Oldest' Koran fragments found in Birmingham University
Oldest texts
When a PhD researcher, Alba Fedeli, looked more closely at these pages it was decided to carry out a radiocarbon dating test and the results were "startling".
The university's director of special collections, Susan Worrall, said researchers had not expected "in our wildest dreams" that it would be so old.
Finding out we had one of the oldest fragments of the Koran in the whole world has been fantastically exciting."
The tests, carried out by the Oxford University Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, showed that the fragments, written on sheep or goat skin, were among the very oldest surviving texts of the Koran.
These tests provide a range of dates, showing that, with a probability of more than 95%, the parchment was from between 568 and 645.
They could well take us back to within a few years of the actual founding of Islam," said David Thomas, the university's professor of Christianity and Islam.
These fragments do corroborate with the 21st Quran.
Even if we compare it with the Abbasi period (as claimed by the mulhid) it does corroborate as well.