Recordings › In Depth: The Sanaʽa Manuscript -Mufti Abu Layth · 1 Mar 2019 › Segment 1 of 11
What are the Sana'a manuscripts and how were they discovered?
masjid masjed masaajid masajid muftis koran quraan al-quran sura soorah suwar soora chapter tawbah tauba taubah repentanceBackdrop: how the Sana'a manuscripts were found in a mosque loft in the 1970s
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This segment0:00 to 2:36 · 2 min 36 sGeneral teaching
What this part covers
machinesummary, machine-writtenThe Sana'a manuscripts are parchment pages of the Quran, including much of Surat al-Tawba, found in the 1970s in the loft of a mosque dome in Sana'a, where old sacred texts had been stored and forgotten. Storing texts this way was a common practice.
In more detail
Mufti Abu Layth gives the backdrop to the manuscript controversy. He says it begins in Yemen in the 1970s, when workers reconstructing the dome of a mosque in Sana'a, the capital, found a bundle of old manuscripts stuck in a loft section. He explains that this is nothing shocking: in the past, people wishing to dispose of sacred texts would often collect them, put them away somewhere high such as in a dome, and perhaps burn them later once enough had accumulated; here they were simply left and forgotten. He says the find, which he dates to about 1972, contained quite a few pages, that in some of them the Quran was recognised, not a complete Quran but, by some accounts, much of Surat al-Tawba, with perhaps around eighty pages' worth. He adds that these are not pages in the modern sense but parchments made from animal hide, one of the materials people wrote on.
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machine0:00 to 2:36 · click a time to seek · dotted terms open the glossary
right so let's look at what is this uh manuscript thing going on so okay let me give you some backdrop to all of this right um what is going on well people right so well this whole issue begins with in Yemen okay so in the 70s they were I don't know reconstructing or working on some Masid in s is the capital of
Y not this is not the name of some girl this is right so this is where the great Legends like you get IM and these great people were from okay so so what's happened anyway is that whilst reconstructing or working on the dome in U S they found a whole bunch of kind of old manuscripts kind of stuck in some Loft section so they've taken them out and and and it was quite common this this is nothing shocking by the way because a lot of the time in the past
when people uh wanted to dispose of let's say certain sacred texts and things like this it's it's very likely that they would just collect them uh and maybe put them away somewhere High like in the dome in a section and and then maybe with time burn them or do something once they've got a certain amount now what's happened is here obviously they've just left them and presumably forgotten about them now um right they've just forgotten about them so what's happened is in 197 in I think 1972 or whatever it was they've
discovered these things pulled them out they've realized a certain amount of them um there's varying there's there's quite a few pages but there's different things but in some they've said that they've realized this is the Quran okay or page it's not the complete Quran uh some people say it's pretty much a lot of Surah Toba there some people have said I think they they may be up to uh something like I think 80 Pages or something like this worth by the way these are not Pages like these kind of pages these are parchments so things like ancient um um initially cloth like cloth but it's actually taken from
animal hide so animal skin that was used to write on so that was one method that people used to write on so they found a lot of these and then anyway to cut all that story short they you know they called in some experts and the experts thought well you know this sounds interesting so they they put all all this stuff on microfilm and then then there was all this long legal battle going on with the yemeni government but anyway I think in the '90s the the German experts were allowed to release those uh uh the these microfilms or whatever it was um and they started to research these manuscripts now these
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Cite this segment
Stable id, transcript version and tier are part of the citation. Every change to a transcript is logged.Mufti Abu Layth Archive, segment 2019-03-01-S01, auto-transcribed, may contain errors. https://muftiabulayth.org/r/k6faz7xw53y/s/1/ (accessed 1 November 2026)
- APA 7
Mufti Abu Layth. (2019, March 1). What are the Sana'a manuscripts and how were they discovered? [Video, segment 2019-03-01-S01, auto-transcribed, may contain errors]. Mufti Abu Layth Archive. Retrieved November 1, 2026, from https://muftiabulayth.org/r/k6faz7xw53y/s/1/
- Chicago author-date
Mufti Abu Layth. 2019. "What are the Sana'a manuscripts and how were they discovered?" Video, segment 2019-03-01-S01, auto-transcribed, may contain errors. Mufti Abu Layth Archive. Recorded March 1, 2019. Accessed November 1, 2026. https://muftiabulayth.org/r/k6faz7xw53y/s/1/
- BibTeX
@misc{abulayth-2019-03-01-S01, author = {Mufti Abu Layth}, title = {{What are the Sana'a manuscripts and how were they discovered?}}, year = {2019}, month = {3}, date = {2019-03-01}, howpublished = {\url{https://muftiabulayth.org/r/k6faz7xw53y/s/1/}}, url = {https://muftiabulayth.org/r/k6faz7xw53y/s/1/}, organization = {Mufti Abu Layth Archive}, urldate = {2026-11-01}, note = {Segment 2019-03-01-S01, auto-transcribed, may contain errors} }
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