Leaves from Three Ancient Qurans (Mingana and Lewis)

Cambridge University Press published this book in 1914, edited by Alphonse Mingana and Agnes Smith Lewis, under the full title Leaves from Three Ancient Qurans, Possibly Pre-Othmanic, with a List of their Variants. Its subject is erased Qur'anic leaves in a palimpsest owned by Lewis. ^{1 2}

Lewis's preface (roughly pp. v–xi) tells the story and condition of the manuscript; Mingana's introduction covers the history of the text, script and pointing and describes the three kinds of writing; then come a list of what the editors counted as variants and the text of the leaves as they read it, with plates. They collated it with two British Museum manuscripts (Or. 1340 and Or. 1401), the Qur'an of Tipu Sultan in Cambridge University Library, a Qur'an owned by Mingana, and Flügel's printed text. ^{3 4 5 6}

The editors' view, as Lewis puts it, is that the leaves are "possibly" pre-Uthmanic, because they could not imagine anyone writing a divergent text after Uthman ordered other copies destroyed; they supposed these leaves were among those ordered destroyed, that their owner rubbed out the text with pumice and sold the vellum, and that Christian monks wrote over it at the end of the ninth century. Lewis says explicitly that she reasons from tradition as it reached her, and draws comparisons with the textual history of the Bible; Mingana himself recognised that forty-one of the "variants" Lewis first marked were only archaic spellings. All of this is the editors' 1914 view, not the museum's judgement. The Sunni account of the compilation under Abu Bakr and the copying of codices under Uthman is in the record on the compilation of the Qur'an. ^{7 3 8}