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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, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday September 01 2015, @07:46AM

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @07:46AM (#230690) Homepage

    between 545 AD and 568 [takyon: 568 and 645 AD, with 95.4% accuracy]

    With the "545 AD and 568" (in bold above, because I can't strike out in a comment) struck out as it is in the article, it kinda negates the entire point of the story.

    Why was this struck out? One of the articles does indeed say between 545 and 568. The other linked to by takyon is a few months old.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @02:40PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @02:40PM (#230818)

    > Why was this struck out?

    Because the one and only one article with those numbers is a typo and takyon corrected it after it was posted.

    • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday September 01 2015, @06:38PM

      by wonkey_monkey (279) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @06:38PM (#230935) Homepage

      Not being funny, but how do you know it's a typo? There's nothing on that one-and-only article about any errors, and the article it links to on those very numbers is paywalled. One of the other articles mentions different dates, but how do we know which are typos, if any?

      What I can see of the paywalled article says:

      At the time the discovery was hailed as confirmation that the Koran had faithfully preserved the words passed on by Muhammad for more than 1,350 years. Now, several historians think the parchment abouts to be so old that it contradicts most accounts of the Prophet's...

      And that's all I can see. But the bits in bold do suggest that there is something contradictory about the dates - whereas there is nothing outright contradictory about the dates in takyon's quote.

      As I said, it pretty much undermines the whole point of the story if you're going to strike out the main pertinent fact.

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