Fragments believed to be the oldest surviving pages of the Muslim holy book the Quran have been discovered as part of a collection of Middle Eastern texts and documents at the University of Birmingham in England, according to various media reports.
The manuscript has been radiocarbon dating found the manuscript was at least 1,370 years old, which BBC News said would make it among the earliest in existence. The document was made of sheep or goat skin, and was found by Alba Fedeli, a Ph. D. researcher at the university.
According to the New York Times, Fedeli was studying a text and found that two of its pages did not appear to have the same scripts as a similar, more recent Quranic manuscript. She convinced the university to have the document sent out for radiocarbon testing, which revealed that the text was old enough to have been transcribed by a contemporary of the Prophet Muhammad.
Susan Worrall, the university’s director of special collections, told BBC News that they never “in our wildest dreams” expected the document to be as old as it is. Dr. Muhammad Isa Waley of the British Library added that it was an “exciting discovery” that would make Muslims “rejoice.”
Parchment dated to between AD 568 and 645
The pages discovered at the Birmingham library contained portions of what are now Chapters 18 and 20, the New York Times said, and consisted of a pair of parchment leaves that had mistakenly been found with leaves belonging to a similar manuscript. Radiocarbon analysis dated the pages to between AD 568 and 645 with a 95.4 percent accuracy, the university added.
They explained that the testing was conducted at a laboratory at the University of Oxford. This result places the leaves at around the same time as the Prophet Muhammad, who is believed to have lived between AD 570 and 632. The Birmingham researchers conclude that this is among the earliest written textual evidence of the Islamic holy book still in existence today.
“By separating the two leaves and analysing the parchment, we have brought to light an amazing find,” Worrall said, adding that the radiocarbon dating outcome “contributes significantly to our understanding of the earliest written copies of the Quran… We are thrilled that such an important historical document is here in Birmingham, the most culturally diverse city in the UK.”
Professor David Thomas, Professor of Christianity and Islam and Nadir Dinshaw Professor of Interreligious Relations at the university, added that the tests “yield the strong probability that the animal from which it was taken was alive during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad… This means that the parts of the Qur’an that are written on this parchment can, with a degree of confidence, be dated to less than two decades after Muhammad’s death.”
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