam, qirāʼa refers to the ways or fashions that the Quran, the holy book of Islam, is recited. More technically, the term designates the different linguistic, lexical, phonetic, morphological and syntactical forms permitted with reciting the Quran. Differences between qiraʼat include varying rules regarding the prolongation, intonation, and pronunciation of words, but also differences in stops, vowels, consonants, entire words and even different meanings.. However, the variations don't change the overall message or doctrinal meanings of the Qur'an, as the differences are often subtle and contextually equivalent.Qiraʼat also refers to the branch of Islamic studies that deals with these modes of recitation.
The Topkapı manuscript or Topkapı Quran is an early manuscript of the Quran dated to the middle 2nd century AH.
The Shia view of the Qur'an differs from the Sunni view, but the majority of both groups believe that the text is identical. While some Shia disputed the canonical validity of the Uthmanic codex, the Shia Imams always rejected the idea of alteration of Qur'an's text. Only seven Shia scholars have believed in omissions in the Uthmanic codex.
The Sanaa palimpsest or Sanaa Quran is one of the oldest Quranic manuscripts in existence. Part of a sizable cache of Quranic and non-Quranic fragments discovered in Yemen during a 1972 restoration of the Great Mosque of Sanaa, the manuscript was identified as a palimpsest Quran in 1981 as it is written on parchment and comprises two layers of text.
The Mushaf of Ali is a codex of the Quran that was collected by one of its first scribes, Ali ibn Abi Talib, the cousin and son-in-law of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Ali is also recognized as the fourth Rashidun caliph and the first Shia imam. By some Shia accounts, the codex of Ali was rejected for official use after the death of Muhammad in 632 CE for political reasons. Some early Shia traditions also suggest differences with the official Uthmanid codex, though currently, the prevalent Shia view is that the recension of Ali matched the Uthmanid codex, save for the order of its content. The Twelver Shia believe that the codex of Ali is now in the possession of their last imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, who would reveal the codex when he reappears at the end of time to eradicate injustice and evil.
The Birmingham Quran manuscript comprises two leaves of parchment from an early Quranic manuscript or muṣḥaf. In 2015, the manuscript, which is held by the University of Birmingham, was radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 AD. It is part of the Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts, held by the university's Cadbury Research Library.
In Muslim tradition the Quran is the final revelation from God, Islam's divine text, delivered to the Islamic prophet Muhammad through the angel Jibril (Gabriel). Muhammad's revelations were said to have been recorded orally and in writing, through Muhammad and his followers up until his death in 632 CE. These revelations were then compiled by first caliph Abu Bakr and codified during the reign of the third caliph Uthman so that the standard codex edition of the Quran or Muṣḥaf was completed around 650 CE, according to Muslim scholars. This has been critiqued by some western scholarship, suggesting the Quran was canonized at a later date, based on the dating of classical Islamic narratives, i.e. hadiths, which were written 150–200 years after the death of Muhammad, and partly because of the textual variations present in the Sana'a manuscript. Muslim scholars who oppose the views of the Western revisionist theories regarding the historical origins of the Quran have described their theses as "untenable".
Abu Sa'id Uthman Ibn Sa‘id al-Qutbi, better known as Warsh (110-197AH), was a significant figure in the history of Quranic recitation (qira'at), the canonical methods of reciting the Qur'an. Alongside Qalun, he was one of the two primary transmitters of the canonical reading method of Nafi‘ al-Madani. Together, their style is the most common form of Qur'anic recitation in the generality of African mosques outside of Egypt, and is also popular in Yemen and Darfur despite the rest of Sudan following the method of Hafs. The method of Warsh and his counterpart Qalun was also the most popular method of recitation in Al-Andalus. The majority of printed Mushafs today in North Africa and West Africa follow the reading of Warsh.
According to Islamic tradition, the Quran was revealed to the Islamic prophet Muhammad by the angel Gabriel (Jibril) in seven ahruf, translated variously as "styles", "ways", "forms" and "modes". Islamic scholars agree that the ahruf were styles used by the early Muslims to recite the Quran.
