Scientists Say Oldest Koran Discovered in England Pre-dates Mohammed

Scientists say oldest Koran discovered in England pre-dates Mohammed, as carbon dating revealed it could be older than the prophet. Scholars have found the fragments of the Koran in a Birmingham library. These fragments belonged to a collection encompassing 3,000 Middle Eastern texts from the 1920, gathered in Iraq.

Islamic tradition might suffer a radical altering, according to scholars at the University of Oxford. Moreover, the Koranic fragments created a contradiction concerning the Muslim prophet’s life occurrences.

It is claimed the text was written before or after Mohammed’s birth. Initially, Mohammed’s life accountings is said to traditionally have occurred in between 570-632 AD, whereas carbon dating revealed that these newly discovered fragments were written in the time frame 568-645 AD.

According to previous information, the Muslim Prophet established his first community at Medina, in 622 AD. Nowadays the area is Saudi Arabia. It was generally believed Mohammed had founded Islam after 610 AD.

After Mohammed’s death, the Muslim community’s leader, Uthman, ordered the texts of the original Koran to be assembled, in 653 AD. Unlike accountings circulating via oral communication of the Islamic Koran, before it was conjoined, the fragments discovered in Birmingham were possibly written on animal skin.

An analogy was made, meaning that it would be the same if new gospels would have been discovered before Christ’s time.

Historian Tom Holland claims that Islam’s traditional values are, as of recently, wrong. He stated that nobody could know for sure at this moment how the sacred Koran emerged, that it was a murky situation.

A Koranic manuscript consultant at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Dr. Keith Small, said that the ink doesn’t correlate with carbon dating, unlike the parchment itself. Moreover, he stated that the calligraphy was of later style. But he does believe the dates are accurate, and the Islamic tradition could suffer a turn over.

Dr. Small explained that the

“Islam (tradition) in late Near Eastern antiquity would have to be completely revised, somehow accounting for another book of scripture.”

However, Muslim scholars found the issue controversial and debatable and they tended to disagree. Mustafa Shah of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies said that

“If anything, the manuscript has consolidated traditional accounts of the Koran’s origins.”

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