Raiders of the Lost Ark
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...