Fragments of World's Oldest Koran May Predate Muhammad | Hacker News Reader

Fragments of World's Oldest Koran May Predate Muhammad

news.discovery.com

Alright, this headline just seems wrong.

First, radiocarbon dating comes with error bars. The date range identified is from 570 C.E. to 632 C.E. Given that Muhammad is thought to have founded Islam in the period from 610 C.E. to 630 C.E., and that date keeping was relatively good in this period, this would seem to confirm rather than dispute the traditional accounts.

Second, the radiocarbon dating was performed on the parchment only, not the ink, as the article belatedly notes. Given the practice of ancient scribes to re-use parchment repeatedly, a rather unfortunate practice that has resulted in the loss of uncountable ancient texts, the age of the writing would be controlling, not the age of the parchment.

Third, I'm forced to draw a rather unfortunate conclusion from this information. The assertion in this article seems deliberately calculated to undermine the historicity of Islam. There is a very sad and shortsighted movement in some corners of military scholarship right now that identifies Islam itself as the enemy, often beginning with Huntington's "clash of civilizations" narrative and ending with some examples of sheer lunacy, such as the recent article by a West Point associate professor arguing that legal human rights scholars are "an Islamist fifth column."

Islam is one of the world's great religions, and like all religions it inspires everything from massive works of charity to zealotry, persecution, and bigotry. I have known many good people who drew their strength from Islam, and condemning an entire religion is a type of insanity that is directly contrary to the founding principles of the United States.

Islam is not the enemy. Those who would pervert it for their own violent ends are. We cannot lose that distinction.

> and like all religions it inspires everything from massive works of charity to zealotry, persecution, and bigotry.

A few people try to claim that other religions don't inspire terrorist groups, but that's clearly bullshit.

Buddhism is generally seen as pacifist but there's a Buddhist army and probably 2 Buddhist terrorist groups. (And that's not including Aum Shinryko)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Karen_Buddhist_Army

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodu_Bala_Sena

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/969_Movement

etc.

Wholeheartedly agreed. The ethnic cleansing by the Buddhist majority of the Muslim minority in Myanmar is horrifying right now.

I'm very disappointed in Aung San Suu Kyi's leadership thus far. I suppose we'll see what she does after the election.

I don't think you can blame her. She's in a very difficult position. She has to think of getting the country from under the throes of dictatorship before she can address civil rights. If she starts with civil rights, her effort will sputter and nothing will happen.

I agree that she's in an impossible position, with the Junta on one side and Buddhist extremists on the other, but her extreme popularity makes her uniquely capable of speaking up on behalf of the Rohingya.

Also, she seems to be constructing her party along an authoritarian model. I was a supporter of her while under detention, but today I just don't know. I very sincerely hope she lives up to her rhetoric once in power.

I hadn't heard of the Buddhist Army, so I looked at your link in wiki. Kind of undermines your point.

> Though the majority of Karens are Buddhist, the Karen political leadership and leadership of the Karen insurgency have been overwhelmingly Christian, as a legacy of American missionary influence over the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Re-read the first line:

> The Democratic Karen Benevolent Army formerly known as Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (Burmese: တိုးတက်သော ဗုဒ္ဓဘာသာ ကရင်အမျိုးသား တပ်ဖွဲ့; abbreviated DKBA) is a breakaway group of Buddhist former soldiers and officers of the predominantly Karen Christian led Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), one of the larger insurgent armies in Burma.

The KNLA is mostly Christian. The DBKA is the buddhist breakaway group.

I would add the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar where religious buddhist leaders largely are the ones stirring up the bad feelings against "the muslims"

Also the time Buddhists tried to reestablish their feudal theocracy with weapons they got from the CIA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_Tibetan_program)

> The first known formal text of the Koran was not assembled until 653 A.D. on the orders of Uthman

Hence the predating. It was memorized and written on leaves, stones etc. before that. Even if it was assembled before the said date, still a large portion of official Islamic history is at stake.

And what we have here are a few fragments of the Quran that may or may not predate the other fragments. That doesn't seem contradictory with the current historical understanding.

This article states that the Quran may predate Muhammad, which is a very much different assertion.

I don't think this is set out to undermine religion. Believers will believe despite strong contrary evidence, if anything, it redoubles their beliefs.

That said, if scholarly religious studies or any studies undermine the great religions and lesser religions, all the better. We'll all be better off without fervent believers. I understand the cultural aspect of these religions will outlast religion and I'm okay with that. It's part of people's cultural identities.

