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Finding a treasure: A Quran is dated to the time of Muhammad

Finding a treasure: A Quran is dated to the time of Muhammad

For nearly a century, no one thought much about the fact that not all the pages of a Quran owned by the library at the University of Birmingham in London fit together stylistically. It took Alba Fedeli, a researcher working on her doctorate at the university, to notice that the beautiful calligraphy of one set of pages didn’t match the pages before or after it.

Ms. Fedeli’s suspicions that there was far more to those pages than could be accounted for in the book the pages were bound in prompted the university to send the pages out for closer inspection and dating by the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit.

When the report came back, it was clear that Ms. Fedeli’s keen eye had indeed unearthed a treasure sitting in plain sight, what is believed to be part of the world’s oldest copy of the Quran. Inscribed on either sheep or goat skin, the two parchment leaves are believed with 94 percent certainty to date back 1,370 years to the time of the Prophet Muhammad.

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The parchments are believed to have been written between 568 and 645. Muhammad died in 632. It is possible the pages were transcribed by a contemporary of Muhammad’s long before finished versions of the Quran entered the world’s spiritual bloodstream.

The parchment contains parts of what now are chapters 18 to 20 of the Quran. Some Islamic scholars, though happy about the discovery, remind fellow scholars and believers that jumping to conclusions this early in the process would not be wise. It is possible the parchment was written later than the radiocarbon report allows because of the style in which it is written.

Still the discovery of this parchment is an occasion for the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims to celebrate a once-hidden connection to the earliest days of their faith.

Meet the Editorial Board.

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First Published: July 27, 2015, 4:00 a.m.

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