Arabic miniatures are small paintings on paper, usually book or manuscript illustrations but also sometimes separate artworks that occupy entire pages. The earliest example dates from around 690 AD, with a flourishing of the art from between 1000 and 1200 AD in the Abbasid caliphate. The art form went through several stages of evolution while witnessing the fall and rise of several Islamic caliphates. Arab miniaturists absorbed Chinese and Persian influences brought by the Mongol destructions, and at last, got totally assimilated and subsequently disappeared due to the Ottoman occupation of the Arab world. Nearly all forms of Islamic miniatures owe their existences to Arabic miniatures, as Arab patrons were the first to demand the production of illuminated manuscripts in the Caliphate, it wasn't until the 14th century that the artistic skill reached the non-Arab regions of the Caliphate.
Quranic studies is the academic application of a diverse set of disciplines to study the Quran, drawing on methods including but not limited to ancient history, philology, textual criticism, lexicography, codicology, literary criticism, comparative religion, and historical criticism.
Gabriel Said Reynolds is an American academic and historian of religion, who serves as Jerome J. Crowley and Rosaleen G. Crowley Professor of Theology and assistant professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His scholarship focuses on Qur'anic Studies, Origins of Islam, and Muslim-Christian relations, and to a more limited extent, also covers World Religions, World Church, and History of Christianity.
Canonized Islamic scripture are texts which Muslims believe were revealed by God through various prophets throughout humanity's history—specifically the Quran and Hadith. Muslims believe the Quran to be the final revelation of God to mankind, and a completion and confirmation of previous scriptures, revealed to Muhammad between 610 and 632 CE, and canonized around 650 by the Rashidun leader Uthman.
Codex Mashhad is an old codex of the Qurʾān, now mostly preserved in two manuscripts, MSS 18 and 4116, in the Āstān-i Quds Library, Mashhad, Iran. The first manuscript in 122 folios and the second in 129 folios together constitute more than 90% of the text of the Qurʾān. The current codex is in two separate volumes, MSS 18 and 4116. The former contains the first half of the Qurʾān, from the beginning to the end of the 18th sūra, al-Kahf, while the latter comprises the second half, from the middle of the 20th sūra, Ṭāhā, to the end of the Qurʾān. In their present form, both parts of Codex Mashhad have been repaired, partially completed with pieces from later Kufic Qurʾāns and sometimes in a present-day nashkī hand.
The codex of Ubayy ibn Ka'b is a mushaf of the Quran that differs from the Uthmanic codex and is attributed to Ubayy ibn Ka'b, a companion of Muhammad. The codices of Ubayy and Uthman differ on point of several textual variants between the two, but more importantly, Ubayy's codex possesses a total of 116 surahs, whereas the codex of Uthman possesses 114. The surahs absent from the Uthmanic codex, but present in that of Ubayy, are Al-Khalʿ and Al-Ḥafd. These continued to be seen as authoritative and Quranic by several scholars through the eighth century, and evidence for the transmission of the codex is available until the tenth or eleventh centuries. A copy of the codex of Ubayy is unavailable in any extant manuscript, although its historicity is accepted. Islamic scholars documented the text of Ubayy's two unique surahs in addition to the textual variants that distinguished the codex of Ubayy from that of Uthman.
References
- Sadeghi, Behnam; Bergmann, Uwe (2010). "The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qurʾān of the Prophet". Arabica . 57 (4). Leiden: Brill Publishers: 343–436. doi:10.1163/157005810X504518. JSTOR 25782619.
- Karimi-Nia, Morteza (2019). "A New Document in the Early History of the Qurʾān Codex Mashhad, an ʿUthmānic Text of the Qurʾān in Ibn Masʿūd's Arrangement of Sūras". Journal of Islamic Manuscripts. 10 (3). doi:10.1163/1878464X-01003002. S2CID 211656087.
- Harvey, Ramon (2017). "The Legal Epistemology of Qur'anic Variants: The Readings of Ibn Masʿūd in Kufan fiqh and the Ḥanafī madhhab". Journal of Qur'anic Studies . 9 (1). doi:10.3366/jqs.2017.0268.