Gerd R. Puin

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Gerd Rüdiger Puin (born 1940) is a German scholar and the world's foremost authority on Qur'anic paleography, the study and scholarly interpretation of ancient manuscripts. He is a specialist in Arabic calligraphy . He is a professor based at Saarland University, in Saarbrücken Germany.

Gerd Puin was the head of a restoration project commissioned by the Yemeni government who spend a significant amount of time examining the ancient Qur'anic manuscripts discovered in Yemen in 1972. His examination revealed unconventional verse orderings, textual variations, and rare styles of orthography which diverges from the authorised later version, refuting the assertion that the Qu'ran is the pure unadulterated word of the God. The scriptures were written in the early Hijazi Arabic script, matching the pieces of the earliest Qur'ans known to exist. There were also versions very clearly written over even earlier, faded versions. What the Yemeni Qu'rans indicated was an evolving text rather than a text fixed since the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in 632 CE.

More than 15,000 sheets of the Yemeni Qur'ans have painstakingly been cleaned, treated, sorted, and photographed and 35,000 microfilmed photos have been made of the manuscripts. Some of Puin's initial remarks on his findings are found in his essay titled the "Observations on Early Qur'an Manuscripts in San'a" which has been republished in the book What the Koran Really Says by Ibn Warraq.

Puin's research supports the conclusions of John Wansbrough and his pupils that the Qu'ran as we know it does not date from the time of Mohammad.

In the 1999 Atlantic Monthly article referenced below, Gerd Puin is quoted as saying that:

"My idea is that the Koran is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Muhammad. Many of them may even be a hundred years older than Islam itself. Even within the Islamic traditions there is a huge body of contradictory information, including a significant Christian substrate; one can derive a whole Islamic anti-history from them if one wants. The Qur’an claims for itself that it is ‘mubeen,’ or clear, but if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn’t make sense. Many Muslims will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Qur’anic text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Qur’an is not comprehensible, if it can’t even be understood in Arabic, then it’s not translatable into any language. That is why Muslims are afraid. Since the Qur’an claims repeatedly to be clear but is not—there is an obvious and serious contradiction. Something else must be going on.” [1]

However, in an earlier, more scholarly article (Puin 1996), Puin describes the variations he found , usually in the order of verses, and matching the variations already described by Islamic scholars. Islamic sources mention that several of the early companions of Muhammad had Qur'anic texts that differed from that imposed by the caliph Uthman ibn Affan circa 650-656, and that these companions were reluctant to abandon their versions. ^{[citation needed]}

Puin is said to be working on a book on the Sana'a manuscripts, which may clarify the seeming gap between his statements to the Atlantic Monthly and his published academic scholarship.

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[edit] References

Puin, Gerd R. -- "Observations on Early Qur'an Manuscripts in Sana'a," in The Qur'an as Text, ed. Stefan Wild, , E.J. Brill 1996, pp. 107-111. Reprinted in What the Koran Really Says, ed. Ibn Warraq, Prometheus Books, 2002.