'Oldest' Koran fragments found in Birmingham University | Hacker News Reader

'Oldest' Koran fragments found in Birmingham University

bbc.co.uk

103 pointssjclemmy57 comments

as already mentioned in the article[1], the velum may be much older than the text written on it since it was very valuable and regularly reused:

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

really surprised that they did not test for any previous washed text underneath since this is both common and the test quite simple and easy to perform

EDIT: [1] my mistake, it was in the NYT article on the same topic: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/world/europe/quran-fragmen...

Saud al-Sarhan, the director of research at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, said he doubted that the manuscript found in Birmingham was as old as the researchers claimed, noting that its Arabic script included dots and separated chapters — features that were introduced later.

He also said that dating the skin on which the text was written did not prove when it was written. Manuscript skins were sometimes washed clean and reused later for new writings, he said.

I didn't see that mentioned in the article - can you paste the precise line you mean?

ah, my mistake, I read it in the NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/world/europe/quran-fragmen...

"Saud al-Sarhan, the director of research at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, said he doubted that the manuscript found in Birmingham was as old as the researchers claimed, noting that its Arabic script included dots and separated chapters — features that were introduced later.

He also said that dating the skin on which the text was written did not prove when it was written. Manuscript skins were sometimes washed clean and reused later for new writings, he said."

Parenthetically, the "dots" mentioned were a later diacritical feature added to Qur'anic texts to mark the placement of short vowels; since Arabic, like Hebrew, elides short vowel sounds in the written text, Muslims without Arabic fluency need markers to show them how to verbalize the Qur'an. (Arabic is seen in Islam as a particularly holy language, and while the Qur'an is widely translated, it is considered especially pious to recite and memorize the text in the original Arabic, even if one does not know the language.) I believe diacritics were introduced some 250 years after Muhammad, as they were only needed as Islam expanded beyond the Arabic-speaking world.

Yes, it would seem so. Not an expert but my guess is the earliest use of diacritics appeared around 100 years after Mohammad's death. So even, being generous the claims they make in the article don't hold water.

The probability is fairly high that this is a very old piece of animal skin with some Quranic text written about 100 years or so after his death (being generous).

It should also be noted that there is absolutely zero contemporary historical evidence for the existence of Mohammad. Zero.

We have piles and piles of contemporary historical evidence in multiple forms (statues, tablets, pottery, artwork, etc.) for many important and lesser important persons in history both much more ancient and equally ancient, but for him, nothing. It is only after a significant time gap after his death that we find a trickle of evidence and then a torrent. Exact same thing for Jesus.

If anyone is interested, Tom Holland's "Islam the untold story" is a fascinating introduction to this sacrilegious line of thought.

"It should also be noted that there is absolutely zero contemporary historical evidence for the existence of Mohammad. Zero."

Yes there is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Muhammad#Non-Mu...

Thanks. Still, on the same page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Muhammad#Views_...

"It is not possible to write a historical biography of the Prophet without being accused of using the sources uncritically, while on the other hand, when using the sources critically, it is simply not possible to write such a biography."

I believe both Jesus and Mụhammad existed and both were just humans, the former just a prophet who managed to be ingloriously killed, the later just a military leader who invented a surprisingly effective ideology for his bloody conquests (or the prophet who had the "luck" to live his bloody character, whatever). How these things develop can be easily seen on the more recent and good documented example of

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

One of the most interesting parallels:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad%27s_wives

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Joseph_Smith%27s_wives

Perhaps coincidentally, on BBC Four tonight a programme was shown which describes vellum (the material on which this manuscript was written) and the process behind creating it.

A clip is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01pr4ty

A slightly longer clip on the same subject: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00n3rdf

I would also like to point out amongst Muslims there is a concept of multiple Qira'aat(readings) where there are multiple dialects in which the Quran is read. These readings may differ by a couple of letters for a specific word every so often. This was the reason the Quran was compiled into one form during the time of 'Uthmaan, to prevent confusion amongst the common Muslims.

Nevertheless these "readings" did not die, but rather continue to thrive to this day. This allows for a broader range of meanings, so it is not something avoided by Muslims rather accepted openly as a part of what they believe was revealed.

What does this even mean to find it in the University? This is almost more interesting to me than the text itself, which has been remarkably well attested through the ages (or at least, versions of it have been independently attested).

People collect old manuscripts and books. People donate old manuscripts and books. Not that surprising

There's a story here. Not implying anything special, no da Vinci code here.

My interest was piqued so I googled the oldest complete copy of the koran and found this[1].

[1] http://www.commdiginews.com/world-news/middle-east/worlds-ol...

Is it just me or is there something strange about the way this piece is written. Feels like it is written by an bot or somehow optimized for search.

