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A Survey of Personal-Use Qur'an Manuscripts Based on Fragments from the Cairo Genizah

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A Survey of Personal-Use Qur'an Manuscripts Based on Fragments from the Cairo Genizah A Survey of Personal-Use Qur’an Manuscripts Based on Fragments from the Cairo Genizah Magdalen M. Connolly and Nick Posegay UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE 1. Introduction1 A genizah2 is a secure location, often in a synagogue or cemetery, where Jewish communities place old or damaged texts that are considered too sacred to simply dispose of.3 The most common determining factor for inclusion in a genizah is the occurrence of a Hebrew name of God in a text, but the use of Hebrew script may also suffice. The ‘Cairo Genizah’ refers to the storeroom in the Ben ʿEzra Synagogue of al-Fusṭāṭwhere the Cairene Jewish community stored hundreds of thousands of manuscript fragments between the fifth/eleventh and thirteenth/nineteenth centuries. In the late 1890s, Cambridge scholars acquired approximately 190,000 of over 300,000 total fragments from this genizah chamber, the synagogue grounds, the nearby al-Basātīn cemetery, and manuscript dealers in Cairo.4 These fragments have since been conserved and catalogued in the Cambridge University Library,5 while smaller collections reside in other institutions, including the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Russian National Library in St Petersburg, and the John Rylands Library in Manchester. Most Genizah manuscripts are written in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Judaeo-Arabic,6 but a substantial portion is in Arabic script,7 and there is a small amount of Qur’anic material in both Arabic8 and Hebrew transcription.9 The inclusion of Arabic-script Qur’an fragments in the Cairo Genizah is particularly noteworthy. Since they are neither Hebrew script nor canonically sacred in Judaism, there is no obvious reason why they came to rest in a synagogue storeroom or a Jewish cemetery. There are at least 35 such fragments in the Cambridge University Library, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the John Rylands Library,10 comprising parts of 25 discrete manuscripts.11 Geoffrey Khan has hypothesised that much of the Journal of Qur’anic Studies 23.2 (2021): 1–40 Edinburgh University Press DOI: 10.3366/jqs.2021.0465 © Magdalen M. Connolly and Nick Posegay. The online version of this article is published as Open Access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the original work is cited. www.euppublishing.com/jqs 2 Journal of Qur’anic Studies Arabic-script material in the Genizah was once part of personal collections – likely owned by affluent members of the Cairene Jewish community – and when they moved or died those entire collections were placed in genizot, regardless of the script of their contents.12 Such a process may well have transferred Qur’anic material into the Ben ʿEzra Synagogue and al-Basātīn cemetery, but this explanation only raises a further question: why would Egyptian Jews possess pieces of the Qur’an in the first place? This question may be answered by examining which features these 25 manuscripts have in common – and which features they do not share. In fact, they are broadly diverse in almost every way that we assess manuscripts. In terms of timing alone, the earliest fragments date to the late third/ninth or early fourth/tenth century, while the latest was written in the last quarter of the thirteenth/nineteenth century. Their script styles vary considerably, ranging between early Abbasid scripts on the one hand, and later naskhī and muhaqqaq̣ scripts on the other. Their vocalisation and diacritic systems are likewise mixed, with some completely unpointed, and others containing fully complex systems of diacritic dots, vowels, and ihmāl signs.13 They are written variously on parchment and paper types of vastly different qualities, in both horizontal and vertical formats. Some are clearly composed by well-trained calligraphers, while others are rough and imprecise. Some are from codices, some are writing exercises, and some have been recycled from their original purposes. There is only one factor that unites the fragments: they are from relatively small manuscripts, probably meant for private use. It seems then that these personal-use manuscripts ended up in the Cairene Jewish community for a variety of different reasons. One notable observation is that fourteen of the manuscripts contain passages related to Biblical figures – or would contain them if the extant fragments were intact.14 Such passages may have interested Jewish owners for polemical purposes, or perhaps just because they offer greater insight into the relationship