Fragments of an early Koran were discovered bound within the pages of another Koran from the late seventh century at the library of the University of Birmingham. The pages were thought to be between 1,448 and 1,371 years old, but carbon dating reveals that they could be older than Prophet Mohammed, thus rewriting the early history of Islam, say scholars.
The dating reveals the text to have been written between AD 568 and 645, while the dates of Mohammed's life are traditionally given as AD 570 to 632. This means that at the very latest it was written before the first formal texts were supposed to have been collated, and at the earliest it was written before or shortly after Mohammed was born, thus contradicting traditional accounts of his life and radically altering "the edifice of Islamic tradition," reports Brietbart News.
"It destabilises, to put it mildly, the idea that we can know anything with certainty about how the Koran emerged - and that in turn has implications for the historicity of Muhammad and the Companions [his followers]," historian Tom Holland told the Sunday Times, according to Brietbart News.
Muslim academics have disputed the claims. "If anything, the manuscript has consolidated traditional accounts of the Koran's origins," said Mustafa Shah of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), reports the Daily Mail.
"We already know from our sources that the Koran was a closed text very early on in Islam, and these discoveries only attest to the accuracy of these sources," said Shady Hekmat Nasser from the University of Cambridge, according to onilsam.net.
Keith Small, Koranic manuscript consultant at Oxford's Bodleian Library, says that while carbon dating applies to the parchment, not the ink, he believes the dates are probably correct and could raise serious questions for Islam.
"If the [carbon] dates apply to the parchment and the ink, and the dates across the entire range apply, then the Koran - or at least portions of it - pre-dates Muhammad, and moves back the years that an Arabic literary culture is in place well into the 500s.This gives more ground to what have been peripheral views of the Koran's genesis, like that Muhammad and his early followers used a text that was already in existence and shaped it to fit their own political and theological agenda, rather than Muhammad receiving a revelation from heaven.
"This would radically alter the edifice of Islamic tradition and the history of the rise of Islam in late Near Eastern antiquity would have to be completely revised, somehow accounting for another book of scripture coming into existence 50 to 100 years before, and then also explaining how this was co-opted into what became the entity of Islam by around AD 700," Small said, according to Brietbart News.