    The manuscript, written in "Hijazi script", an early form of written Arabic, becomes one of the oldest known fragments of the Koran.

    Because radiocarbon dating creates a range of possible ages, there is a handful of other manuscripts in public and private collections which overlap. So this makes it impossible to say that any is definitively the oldest.

    But the latest possible date of the Birmingham discovery - 645 - would put it among the very oldest.

Oldest, Oldest Oldest. Ok, I get the picture.

No mention of what chapters/verses? And no digitized images so we can compare it to current mainstream versions...

Too bad.

CNN seems to have a better source:

http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/22/europe/uk-quran-birmingham-man...

> The two parchment leaves are believed to contain parts of Suras (chapters) 18 to 20, written with ink in an early form of Arabic script known as Hijazi.

Give it time, I'm sure it'll be released. Though being in Hijazi script might make it somewhat more difficult to compare with modern Arabic versions anyway

It's from the Surat Taha (found from simple Google search, but also indicated by the first two Muqattaat letters), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta-Ha.

BTW, the search for the meaning of these letters that appear in a small percentage of suras is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muqatta%27at

3rd image from the top. The verses are highlighted and a translation is presented

Here's the digitized version: http://vmr.bham.ac.uk/Collections/Mingana/Islamic_Arabic_157...

In case you know how to read arabic: https://www.facebook.com/yasir.qadhi/photos/a.10150091939643...

Deleted comment

Thanks!

It's funny how Muslims claim it's a "miracle" of Koran that it hasn't changed since it was published. Of course it hasn't changed, technology was at a point that it was possible to keep a book from forgers but publishing it heavily and also, there were many muslims trying to protect Koran from day one.

P.S. I born Muslim so I get to be critical about Islam and I think everyone should be able to do so.

Actually, it's quite explainable. Unlike the Bible, the "official" version of the Koran has always been the original text in the original version of Arabic spoken in the 7th century. Since it was written down at the time without having to rely on decades or even centuries of oral tradition, as was the case with the Christian and Hebrew scriptures, it's understandable that the text has remained unchanged.

Once you start translating something into different languages, that's when the unavoidable changes start working their way in. So, I agree with you that it's not "miraculous" in any way, but it is a fascinating and important archaeological find.

>it's understandable that the text has remained unchanged //

Understandable but not true. There are, currently extent, versions of the text with variations. There was a significant effort made to create a single authoritative version to enforce the narrative of the text being a perfect copy of one in heaven.

There was no day one Quran. It was compiled many year's after Muhammad's death. There were many versions of the Quran that were destroyed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Quran#Uthman_ib...

"When the task was finished Uthman kept one copy in Medina and sent others to Kufa, Baṣra, Damascus, and, according to some accounts, Mecca, and ordered that all other variant copies of the Quran to be destroyed. This was done everywhere except in Kufa, where some scholars argue that, Ibn Masʿūd and his followers refused."

Thousands of people claim below:

The famous ten People who form the chains of narration regarding the Quran are as follows.

    Umar ibn al Khattab [26]
    Uthman bin Affan[27]
    Ali ibn abi Talib[28]
    Abu Musa al Ash'ari[29]
    Ubay Ibn Ka'b[30]
    Abdullah ibn Masood[31]
    Zayd Ibn Thabit[32]
    Abu Hurairah[33]
    Abdullah Ibn Abbas[34]
    Abu al-Darda[35]

Amongst those ten the two most important people were zayd ibn thabit the personal scribe of Muhammad and Ubay ibn Ka'b who was the foremost authority on the Quran after zaid.[36][37]

So 12 people were essentially responsible for Quran, mostly through hearsay.

"Many years"... it was within 2 years.

The entire muslim community contributed their memorized Quran together with written parchments (to double check) in the making of the "official" copy.

Making this into a community-wide project and hence nobody could say that the Quran was incorrect.

Thereafter unreliable parchments were destroyed.

No. It was 20 years.

"The Quranic canon is the form of the Quran as recited and written in which it is religiously binding for the Muslim community. This canonical corpus is closed and ﬁxed in the sense that nothing in the Quran can be changed or modiﬁed. The process of canonization ended under the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan (r. 23/644–35/655), which was about twenty years after the death of the Muhammad"

Edit, most of it is hearsay any way:

Zaid ibn Thabit, Muhammad's primary scribe, was assigned the duty of gathering all of the Quranic text. He gives an insight into what happened during the meeting between Abu Bakr, Umar, and himself:

