For centuries, Cairo's oldest mosque, the Mosque of 'Amr ibn al-'As, built in 641-642, housed one of the world's oldest collections of Koranic manuscripts. Thousands of sheets of parchment, written during the first four centuries of Islam, were "thrown in a heap, at the bottom of the underground [...] abandoned to humidity, rot and destruction..." as Jean-Joseph Marcel, one of the mosque's visitors in the early 19th century, described it.
Since then, the vicissitudes of history have scattered this primitive collection to the four corners of the globe. Curiosity collectors and Western scholars have coveted these treasures, most often reduced to fragments. As a result, it is not uncommon to find in the collections of the West's most prestigious libraries folios that originally formed a single volume. Recently, the Franco-German scientific project PALEOCORAN, led by François Déroche (Collège de France, Paris) and Michael Marx (Corpus Coranicum, Berlin), obtained the support of the Agence Nationale de Recherche and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, to carry out a study of this bibliotheca coranica. By virtually reassembling the dispersed fragments and reconstructing the manuscripts in this way, the researchers involved in this project hope to obtain new data for approaching the history of the Koran. This library raises many questions: how was the collection built up? Was it locally produced or imported? Did the city of Fusṭāṭ play an important role in the copying and transmission of the Koranic text?
To date, the date or location of the copying of these manuscripts eludes us, with no direct information in this regard appearing before the second half of the IXᵉ century. However, specialists are overcoming this obstacle by using a variety of methods: material analysis of the book, study of the writing and decoration, physico-chemical analyses, and finally a textual approach. These methods are gradually enriching our knowledge of the first stages in the handwritten transmission of the Koranic text.