The Birmingham Qur'an Manuscript: Two Leaves and a Date

In 2015 a doctoral researcher, Alba Fedeli, was studying Qur'an fragments in the Mingana Collection at the University of Birmingham. She noticed that two leaves bound into one manuscript did not belong with the rest. Their script was different, and so was their parchment. They had been misbound with leaves of another early Qur'an. The university sent samples to the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit. The answer came back 568–645 CE, at 95.4% probability. News reports around the world called them among the oldest Qur'an fragments known.

The leaves and their text

• Two folios of parchment, written on both sides in Hijazi script. This early Arabic hand slopes to the right, leaves out vowel signs and marks only some of the dots that distinguish letters.
• They carry parts of Sura 18 (al-Kahf, verses 17–31), the end of Sura 19 (Maryam, 91–98) and the start of Sura 20 (Ṭā Hā, 1–40). The text is in the order and wording of the standard text.
• The leaves came to Birmingham with the manuscripts collected in the 1920s by Alphonse Mingana, a scholar from what is now Iraq. The collecting trips were funded by Edward Cadbury.

Part of a book in Paris. Scholars soon recognised the Birmingham leaves as belonging to the same codex as sixteen leaves in Paris (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Arabe 328(c)). In December 2015 François Déroche endorsed the identification that Fedeli had proposed. The Birmingham leaves even fill a gap in the Paris text. The Paris leaves are generally held to come from the great store of old Qur'an copies at the Mosque of ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ in Fustat (Old Cairo), from which a French vice-consul acquired manuscripts in the early nineteenth century.

What a radiocarbon date measures

The date is real, but it measures one thing: when the animal whose skin became the parchment died. It does not say when the ink went onto the skin. Three limits follow:

1. The range is wide. 568–645 CE covers the whole traditional lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad (c. 570–632) and the years after, up to the caliphate of ʿUthmān.
2. Parchment could be stored. Writing usually followed soon after the skin was prepared, but not always.
3. Calibration has surprised before. Déroche pointed out that radiocarbon has sometimes given dates too early for Qur'an manuscripts whose dates are known from endowment notes. He also noted that the Paris leaves of the same codex had not been tested.

So the result is consistent with the leaves being written within a few decades of the Prophet's death. It does not prove that they were written in his lifetime, as some headlines claimed. Nor does it show that the text existed before him, as some online arguments claimed.

The text in the history of the Qur'an

Islamic tradition holds that the Qur'an was revealed to Muhammad and memorised and written down in his lifetime. It then holds that the third caliph, ʿUthmān (r. 644–656), had a single standard copy made and sent to the main cities. The Birmingham leaves follow that standard text, the one found in almost every Qur'an manuscript. For many Muslims they are a tangible sign of the text's preservation. For historians they are one of the early witnesses to how quickly the standard text spread in written form.

Symbology and sacred encoding

The rasm and the dots. Early Qur'an manuscripts write the rasm, the consonant skeleton, and add only some of the dots (iʿjām) that tell apart letters of the same shape, such as ب ت ث ن. There are no short-vowel signs. The full system of dots and vowel marks was added over the next two centuries. The interactive text above shows this by stripping a modern text back to its skeleton.

Verse dividers and sura breaks. Hijazi scribes marked verse endings with small clusters of strokes, and sometimes left a space or a decorated band between suras. These are the beginnings of the Qur'an's later illumination.

The disconnected letters. Sura 20 opens with the letters Ṭā Hā. Twenty-nine suras begin with such letters (al-ḥurūf al-muqaṭṭaʿāt). Their meaning is not known. Muslim tradition and modern scholars have proposed many explanations, and none is agreed.

Connections

Islam (ch21) and the Sana'a Palimpsest (V29), a very different early Qur'an manuscript. Compare the Dead Sea Scrolls (V02) and the Codex Sinaiticus (V18) as early witnesses to other scriptures.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/birmingham-quran.html