"Abu Bakr sent for me at a time when the Yamama battles had witnessed the martyrdom of numerous Companions. I found 'Umar bin al-Khattab with him. Abu Bakr began, Umar has just come to me and said, 'In the Yamama battles death has dealt most severely with the qurra',[Reciters of the Quran] and I fear it will deal with them with equal severity in other theatres of war. As a result much of the Quran will be gone. “ 'I am therefore of the opinion that you should command the Quran be collected.'" Abu Bakr continued, "I said to 'Umar, 'How can we embark on what the Prophet never did?' 'Umar replied that it was a good deed regardless, and he did not cease replying to my scruples until Allah reconciled me to the undertaking, and I became of the same mind as him. Zaid, you are young and intelligent, you used to record the revelations for the Muhammad, and we know nothing to your discredit. So pursue the Quran and collect it together." By Allah, had they asked me to move a mountain it could not have been weightier than what they requested of me now”. (Al-Bukhari, Sahih,Jam'i al-Qur'an, hadith no. 4986; see also Ibn Abu Dawud, al-Masahif, pp. 6-9)"

The person ordered to compile the Quran by Abu Bakar said:

...By Allah, if he (Abu Bakr) had ordered me to shift one of the mountains it would not have been harder for me than what he had ordered me concerning the collection of the Quran... So I started locating the Quranic material and collecting it from parchments, scapula, leafstalks of date palms and from the memories of men.[Bukhari Sahih al-Bukhari, 6:60:201]

"So I started looking for the Holy quran and collected it from (what was written on) palm-leaf stalks, thin white stones, and also from men who knew it by heart, until I found the last verse of Surat at-Tauba (repentance) with Abi Khuzaima al-Ansari, and I did not find it with anybody other than him. (Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol. 6, p. 478).[23]

Abu Bakr - the first Caliph - compiled the very first copy. Uthman "standardized" it.

Indeed, so compared to the Bible there is small room for argument against canonization. It is still there, but the textual evidence (what would be necessary for this) vanishes abruptly before the Uthman version.

I assume you mean "hearsay" ("information that was heard by one person about another"), rather than "heresy" ("A doctrine held by a member of a religion at variance with established religious beliefs")? Use of the latter term by accident might be a little unfortunate given the nature of the topic :)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hearsay https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/heresy

i did, tried to fix it but was too late.

Ok, we edited it for you to correct "heresy" to "hearsay". Seems like an important correction in a thread about religious text. (If you don't want this change, let us know and we'll revert it.)

Thousands of people had the entire Quran committed to memory during the lifetime of Mohammad. The standardization of the written Quran, and the many "versions" you speak of, deal essentially with dialect and the addition of symbols that guide pronunciation. As far as I know it is generally agreed that the standardization process was carried out in an unbiased mechanical way.

By the way, it is relatively easy to memorize the Quran, because it is in verse form. You can go to any mosque and find children from the age of ten who has it memorized.

This is absurd, where did you learn this?

It's called history. Even to this day Arabic newspapers/books don't have the extra symbols to aid reading. These were introduced for non-arabs.

Common knowledge among Muslims. I memorized the entire Quran word-for-word when I was 12 years old myself, as did many of my friends.

>Thousands of people had the entire Quran committed to memory during the lifetime of Mohammad. //

Your comment doesn't address the claim.

Once the canonical written version of the Koran had been established memorising the entire text is relatively easy. Prior to that you would have had to be present when Mohammed revealed the narrations or had a precise rendition of that oration conveyed to you. At times Mohammed only spoke to one or two people when revealing surah. Having thousands of people memorise a number of separate orations exactly without any problem of conflicting versions is really impossible. Conveying the general meaning is within the realms of possibility; surahs revealed to large groups might even allow the preservation of some of the actual wording too.

Take an example - Armstrong's speech when stepping on to the moon, was it "one small step for a man" or was the "a" not spoken? This is probably the most pored over of all speeches ever, millions of witnesses. Did no camel ever brae in the tents of the Qureshi tribe in Mohammed's time?

Abrogation causes further problems to this claim as not only do all "thousands" have to remember the exact wording used but the exact order too, and they have only a couple of months from the end of Mohammed's narrations to learn the last of them. Not only do they need to know the order, for abrogation purposes (to learn the way to act) but they have to remember the narrations in the same non-temporal order as everyone else. I can believe even that many of Mohammed's followers remembered surah, mostly that they agreed on wording, but not at all that they remembered it in the "wrong" (ie not the delivered order) and that the order it was remembered in was identical (ie was "the entire Quran").

Doesn't 2:106 say that Allah causes ayats to be forgotten, those ayats must have been in the original - else they wouldn't have been narrated by Mohammed - but aren't now remembered and so are not in the "entire Quran".

Of course if surah 25:32 (http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=25&verse=32) that says the Koran was revealed piecemeal is wrong and surah 2:185 is right then the whole Koran was passed on in one month (including future conversations) which makes it easier to attain unanimous agreement but also means that [if tradition that the Koran was passed on in 10 days is correct] the hearers were remembering > 600 ayats of prose each day for 10 days in a row; quite a feat for illiterate desert tribesmen regardless of whether they had a tradition of oral history or not.

