Abstract
How can we understand Islam without knowing how its founding text, the Koran , was formed and then fixed? The discovery of a palimpsest in Sanaa in 1973 confirmed the existence of other recensions of the Koranic text in the early centuries of Islam. Their study, combined with that of the manuscripts of the dominant transmission, has made it possible to identify the different strata of the text and the variants that were gradually discarded. This unprecedented approach to the Koran has profoundly renewed the intellectual and cultural history of the Muslim world.