between Judaism and Islam. On the other hand, Biblical prophets are quite common in the Qur’an, and these fragments may simply represent a random distribution of verses.15 Similarly, some manuscripts contain passages that discuss non-Muslims more broadly. T-S Ar.40.97, for example, mentions ahl al-kitāb and al-mushrikīn (Q. 98:1–6).16 T-S AS 176.492/T-S AS 179.333 also refers to ahl al-kitāb (Q. 3:199), while T-S NS 327.46 addresses those who say ‘We believe in God and the Last Day’, but they are not believers (Q. 2:8–11). T-S Ar.41.84 includes all of Q. 109 (al-Kāfirūn), which concludes, for you is your religion, and for me is my religion (Q. 109:6). Then T-S AS 178.345/AS 178.346 reads: O you who have believed, let not a people ridicule [another] people; perhaps they may be better than them, nor let women ridicule [other] women; perhaps they may be better than them. And do not insult one another and do not call each other by [offensive] nicknames (Q. 49:11). Perhaps these verses would have been useful for a Jew living under Muslim rule to have on hand. A Survey of Personal-Use Qur’an Manuscripts 3 A number of these manuscripts contain verses that are recited in the presence of the sick, dead, and dying, and are also frequently copied as talismans: T-S Ar.41.84 (Q. 1, Q. 112–4), T-S Ar.42.145 (Q. 36), T-S NS 306.214/T-S NS 306.232, T-S AS 177.582, and T-S AS 183.76 (all of Q. 67).17 T-S Ar.41.84 and T-S AS 177.582 have been folded several times, suggesting that they were carried on someone’s person, perhaps for protection. T-S Ar.19.7 contains only Q. 2:255, and it has also been deliberately folded several times. A further two fragments – T-S Ar.38.8 and T-S Ar.51.74 – appear to have been removed from codices and then carefully folded up; again, likely indicating they were carried as talismans.18 Four of the manuscripts – T-S Ar.42.145, T-S NS 327.31, T-S NS 327.46, and JTS ENA 3691.5/ENA 3961.6 – show signs of having been repurposed for bookbinding. It was customary among Muslim binders to recycle old Qur’an leaves to create the pasteboard covers of new codices.19 This was considered more respectful to the fragment and its sacred contents than simply discarding it.20 Thus, it is possible that these four fragments constituted the inner lining of codices purchased by Jews which have since fallen apart, either before they were consigned to the Genizah or after the Genizah was emptied. Additionally, before it was used for bookbinding, it seems that T-S Ar.42.145 was originally a writing exercise, showing the joint writing of a student and a master. T-S Ar.41.93/T-S NS 192.11a-c/T-S NS 306.145 is also a writing exercise, produced at an Egyptian public school.21 One further consideration is related to the medieval Karaite Jewish practice of transcribing the Hebrew Bible into Arabic script. A considerable number of Arabic-script Hebrew Bible manuscripts are extant from Cairo genizot, seemingly the by-products of a Karaite desire to distinguish their recitation tradition from that of their Rabbanite peers.22 Codicologically, these manuscripts have more in common with Arabic-script Qur’an manuscripts than they do with Hebrew-script Bibles. In contrast to typical two- and three-column Bibles, they are all arranged in single columns, and many include verse-dividing rosettes or red vowel marks that are directly analogous with those found in medieval Qur’ans.23 It is likely that Karaite scribes had Qur’anic exemplars from which they modelled their work, including – perhaps – a few that now reside in these Genizah collections. Whatever their original purpose, it is probable that most of these Qur’an manuscripts made their way to the Cairo Genizah as a result of ownership by Jews.24 Given the palaeographic and codicological variation in the fragments, these owners must have lived at many different times throughout the history of the Ben ʿEzra Synagogue. However, it remains uncertain as to whether any of these Jews owned entire copies of the Qur’an or only select pages.25 4 Journal of Qur’anic Studies Also uncertain is the identity of the people who wrote these manuscripts. Most of them were probably Muslims who copied the Qur’an for themselves or for commercial sale, but it is not impossible that one of the writing exercises was undertaken by a Jew. None of the fragments contains any Hebrew script, and there is no evidence that they were produced in an irregular manner. In fact, in terms of codicology and palaeography, the Genizah Qur’an fragments are practically indistinguishable from Qur’an manuscripts known from other contexts.26 They thus serve as a valuable diachronic corpus for tracing the history of Qur’anic composition between the fourth/tenth and thirteenth/nineteenth centuries.
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