The early history of the Qurʾānic text is a field that has seen striking progress in recent decades, despite the fact that only a limited number of really early copies of the Qurʾān, or substantial parts of it, survive today. One of them is a codex large parts of which are found in two manuscripts preserved in the library of the sanctuary in Mashhad. Radio-carbon dating indicates that this codex could be from as early as the second half of the first/seventh century, and palaeographical study supports such a dating. The text is largely identical with the form of the standard text that our sources associate with Medina, but occasionally it agrees instead with readings tied to other regions. By contrast, the division of the text into verses diverges from those of all the various regional traditions known to us. Surprisingly, at three points the codex appears to preserve older readings where those of the standard text were on one account introduced by Ḥajjāj (d. 95/714), the governor of Iraq. For all these reasons and more, making such a codex available to scholars is in itself a valuable service to the study of the history of the Qurʾān.
But this codex is not just early, it is also very intriguing. Like almost all our witnesses to the early Qurʾān, it contains the text more or less as standardized in the mid-seventh century, and with the Sūras in the standard order. Yet Karimi-Nia’s careful study shows beyond doubt that the order of the Sūras was reworked at some point in the later history of the codex by a drastic process of cutting and pasting. Originally the Sūras were in a quite different order, one identical with that described in our sources for a version of the text that we no longer possess, but know to have antedated the standardization. This leads to yet another puzzle: this lost version was associated with the city of Kūfa (and Ibn Masʿūd) in Iraq, whereas the version of the standard text behind the Codex Mashhad is Medinese. Just what circumstances gave rise to this strange hybrid — almost though not quite unique — is a fascinating question. Whatever the answer, this codex is a key exhibit in the little-known history of the relationship between the standard text and those it replaced.
