Last year, three leaves of an ancient Koran held at the University of Birmingham made global headlines when carbon dating suggested that they dated to Mohammed’s lifetime. But while initial media coverage emphasised the apparent continuity of the Koranic text over the centuries, another interpretation soon emerged. As Keith Small of the Bodleian Library told the Daily Mail, the age of the fragments could reinforce views that Mohammed and his companions “used a text that was already in existence and shaped it to fit their own political and theological agenda”.
Controversial? Just a little. Lost amid the hype, however, was the story of how the leaves got to England in the first place. They were purchased in the 1930s by Alphonse Mingana, a Birmingham-based Chaldean Christian scholar from Iraq who – fittingly enough – was no stranger to controversy himself.
Mingana was born in 1878 outside Mosul, a tragic name in the era of ISIS but which was then still home to an ancient Christian population. The eldest of eight children, he was educated in French schools and entered the Dominican-run Mosul seminary aged 12. He thus acquired an excellent education and fluency in Syriac (both ancient and modern), Arabic, Turkish, Persian and French.
Fascinated by Church history, Mingana started collecting ancient Syriac manuscripts in his early 20s. In 1905, he published an ambitious two-volume edition of the works of Narsai, a 5th-century Nestorian poet and theologian. But Mingana’s budding career suffered when he was accused of making additions to one ancient text and forging another. Although Mingana mounted a vigorous defence, his reputation never fully recovered.
He continued publishing until 1908, when a mysterious crisis brought his activities to a five-year halt. In Mingana’s obituary this long blackout was ascribed to “theological difficulties”, while the Egyptian Jesuit priest and scholar Samir Khalil Samir suggests that he ran afoul of the Chaldean Patriarch. Either way, the silence lasted until 1913, when Mingana left Iraq, travelling through the Ottoman Empire and Persia until he finally arrived in England with one address in his pocket, that of the biblical scholar James Rendel Harris.
Now the second phase of Mingana’s career began. Based in Woodbroke, a Quaker study centre in Birmingham, Mingana set to work writing, lecturing and publishing. He was soon embroiled in a fresh controversy. In 1914 he co-authored an analysis of some ancient fragments of the Koran held in Cambridge University Library. Mingana argued that they predated the final and official revision of the text by Uthman, the third caliph. However, the book provoked a hostile response, and soon vanished.
Mingana carried on regardless. In 1915 he married and moved to Manchester, where he spent the next 17 years cataloguing the Arabic manuscripts at the John Rylands Library. Mingana found many lost wonders, including The Book of Religion and Empire, a work of apologetics by a 10th-century Christian convert to Islam, and The Book of Treasures by Job of Edessa, an important work for the history of Islamic science. He also uncovered apocryphal Christian works, including one where Pontius Pilate becomes a Christian martyr.
During World War I Mingana worked as a linguist for the British Admiralty and War Office, producing a phrasebook containing English words and their equivalents in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Armenian, Kurdish and Syriac (entirely his work except for the Armenian). He also wrote articles on the Middle East for the Manchester Guardian.
In the 1920s Mingana became a British citizen and returned to the Middle East in pursuit of ancient manuscripts. Funded by the Quaker industrialist Edward Cadbury, Mingana undertook three expeditions, in 1924, 1925 and 1929, which saw him travel to Mosul, Beirut, Aleppo, Kurdistan, Damascus, Baghdad, Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula and beyond.
Mingana’s expertise, linguistic dexterity and impressive negotiating skills enabled him to amass an incredible collection of rarities, including 2,000 Islamic manuscripts in Arabic, and almost 1,000 Arabic and Syriac Christian manuscripts including gospels, liturgical works, homilies and lives of saints. He also acquired Armenian, Coptic, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Persian, Samaritan and Sanskrit manuscripts – although ironically he bought the now famous Birmingham leaves from a dealer in the Netherlands in 1936.
Clearly, Mingana was a remarkable man who led a remarkable life. Sadly, he only ever jotted down a few brief notes about the things he had experienced on his travels, such as an account of a night in a Yazidi “Devil worshipper village”, or an amusing tale about some dealers who offered him a Christian manuscript “older than Christ’’, yet which was produced with a printing press.
In 1932 he returned to Birmingham to catalogue the manuscripts he had collected. Settling into a house he named “Manuscripta”, he thought he had years to catalogue his collection, but a premature death in 1937 brought his work to a close.
His legacy was assured, however. According to Samir Khalil Samir, the Mingana collection’s Syriac section ranks as the third most important in the West, after the British Library and the Vatican Library. As for the Christian Arabic section, only the Vatican Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris have greater holdings in the West, while the Islamic Arabic section is “large and noteworthy”.
At a time when Eastern Christianity faces extinction, the immense value of Mingana’s work retrieving manuscripts from oblivion is more obvious than ever. Nevertheless, he would also have been pleased with the attention given to his sideline in Islamic texts.
His controversial 1914 work on the Koran was not the only time he dug into the origins of Islam’s holy book. In 1927 he published a paper on the Syriac influence on the style of the Koran. There he insisted that the Koran should be subjected “to the same criticism as that to which we subject the Hebrew and Aramaic of the Jewish Bible, and the Greek of the Christian scriptures”.
What Mingana couldn’t imagine was that less than a century later, scientific methods could be combined with textual analysis to delve deep into the Koran’s genesis. Without his trailblazing work, no such inquiries would be possible.
Daniel Kalder is an author and journalist. Visit danielkalder.com
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