Leaves from Three Ancient Qureins. Edited by Rev. A. Mingana
and Agnes Smith Lewis. (Cambridge University Press. 10s. 6d. net.)When 'Othnittn prepared his famous recension of the Qur'an, he ordered all previous copies of the Mohammedan sacred 'writings to be destroyed, and his standard text has e'er since held a position of unique and undiallenged authority over the Moslem world. A vellum palimpsest which Mrs. Smith Lewis bought at Suez in 1895 turned out to hold, on some of its sheets, an erased version of parts of the Qurim which differed in many points from the accepted text. Mrs. Lewis and Professor Mingana—who succeeded in deciphering these Sfirahs—therefore conclude that the MS. must be older than the days of `Othm&n. In such a case it must be of the greatest importance to Mohammedan scholarship. The deciphered MS. is now first published, with a critical intro- duction by Professor Mingana and several facsimiles of the revived palimpsest.
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