Evidence · Case 10 · Islam
The Uthmanic standardization and the Sana’a palimpsest
One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
Bukhari’s own collection records Uthman’s standard codex and the burning of other copies. The Sana’a palimpsest, studied by Behnam Sadeghi and others, shows a non-Uthmanic text underneath, evidence of more than one early version. The variant readings tradition is accepted within Islam.
Sources
- Behnam Sadeghi and Uwe Bergmann, “The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qur’an of the Prophet,” Arabica 57 (2010). (opens in a new tab)
Scholarly study of the Sana’a palimpsest’s lower text.
Objections & responses
- Standardizing the text is not the same as changing it. Uthman preserved the true reading and removed errors, so this shows care, not corruption.
That is a reasonable reading, and the argument here is not that the Qur’an was corrupted. It is narrower: the popular claim that not a single letter has ever varied is not what the sources show. If variant copies had to be burned to end disputes, then variants existed. A Muslim can hold that Uthman preserved the correct text, but that is a claim about which reading was right, not evidence there were never any. The same honest examination Muslims apply to the Bible’s transmission applies here too.