Codification of the Qur’ân". (1) She points out three kinds of historical evidence, namely, the Umayyad inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock, al-Walîd’s inscription at the Great Mosque at Madina and the information about the existence of a group of Qur’ân copyists at Madina since the middle of the first century of Islam. Another scholar, F. M. Donner, points out that Yehuda Nevo’s argument is circular. "The absence of specifically Qur’ânic or Muslim phraseology from the generic monotheism of the earliest Negev texts ... may be taken as evidence for the late codification of the Qur’ân only if we knew that the Qur’ânic texts crystallized in this region (i.e., the Negev, or at least geographical Syria) rather than somewhere else, such as Arabia; but the crystallization of the Qur’ân outside Arabia is another of Nevo’s (and Wansborough’s) assumptions, not a known fact." (2)

(b) The San‘â’ find and renewed speculations

Meanwhile the discovery of a stock of old parchment manuscripts containing Qur’ânic manuscripts in the loft of the Great Mosque at San‘â’ gave rise to fresh speculations about the history and textual integrity of the Qur’ân. The discovery was made in 1972; but it was early in the eighties that the Yamani Antiquities Authority, particularly its president Qâdî Ismâ‘îl al-Akwa‘, invited through the German Foreign Ministry two German experts, Dr. Gerd. R. Puin and H. C. Graf von Bothmer, for the restoration and preservation of the manuscripts. They worked at San‘â’ for some years in this project. It appears that besides being experts in restoration and preservation of manuscripts they had "orientalist" motives; for, it is reported that Bothmer made microfilm copies of some 35,000 sheets of manuscripts and took them to Germany. In 1987 he wrote an article on these manuscripts mentioning, among other things, that one of them, no. 1033 - 32, could be assigned a date in the last quarter of the first hijrî century. More orientalist in nature was the article which Puin wrote under title: "Observations on the Early Qur’ân Manuscripts in San‘â’." (3) These writings attracted the attention of the orientalists to the San‘â’ manuscripts and they held a seminar at Leiden in 1998 on "Qur’ânic Studies" at which both Bothmer and Puin