I'm very interested in the Muqatta'at too - how were written character variations conveyed by the "thousands"?

Very fair argument. However there also existed a consistent, full-time effort by significant numbers of people, around 70 in number, (known as Ashab as Suffa or People of The Platform) whose sole job was to memorize the Koran (and learn its interpretations) during the lifetime of Mohammed. They lived in the mosque pretty much all day, and did nothing else. Their learning was regularly checked, and presumably feedback given by Mohammed, until his death. It is not impossible to imagine that they were able to memorize and organize the current canonical text in the right order, even though it was revealed piecemeal. After Mohammed's death, these people went on to travel all over the Islamic world and teach students, giving rise to the "thousands" of memorizers within the 2nd generation of Islam, with no recorded incidents of version conflicts among the 7 established dialects.

However even with that, it is understandably difficult to believe that no mistakes were made in transmission. That's why the Quran calls it a miracle, and calls it Allah's job, to safeguard the integrity the Quran. That fact there is an established canonical version today with zero conflicts among all major prints in all countries is somewhat of a miracle, considering the fact that Muslims across cultures argue and disagree about a lot of other things within the religion.

As for the Muqatta'at, they are a part of regular recitation - they are not simply written characters.

There is an established canonical version today because Uthman set about the task of destroying all texts except the one he preferred. It's obvious why Muslims would wish a standardized text, but from a secular perspective, this was no miracle, but a tragic loss of historical sources and artifacts.

> At times Mohammed only spoke to one or two people when revealing surah. Having thousands of people memorise a number of separate orations exactly without any problem of conflicting versions is really impossible.

And that's the point of why it is considered a miracle. Transmission of the Quran has always been orally and will continue to be. The general meaning is preserved within the text, however, the correct recitation(s) are not.

You can't pick up the Quran and expect to be reciting it correctly.

Ahh, but did you understand any of it? Many people, particularly Indians/Pakistanis do this without understanding it. It is a very odd thing for me to comprehend.

It's correct. There were thousands of people who memorized the verses at the time of Muhammad(pbuh). Muslims recite the Quran at least 5 times a day in the daily prayers from memory. Even today there are millions of people in all age groups who've memorized the whole Quran in Arabic

All evidence points to the contrary. The need of Uthman to canonize the text was due to the variation that existed. He ordered those variants destroyed, removing all evidence of their content. I even recall from college that the caliph ordered all verses, in any form, to be collected; some of the verse was from scraps of vellum, reed, antler, etc... If thousands of memorizers truly existed, such an exercise wouldn't be needed. He would only need to get a dozen of the people that memorized it to recite the exact verse again.

Variations existed in the written form not in the recitation because diacritics (tashkeel) were not standardized. It's a common misconception that the Quran is memorized through the written text. This is not how it is transmitted. Look up Tajweed, which are the rules of pronunciation of the Quran.

Furthermore, memorizers of the Quran can trace the chain of narration back to Muhammad himself. So there couldn't be any forgery or manipulation. Uthman doesn't have the power to erase people's memories.

Since written word is far more reliable than oration, again there is absolutely no proof of any of this.

In Arabic language different dialects/variations have different punctuations and pronunciations which changes how a word is pronounced but not what the word is or what it means.

I understand this. Spouting random facts doesn't constitute a rebuttal.

Shi'a traditions state that Ali had a different recension of the Quran - it contained the same text as the Uthmanic, but the Surahs were arranged in chronological order. So it seems plausible to me that, at least, different versions of the Quran pre-standardisation differed in the order of the Surahs.

I have heard that the current version is not chronological. Is there a reason for that?

I am not sure Muslims claim this. Actually it is a well known fact that there were several copies, but they were all gathered and burned after ONE was approved by Usman.

I have yet to meet a Muslim that doesn't claim it is the perfect word of their god.

That is the OP's concern. OP was stating that the book has been unchanged and unaltered, and that is not something any Muslim claims.

Here is some info in case you are curious [0]. Look for the word "burnt" and read that paragraph. Or simply google "Quran Uthman burnt"

http://www.answering-christianity.com/quran/other_books.htm

"If it had been from anyone other than God, they would have found much inconsistency in it." (The Holy Qur'an, An-Nisa'; 4:82)

"Truly, We have revealed this remembrance, and We shall, for sure, preserve it." (The Holy Qur'an, Al-Hijr; 15:9)

Digitized version: http://vmr.bham.ac.uk/Collections/Mingana/Islamic_Arabic_157...

In case you know how to read arabic: http://tinyurl.com/nr5gvz9

Not really an insightful comment but I first read that as Brigham Young University which makes it all that more impactful... and funny

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