I don't think for example, we should start renaming all the "San/Santa xxxxxx" city names to secular names.

I seem to be writing short comments this morning myself, for which I apologize, but this is an absolutely terrible non-argument. You have a thesis statement, an assertion of fact that is essentially irrelevant to that thesis, and then the assertion that, besides, it would be good if your thesis was wrong.

What you actually meant to say is "if scholarly religious studies do undermine the great religions and lesser religions, all the better." Which is fine, if that's an assertion you'd like to share with us, but you're not really all that interested in whether or not the article undermines religion; not enough to actually have anything to say about it.

To undermine a religion, it's necessary for the religion to have fragile beliefs or beliefs proven untrue and accepted untrue. Since their beliefs are faith based, it's hard to undermine them. Believers would have to believe these findings upended their religions, which is something I find unlikely. So, it's almost impossible to undermine them.

The only thing these findings do is reinforce what non believers already know and adds to historical knowledge. Therefore I don't think it sets out to undermine religion.

What is the thing that "non-believers already know" that these findings reinforce? I do not think that you will find a rational basis for any such thing in the facts cited by the article, as I shall discuss presently. This suggests that it is the tone and context of the article which provides your feeling of 'reinforcement', which in turn suggests that what is being appealed to is not your capability for reason, but your acquired prejudices.

The article presents a single scientific finding: the parchment on which the Birmingham Koran was written was very likely manufactured sometime between 568 AD and 632 AD. That is all. There is no other finding presented in the article.

The article presents four pieces of valid contextual information regarding dates. Firstly, that Muhammed most likely lived between 570 AD and 645 AD. Secondly, that Islam is generally regarded as having been founded in 610 AD. Thirdly, that the first Muslim community was established at Medina in 622 AD. Fourthly, that the first known 'official' version of the Koran was assembled on the orders of the third Caliph, Uthman, in 653 AD.

The article also clarifies it is known for a fact that many sections of the Koran had been written down well before 653 AD.

In this context, we have Keith Small's statement: "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,"

Clearly, the prior existence of the text of the Koran would establish a solid, factual doubt regarding the story of the Koran's origins. But just as clearly, no such thing is established here. The evidence presented merely fails to eliminate the possibility the Koran could have been written before so-and-so date. The parchment could have been written on before 610 AD, for instance. But even if it had not been, the possibility that parts of the Koran predated Islam would remain, because there is no way to disprove a hypothetical.

Thus, it is hard to see how the assertion that 'more ground is given' makes any sense outside of a prejudicial, opinionated context. There is no ground given that was not already there. What Keith Small is announcing is basically that the available evidence fails to disprove his admittedly fringe hypothesis. What he is overlooking is that the evidence we are discussing could only ever has (a) proven, or (b) failed to disprove his hypothesis. It was never at risk of falsification.

There is no rational basis to regard the "failure to disprove" as significant, and to treat it as such is evidence a prejudicial and emotive involvement in the subject matter.

> The assertion in this article seems deliberately calculated to undermine the historicity of Islam. There is a very sad and shortsighted movement in some corners of military scholarship right now that identifies Islam itself as the enemy...

FWIW I've seem some pretty ridiculous "historical" claims made against the historicity of Christianity. When it comes to the history of someone else's religion, I find people tend to tolerate a lot of sloppiness. I wouldn't take this article as specifically anti-Islam, but rather an example of such sloppiness.

> Given the practice of ancient scribes to re-use parchment repeatedly, a rather unfortunate practice that has resulted in the loss of uncountable ancient texts...

I wonder if future historians will look back on modern mutable storage devices with the same distain.

> Third, I'm forced to draw a rather unfortunate conclusion from this information. The assertion in this article seems deliberately calculated to undermine the historicity of Islam. There is a very sad and shortsighted movement in some corners of military scholarship right now that identifies Islam itself as the enemy, often beginning with Huntington's "clash of civilizations" narrative and ending with some examples of sheer lunacy, such as the recent article by a West Point associate professor arguing that legal human rights scholars are "an Islamist fifth column."

This is an article from a private news source about work done by academics at a private university, saying that the parchment MAY predate the accepted dates of Islam's founding. How do you get from that to military scholarship and an attack on Islam?

