Gerd R. Puin

Gerd Rüdiger Puin (born 1940) is a German scholar on Quranic historical palaeography, the study and scholarly interpretation of ancient manuscripts and an orientalist. He is also a specialist in Arabic orthography. He was a lecturer of Arabic at Saarland University, in Saarbrücken Germany.

Sana'a Quran find
Gerd R Puin photo of one of his Sana'a Quran parchments

Gerd Puin was the head of a restoration project, commissioned by the Yemeni government, which spent a significant amount of time examining the ancient Quranic manuscripts discovered in Sana'a, Yemen, in 1972, in order to find criteria for systematically cataloging them. According to writer Toby Lester, his examination revealed "unconventional verse orderings, minor textual variations, and rare styles of orthography and artistic embellishment."[1] The scriptures were written in the early Hijazi Arabic script, matching the pieces of the earliest Qurans known to exist. Some of the papyrus on which the text appears shows clear signs of earlier use, being that previous, washed-off writings are also visible on it. In 2008 and 2009 Dr Elisabeth Puin published detailed results of the analysis of Sanaa manuscript DAM (dar al-makhtutat) 01.27-1 proving that the text was still in flux in the time span between the scriptio inferior and the scriptio superior of the palimpsest.[2][3]

More than 15,000 sheets of the Yemeni Qurans have painstakingly been cleaned, treated, sorted, cataloged 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.

With his approach of research Puin is a representative of the "Saarbrücken School" which is part of the Revisionist School of Islamic Studies.

Assessment of the Quran

In an article in 1999 Atlantic Monthly,[4] 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 Koran 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—and Orientalists—will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Koran is not comprehensible—if it can't even be understood in Arabic—then it's not translatable. People fear that. And since the Koran claims repeatedly to be clear but obviously is not—as even speakers of Arabic will tell you—there is a contradiction. Something else must be going on.[1]

Writings
  • Ohlig, Karl-Heinz; Puin, Gerd-Rüdiger (2007). Die dunklen Anfänge. Neue Forschungen zur Entstehung und frühen Geschichte des Islam [The obscure beginnings: new research on the origin and early history of Islam] (in German) (3rd ed.). Berlin: Verlag Hans Schiler. ISBN 978-3-89930-128-1. LCCN 2006374620. OCLC 173644215.
  • Ohlig, Karl-Heinz; Puin, Gerd-Rüdiger (2009). The hidden origins of Islam : new research into its early history (1st ed.). Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1-59102-634-1. LCCN 2008049316. OCLC 179808111. Archived from the original on 10 May 2012. Retrieved 31 January 2012.
  • Hans-Caspar Graf von Bothmer; Karl-Heinz Ohlig; Gerd-Rüdiger Puin (1999). "Über die Bedeutung der ältesten Koranfragmente aus Sanaa (Jemen) für die Orthographiegeschichte des Korans. In: Neue Wege der Koranforschung" [On the meaning of the oldest Quran fragments from Sana'a (Yemen) on the orthographic history of the Quran. In: New Ways in Quran Research] (PDF). magazin forschung. Saarland University. 1999 (1): 37–40. ISSN 0937-7301. Archived from the original (PDF, 0.4 MB) on 23 December 2012. Retrieved 31 January 2012.

See also

References
  1. Lester, Toby (January 1999). "What Is the Koran?". Atlantic Monthly. ISSN 1072-7825. Retrieved 5 November 2014.
  2. Puin, Elisabeth (2008). "Ein früher Koranpalimpsest aus Ṣanʿāʾ - I. Einführung [An early Quran palimpsest from Sana'a - I: Introduction]". In Markus Groß, Karl-Heinz Ohlig (ed.). Schlaglichter: Die beiden ersten islamischen Jahrhunderte [At a glance: The first two Islamic centuries] (in German) (1st ed.). Berlin: Verlag Hans Schiler. pp. 461–. ISBN 978-3-89930-224-0. LCCN 2009379219. OCLC 299070399.
  3. Groß, Markus; Ohlig, Karl-Heinz (2009). "Ein früher Koranpalimpsest aus Ṣanʿāʾ - II. [An early Quran palimpsest from Sana'a - II. ]". In Markus Groß, Karl-Heinz Ohlig (ed.). Vom Koran zum Islam [From the Quran to Islam]. Schriften zur frühen Islamgeschichte und zum Koran [Writings on the early Islamic history and on the Quran] (in German). 4 (1st ed.). Berlin: Verlag Hans Schiler. pp. 523–581. ISBN 978-3-89930-269-1. LCCN 2010359348. OCLC 496960079.
  4. Lester, Toby. "What Is the Koran?". The Atlantic. Retrieved 26 March 2017.
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