When identifying and locating early Qurʾānic fragments from the first centuries of Islam they sometimes appear as pieces of an, as yet, incomplete body of knowledge. Their actual situation as single leaves and quires, rather than complete manuscript copies of the Qurʾānic text, could correspond to the practice described in the account of Ibn Abī Dāwud about the habit of copying the text from one leaf to another leaf or from one verse to another verse or from one word to another word. Nevertheless among these fragments there are traces of unity in the single leaves that later scribes have sometimes used and transformed into codices.

Despite first considering these single leaves as disparate fragments, when we endeavour to understand the fragments of these early Qurʾānic copies at our disposal, we should not be oblivious to the fragmentation of our knowledge about them, as the extraordinary and (un)expected manuscript findings of the last decades have made great strides forward, as with the rediscovery of the lost archive of Gotthelf Bergstrasser (1886-1933) or the new discoveries from the Great Mosque of Ṣanʿāʾ in 2007. In particular, the materials collected by Alphonse Mingana (1878-1937) are an interesting case of fragmentary knowledge with regard to a hidden fragment of a Qurʾānic palimpsest and three uncatalogued Qurʾānic papyri

Access to Early Qurʾānic Leaves and Fragmentary Knowledge

The case of the lost photograph archive assembled by Bergstrasser, with the newly developed first transportable Leica photo-camera in the late 1920s and 1930s, is emblematic of the incomplete picture that scholars have been describing for at least sixty years. It was generally thought that Bergstrasser's photographic collection was destroyed during bombing in 1944, although his contemporaries evidently knew that these photographs were extant after World War II, considering that Giorgio Levi Della Vida (1886-1967) wrote in his catalogue of the Qurʾānic manuscripts of the Vatican Library in 1947 that ‘fear of the collection's destruction during the recent war seems luckily unfounded, if the news we heard was accurate; however, it is not yet possible to foresee how and when the collection could be again at scholars’ disposal.’ Even though fear of the collection's destruction proved to be unfounded and the rumours of its survival were accurate, the materials were only made available to scholars, after the death of the German philologist Anton Spitaler (1910-2003), as it was he who had been holding Bergstrasser's archive.