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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday September 01 2015, @12:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-just-date-get-married dept.

Brian Booker writes at Digital Journal that carbon dating suggests that the Koran, or at least portions of it, may actually be older than the prophet Muhammad himself, a finding that if confirmed could rewrite early Islamic history and shed doubt on the "heavenly" origins of the holy text. Scholars believe that a copy Koran held by the Birmingham Library was actually written sometime between 545 AD and 568 [takyon: 568 and 645 AD, with 95.4% accuracy], while the Prophet Mohammad was believed to have been born in 570 AD and to have died in 632 AD. It should be noted, however, that the dating was only conducted on the parchment, rather than the ink, so it is possible that the quran was simply written on old paper. Some scholars believe, however, that Muhammad did not receive the Quran from heaven, as he claimed during his lifetime, but instead collected texts and scripts that fit his political agenda.

"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," says Keith Small, from the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library. "'It destabilises, to put it mildly, the idea that we can know anything with certainty about how the Koran emerged," says Historian Tom Holland. "and that in turn has implications for the history of Muhammad and the Companions."


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by looorg on Tuesday September 01 2015, @02:09AM

    by looorg (578) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @02:09AM (#230602)

    So they only tested the parchment and not the ink. OK, I can't find anything about them examining what type of parchment it is. Unless otherwise stated or disproved I'm going to guess that it's a palimpsest (reused parchment) then.

    Even if it turns out to be older I doubt it would really change things, after all we already know that the work is heavily influenced by the other two abrahamic religions and it didn't just pop into existence out of nowhere. A decade here or there won't really change much. It's not like this discovery even if true is going to change the believes of the 1.5 billion muslims in the world.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:50PM (#230888)

    I don't think parchment age even says much. It's well known parchment was very hard to come by at the time, and they wrote on whatever random things they had available to them.