It's perfectly possible (leaving aside the deficiencies in the radiocarbon dating) to believe that the accepted dates are incorrect without condemning Islam in any way. People frequently discuss errors in the histories of other religions (e.g. the Old Testament has god giving an incorrect value of Pi) without condemning their followers in any way.

tl;dr: "undermine the historicity of Islam" != "condemning an entire religion"

This is a very good point.

I'm drawing on a few cues here that raise my antennae, e.g. the conflict with scholars of Islam, the strength of the assertions compared to the shoddiness of the evidence, the promotion by a particular source (News Corp., which has an unabashed record of Islamophobia), the prolific use of A.D. vs C.E., etc.

Particularly, the assertion that the Quran predates Muhammad seems absurd given the evidence, and leads me to believe that this is part of a pattern of anti-Islamic articles I've noticed recently.

Take my comment for what it's worth. Your conclusions may vary.

Reason why this story is doing circles again and trending high is because of a colossal, major screw-up, and no one picked up on it but a few readers yesterday.

The 8/31 rawstory "article" originally claimed the carbon dating range was 568 - 545. The 7/22 University of Birmingham press release that the story is loosely based on stated "568 - 645": the reporter copied the range wrong by 100 years and then researched and wrote rest of the article based on that. They've since corrected the number (after it trended on reddit), but not altered the narrative to reflect the change.

So you have an entirely speculative article based off of incorrect facts and sensationalized on that premise, and no one bothered issuing a correction notice because it's obviously sloppy, sloppy work and that'd be too much work or worse, embarrassing. And now, all the lazy regurgitation of trending material from other news outlets is repeating the message whose very first paragraph was so horribly wrong.

>The Times of London reported that radiocarbon dating carried out by experts at the University of Oxford says the fragments were produced between the years 568 A.D. and 645 A.D. Muhammad is generally believed to have lived between 570 A.D. and 632 A.D. The man known to Muslims as The Prophet is thought to have founded Islam sometime after 610 A.D., with the first Muslim community established at Medina, in present-day Saudi Arabia, in 622 A.D.

When they test the document, how do they know the difference of when the document was created versus when the actual document was written on?

For example, paper could be created before the paper is actually used to write on.

> Small cautioned that the carbon dating was only done on the parchment in the fragments, and not the actual ink

For other news sources the researchers estimate that given the importance of the Koran it would have used the newest products. This is, of course, wild speculation. There is no way to confirm or deny that the original Korans were written on new parchments.

> University of Oxford says the fragments were produced between the years 568 A.D. and 645 A.D. Muhammad is generally believed to have lived between 570 A.D. and 632 A.D.

Without a narrower range, it's ridiculous to say that it predates Muhammad. At most it predates the first known, fully assembled Qur'an from 653CE.

(Aside: I realize this story comes from Fox News but its listing of dates as "Anno Domini" is in poor taste, given the subject matter.)

Oh, please. CE means precisely AD but with a gloss of PC lipstick. Next we're going to hear that uttering AD instead of CE triggers those of weak constitution.

Older works I have seen referred to CE as meaning "Christian Era" anyway. I don't know if that predates "Common Era" or not, though.

The term was originally "Vulgar Era" (meaning "the one that the people use", as opposed to the aristocracy which dated from the reign of various kings).

Jewish academics started using "Common Era" to mean the same thing as "Vulgar Era" in the mid 19th century.

"Christian Era" has never been used academically. It presumably came about due to people guessing at the "CE" in academic texts". It's not wrong though, so there's no problem. Also, unlike "Year of our Lord", it doesn't align the author with Christianity; it is merely factual.

Poor scholarship has never stopped anyone. As a theological masters degree student and PhD candidate I have always been just blown away at how poorly people do their work.

In terms of years AD isn't really disrespectful the CE (Common Era) never really caught on and it was the same years. Muslim year numbers are in AH (1 AH is when the prophet moved to Medina) so 1 AH Day 1 is 16 July 622. So the years would be 54 BAH to 23 AH. This range means that it goes with our history from the time. As far as history goes int he last 100 years we have gotten very good at dates in our history and especially around the 6th Century. Bogus reporting on bogus scholarship.

Why poor taste? As is common knowledge A.D. is an abbreviation for Anno Domini. You might as well say that calling Muhammamad 'The prophet' is in poor taste. For most people in the Western world the year zero is an arbitrary number and not understood as year of 'Our Lord' nor is Muhammad regarded as a prophet. Both are aids to communication not exegesis.

