A university assistant shows fragments of an old Quran at the University in Birmingham, in central England on July 22, 2015.(Photo: Frank Augstein, AP)
A Quran manuscript long held by a British university is now believed to be among the world's oldest, written close to the time of the prophet Mohammed.
Radiocarbon testing on the document found the parchment on which the text was written dates to a similar time period as Mohammed, who is believed to have lived between 570 and 632, the University of Birmingham said in a statement Wednesday.
"Researchers conclude that the Quran manuscript is among the earliest written textual evidence of the Islamic holy book known to survive," according to the statement.
The manuscript consists of two parchment leaves and contains parts of the suras, or chapters, 18 to 20 written in an early form of Arabic known as Hijazi. Radiocarbon analysis dated the parchment to between 568 and 645 with a 95.4% accuracy. The leaves had been incorrectly bound for years with documents of a similar Quran from a more recent century. The new tests were prompted by questions from a doctoral student.
"The radiocarbon dating of the Birmingham Quran folios has yielded a startling result and reveals one of the most surprising secrets of the university's collections," David Thomas, a professor of Christianity and Islam at the University of Birmingham, said in the statement. "They could well take us back to within a few years of the actual founding of Islam."
According to Muslim tradition, the prophet Mohammed received the revelations that form the Quran between 610 and 632, the year of his death, Thomas said. However, the revelations weren't immediately written down. Caliph Abu Bakr, the first leader of the Muslim community after Mohammed, ordered the Quran to be written into book form, which was completed around 650 under the direction of the third leader, Caliph Uthman, Thomas added.
"This is indeed an exciting discovery. We know now that these two folios, in a beautiful and surprisingly legible Hijazi hand, almost certainly date from the time of the first three Caliphs," Muhammad Isa Waley, lead curator for Persian and Turkish Manuscripts at the British Library, said in a statement.
Muslims believe today's Quran is the same text that was finished and standardized in 650, regarding it as a precise record of the revelations sent to the prophet, Thomas said.
"These portions must have been in a form that is very close to the form of the Quran read today, supporting the view that the text has undergone little or no alteration and that it can be dated to a point very close to the time it was believed to be revealed," Thomas said.
According to tests results, there's a strong probability the animal from which the parchment was made was alive during the lifetime of prophet Mohammad or shortly afterward, Thomas said.
"This means that the parts of the Quran that are written on this parchment can, with a degree of confidence, be dated to less than two decades after Mohammed's death," Thomas said.
The document is part of the university's Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts, held in the Cadbury Research Library. The library contains some 200,000 pre-1850 books dating from 1471 and some 4 million manuscripts. The Quran manuscript will be on public display at the university from Oct. 2 to Oct. 25
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