Gerd R. Puin


Gerd Rüdiger Puin is a German scholar on Quranic historical palaeography, the study and scholarly interpretation of ancient manuscripts and an orientalist. He is also a specialist in Arabic orthography. He was a lecturer of Arabic at Saarland University, in Saarbrücken Germany.

Sana'a Quran find

Gerd Puin was the head of a restoration project, commissioned by the Yemeni government, which spent a significant amount of time examining the ancient Quranic manuscripts discovered in Sana'a, Yemen, in 1972, in order to find criteria for systematically cataloging them. According to writer Toby Lester, his examination revealed "unconventional verse orderings, minor textual variations, and rare styles of orthography and artistic embellishment." The scriptures were written in the early Hijazi Arabic script, matching the pieces of the earliest Qurans known to exist. Some of the papyrus on which the text appears shows clear signs of earlier use, being that previous, washed-off writings are also visible on it. In 2008 and 2009 Dr Elisabeth Puin published detailed results of the analysis of Sanaa manuscript DAM 01.27-1 proving that the text was still in flux in the time span between the scriptio inferior and the scriptio superior of the palimpsest.
More than 15,000 sheets of the Yemeni Qurans have painstakingly been cleaned, treated, sorted, cataloged and photographed and 35,000 microfilmed photos have been made of the manuscripts. Some of Puin's initial remarks on his findings are found in his essay titled the "Observations on Early Qur'an Manuscripts in San'a" which has been republished in the book What the Koran Really Says by Ibn Warraq.
With his approach of research Puin is a representative of the "Saarbrücken School" which is part of the Revisionist School of Islamic Studies.

Assessment of the Quran

In an article in 1999 Atlantic Monthly, Gerd Puin is quoted as saying that:

Writings

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