Qur’an fragment dated back to the time of Muhammad
LONDON: A British university said yesterday that fragments of a Qur’an manuscript found in its library were from one of the oldest surviving copies of the Islamic text in the world, possibly written by someone who might have known Prophet Muhammad.
Radiocarbon dating indicated that the parchment folios held by the University of Birmingham in central England were at least 1 370 years old, which would make them one of the earliest written forms of the holy book in existence.
“They could well take us back to within a few years of the actual founding of Islam,” said David Thomas, Professor of Christianity and Islam at the university.
Researchers said the manuscript consisted of two parchment leaves and contained parts of Suras (chapters) 18 to 20, and was written with ink in an early form of Arabic script known as Hijazi.
The university said for years it had been misbound with leaves of a similar Koran manuscript which dated from the late seventh century.
The radiocarbon dating, said to have a 95.4 percent accuracy, found the parchment dated from between 568AD and 645AD. Muhammad is believed to have lived between 570AD and 632AD.
Thomas said the tests strongly suggested the animal from which the parchment was taken was alive during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad or shortly afterwards.
“The person who actually wrote it may well have known the Prophet Muhammad. He would have seen him probably, he would maybe have heard him preach,” Thomas said.
The manuscript was part of a collection of 3 000 Middle Eastern documents acquired in the 1920s by Alphonse Mingana, a Chaldean priest.
His trips were funded by philanthropist Edward Cadbury to raise the status of Birmingham as an intellectual centre for religious studies.
“The parts of the Koran that are contained in those fragments are very similar indeed to the Koran as we have it today,” Thomas said.
“So this tends to support the view that the Koran that we now have is more or less very close indeed to the Koran as it was brought together in the early years of Islam.”
The university said it would put the manuscript on public display in October, and Muhammad Afzal, chairman of Birmingham Central Mosque, said he expected it to attract people from all over Britain.
“When I saw these pages I was very moved. There were tears of joy and emotion in my eyes,” he told the BBC.