The Brubaker home was honored to host Dr. Gerd-R Puin, the well-known German scholar of Quran manuscripts and one-time cataloguer and caretaker of the so-called Sanaa Manuscripts shortly after the time of their first discovery in Yemen. Dr. Puin traveled to Virginia to present a paper on a panel I led at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) in Washington, DC from October 31-November 3, 2019.
Also on the panel, and also a guest in our home, was the eminent Tom Milo of DecoType, creator and lead designer of the Azhar-approved Omani digital Qurʾan, the Muṣḥaf Muscat. This was not Tom Milo’s first visit, but we are always honored and stimulated to have him.
Also a houseguest and attendee of our conference panel was Ibn Warraq, author of the bestselling “Why I Am Not A Muslim,” now approaching its 25th year of publication and soon to be re-released in an updated edition. Ibn Warraq is also the author of many other books. He has been a friend or ours now for a number of years.
Finally, we were paid a visit by our friend, Hythem Sidky, who joined us for dinner one evening. Hythem is a molecular biologist (in which is his Ph.D.) who also is regularly engaged in high level discourse about Quran manuscripts and the Quran’s early history with a number of our colleagues and discussion groups in this area.
You may imagine the excellent conversation that was had with this convergence of scholars late into the evening.
During these days, Milo, Puin, and myself formulated initial plans to convene a conference on the Quran in Northern Virginia in 2021.
It has been my great pleasure to get to know these these men over the past decade. Puin, Milo, and Warraq have all become good friends to me personally in addition to their role of colleagues in the field of study that has captured our mutual interest. It has also been good, over the past year or so, to make better acquaintance of Dr. Sidky.