Not living in the US, the reference to Fox News is a bit lost on me. Perhaps it's equivalent to the seemingly obligatory sideswipe at the British Daily Mail on the part of some folk. Establishes their credentials, I guess.

> Perhaps it's equivalent to the seemingly obligatory sideswipe at the British Daily Mail on the part of some folk.

The Daily Mail carries comments from people wanting refugees to be shot (a variety of ammunition is suggested, a few only want rubber bullets, a few want live rounds) or tear gassed, or sprayed with sewage.

Recently some bloggers took anti Jewish Nazi propaganda and changed the word "Jew" to "migrant" and posted it to the DM comments sections. Readers upvoted those comments.

DM regularly has creepy articles about underage girls. http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/all-grown-up-sexing-up-the-in...

The Daily Mail is scum.

There is no year zero, 1 BC is followed by 1 AD (1 BCE is followed by 1 CE.)

Fox News are unashamedly biased towards Christianity.

The poor taste is because it is an article about one religion's prophet but uses a date suffix which effectively translates as "our God is Jesus". It is difficult to be academic about the subject matter if your word choice is highly partisan. This is why academics use "Common Era", aka CE.

Using CE -- either as "Common Era" or "Christian Era" -- dating from the same origin date as A.D. (and as a synonym for A.D.) is just as much of a Christian-origin and Christian-centric system as A.D., and is several hundred years old.

The idea that it is somehow more "neutral" and appropriate for academic when compared to A.D. is a fairly recent idea that ignores the history, origin, basis, and meaning (which directly holds Christianity as the norm) of the label.

You omitted a significant phrase

> The Times of London reported ...

That's a News Corp. (Fox, Wall St Journal, etc.) publication. Unfortunately it is no surprise that they might try to undermine people who believe in Islam. News Corp's open religious prejudice, and propaganda, have a long track record.

This is highly unlikely as the parchment contains diacritical marks which were not introduced until 4 caliphs/leaders after the Prophet who had all already died/been killed. This has been mentioned by many critics as well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics#history

This seems more like a means to incite Muslims rather than science.

FTA:

> Article originally appeared on FoxNews.com.

yup :)

Not JUST the diacritical marks. The writing style looks like Nashk, which came much MUCH later than the Koran.

That's very interesting. Do you happen to know a good place to read about that (i.e., more reliable than Wikipedia)?

The last paragraph says:

    Small cautioned that the carbon dating was only done 
    on the parchment in the fragments, and not the actual
    ink, but added "If the 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 
    — predates Mohammed, and moves back the years that 
    an Arabic literary culture is in place well into 
    the 500s."

Nothing to report yet then?

So if the parchment's carbon dating window contains the known date in reality, doesn't it make more sense to throw away the low end of the window?

(Unless of course, you just want to undermine the religion.)

i first read it the way you did, but after second reading i think they meant that fragments were produced over the period, with old fragments in the older date and more recent ones on the more recent one.

You're right. If the range didn't overlap at all, that might be something. It's hard to believe that professional researchers would be this obnoxious, so I somewhat suspect that Discovery has the figures wrong.

While I would actually like this to be true (just to see how it would affect Muslim beliefs), I don't think it is. But what surprises me more than anything else is how a legitimate historian can come to the conclusion that this finding changes in any way what we know already, especially since the same person admits that the radiocarbon dating only applies to the ink and not the parchment.

The quotes from Tom Small are unremarkable considering his previous publications and statements about Islam.

The likelihood that the entire Koran was written from scratch after the birth (and during the life) of Muhammad is pretty slim. The Hebrew Bible was canonized* after the Babylonian exile and there have been copies found containing different versions of other books. The Old Testament has additional books to the Hebrew Bibles (Maccabees) that were never canonized in the Hebrew Bible but remain an Historical Jewish cannon (The Great Revolt). There are also varied versions of the New Testament such as additional Gospels and Epistles that were not canonized at all or did not survive transition from proto-Christianity into Orthodox Christianity (Or sub sects like the Coptic and Syriac Bibles).

The original works that make up the New Testament was most likely been written in Classical Hebrew, Hellenic Hebrew and Greek (Since some canonization was conducted in as late as 300-400CE also possibly Talmudic Hebrew), there were quite a few sects during the Hellenic period of Judaism that either converged into Christianity or into Judaism so there was quite a bit of cross pollination between various religious texts that some were canonized in the New Testament, some were canonized as the external canon in Judaism and some were lost for ever.

