The Sana manuscripts is a palimpsest manuscripts ; which means that there is a lower and upper layers of writing . Scholars say that the two writings are late seventh and early eighth century respectively. They think that it is two versions of the Quran; the first is a pre- standard Quran which was erased and rewritten as the canonical version. On comparing the two writing , it was found that there are seventy variants between the two. Dr Jay says that the lower text was erased because it needed to be updated.

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1. Dr Jay Smith discusses the book that Dr Asma Hilali wrote on the Sana Palimpsest manuscripts. He talks about the conclusions that she came up with by comparing it to todays Hafs Quran; she says that there are seventy variants in sixty three verses. She also believes that it is a student text. Jay says that that shuts down the idea of the preservation of the Quran which both Muslim and the Quran claim ( ie Sura 85: 21,22). Then Jay and Al discuss some of the differences as examples. Then they ask the question : Is the Quran perfectly preserved?

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The Sana'a manuscript was discovered in Yemen in 1975, it is very old with no dots and vowels. It is a palimpsest (It has two layers of writings). It had late 7th to 8th century scripts. It was carbon tested at the university of Arizona in 2007, and was dated to mid 7th century. The same segment was taken to four Europeans labs and they did not agree with the Arizona dating. Shoemaker concludes that there is a problem with the carbon dating because the process dates the skin of the animal not the time the writing was written

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