‘Oldest Koran’ is found... in Birmingham
THE discovery of what could be the world’s oldest fragments of the Koran may spark an Elgin Marbles- style row over their future, academics say.
The ‘globally significant’ parchment was kept in a library at Birmingham University for more than 80 years with a similar manuscript, but its importance was unknown until student Alba Fedeli examined it for her PhD.
Tests at Oxford University revealed the two pages were written between 568AD and 645AD, suggesting they could have been made less than 20 years after the Prophet Mohammed’s death in 632AD.
David Thomas, professor of Christianity and Islam at Birmingham University, said it was possible the writer was alive at the time of Mohammed, who is said to have received the Koran’s teachings more than 23 years before they were written down. He said: ‘The person who actually wrote it could well have known the Prophet Mohammed.
‘He would have seen him probably, he would maybe have heard him preach.
‘He may have known him personally – and that really is quite a thought to conjure with.’
But Professor Thomas said the fragments’ significance meant there was ‘possibly an analogous situation’ to the Elgin Marbles, the collection of classical Greek marble sculptures in the British Museum which Greece has long argued should be returned.
Further investigations are needed to establish exactly where the manuscript originates from, but there is evidence it may have been Saudi Arabia or Egypt.
The manuscript is part of Birmingham University’s Mingana Collection of more than 3,000 Middle Eastern documents gathered mostly in the 1920s by Alphonse Mingana, a Catholic priest.
But the Koran pages came into the collection around 1932 after being bought from a dealer in the Netherlands, the university confirmed last night. They were l ater mistakenly bound with another manuscript in the collection.
Radio carbon dating was carried out on a small piece of blank parchment, likely to have been made from goat or sheep skin, that had long ago separated from the rest.
To try to establish where the text was written, it would be necessary to test the ink. But Professor Thomas said: ‘It’s a very delicate matter to test the ink. The danger is you could damage it, and from a religious point of view you would be damaging part of God’s word.’