So it would be quite surprising if the Koran was a body of work that was exclusively written during the life time of Muhammad since it's much more likely that it's been gathered from existing works and rewritten and adjusted just like the Hebrew Bible to fit the required goal during it's final canonization. It is also highly likely that adjustments would've been made after the canonization it self since variations can be found both the Hebrew Bible and the Old and New Testaments, as far as the Hebrew Bible goes with the exception of the Hebrew Bibles that is used by surviving Judaism derivatives like The Samaritans, Karaim, and Beta Israel is standardized since the 9th century (a handful more recent versions were discovered with alterations over the years but not in masses) and the New and Old Testaments were altered with each new translation pretty much upto the modern era.

On a side note, I am for one actually surprised that this work was conducted dating early Islamic artifacts and texts tend to generate quite a big shit storm.

*I refer to Canon as the agreed on final collection of works that made it into each book, minor variances such as ones regional differences between existing schools and different translations are not treated as separate canon.

That's a lot of "facts".

apologies for my simplistic agnostic point of view, but what's the big deal? that some historic records from 1400 ago may not be that super accurate? anyway from big enough distance, isn't christianity just a sect* of judaism, and islam just a sect* of christianity? they share most prophets, events etc. and god should also be roughly same guy up there somewhere.

* by sect i mean forking given official doctrine at that time by claiming that all before didn't get it right but you did, god showed it to you specifically etc. just like gazillion variations of chtristianity forked from original catholicism (well, I suspect that even catholicism is now are quite a bit different religion from the original one in early AD centuries).

something tells me I just insulted half of this planet, but cannot help it - from rational point of view, what holy books contain are just some old stories, not more or less interesting then say Myths and legends of ancient greece, or Aesop's fables. now imagine somebody would base their whole life around those, feeling he is right and all others got it wrong. funny, no? no... From purely rational point of view, I fail to see any added value of religions in these times. There are many irrational - emotional aspects where they work, but I just cannot turn off my rational critical part of me that asks questions and doubts anything not provable by experiment, repeatedly. And the Ultimate truth, I mean THE truth, should be able to stand any test of logic with flying flags and should be as solid now as 1500/2000/3000 years ago.

my 2 lousy cents

I'm very interested in how research into this will develop, but I'm also concerned about zealots going out of their way to slow down any such research. If this is true, it could be a major turning point for many of the Abrahamic religions, not just Islam.

Hopefully this encourages more skepticism than aggressive idealism.

It almost certainly won't encourage scepticism, sadly. People just don't work that way (on the whole).

Example: http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/i-dont-want...

Do you think Muslims will trust a group that is to them a bunch of random British researchers that just happened to come across an old piece of parchment with Arabic writing just lying around in a British university? Also this is coming from a country that to them seems biased against them. That my friend is just plain crazy.

Why not date some of the ink?

I seem to remember reading they re-used paper a lot back then, scraping off old ink. Paper could've been much older than the author.

Why the hell it is on front page of all IT news sites?

Because a) it's a hot topic b)it's an example of fallacious logic and bad conclusions

There's a bunch of information hidden away in University libraries.

These things get rediscovered every now and again.

Isn't it exciting, interesting, that there's a bunch of knowledge to be gained from stuff we already have?

Isn't "finding out about this stuff" relevant to hackers?

A bunch of Victorian authors were recently de-anonimised when we found notes by Charles Dickens. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/charles-dicke...

Here's an HN discussion about the possibility of dinosaur feathers being discovered in amber https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10145685

And here's how Al Jazeera reported the discovery of this Quran

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/07/world-oldest-quran-man...

> 568 A.D. … 645 A.D. … 570 A.D. and 632 A.D. … 610 A.D. … 622 A.D.

It's 'A.D. year,' not 'year A.D.'! Sheesh.

When discussing history, especially Islamic history, it would be better to use year C.E.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era

But CE's still just the same numbering system as AD. Much better to use AUC[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_urbe_condita

Well, really we should use the World Calendar, as specified by the League of Nations, or the Hijri since we're discussing Islam, or good 'ol ISO 8601 as this is Hacker News.

Heh, yeah, it all does become a little silly.

The important thing is communication. Using Christian dates is needlessly upsetting when discussing world religions. Upsetting people disrupts communication, so I avoid it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com