Salmiya

The current, as ever marvellous, January - February issue of the Saudi Aramco World Magazine contains a virtual tour through the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a site of great significance for Muslims (and maybe Jews and Christians, as well). For the first time, I could see the intricate and intriguing calligraphic inscriptions on the inner octagonal arcade, which are considered as belonging to the oldest Islamic inscriptions ever. It contains, apart from verses from the Holy Qur'an, strong polemic against Christianity, while stressing at the same time the Qur'anic doctrine that Jesus Christ, the son of Mary, was a true prophet. German scholar and professor for semitic and arabic languages Christoph Luxenberg had recently claimed that the text may in fact point to the Christian origin of the building. From the January - February 2009 issue of Saudi Aramaco World : "One hundred and fifty years ago, in 1859, M. J. Diness made the first known photographs ...

When I recently visited Yemen , I had read about a sensation which had happened more than 30 years ago. When restoring parts of the Grand Mosque in Sana’a in 1972, workers stumbled in a small niche between the outer and inner structure of the roof across fragments of paper manuscripts. Careless as they were, they packed the pages into potato bags and subsequently forgot about them. Years later, the president of the Yemeni Antiquities Authority, Qadhi Ismail al-Aqwa’, realized that he had to ask for international assistance to study what is now known as one of the oldest versions of the Holy Qur’an. It was the German Qur’anic paleographic Gerhard R. Puin who started the restoration of the tens of thousands of fragments of the Holy Scripture. Little has been published in the meantime since the message might be too disturbing for the common faithful Muslim. See the article by Toby Lester in The Atlantic Monthly here . In upcoming August, there might be another heavy dispute about the hid...