Birmingham Qur'an manuscript dated among the oldest in the world

This University of Birmingham announcement reporting the radiocarbon dating of its Qur'an manuscript fragment is the institution's own primary account of a genuinely significant and independently notable finding, that the parchment dates with 95.4 percent probability to between 568 and 645 CE, placing it among the oldest known Qur'an fragments. As the testing institution's own report, it is authoritative for the radiocarbon results themselves, which were produced by an accredited laboratory using standard scientific method. The dating's interpretive significance is more contested: several manuscript specialists, including Francois Deroche and Mustafa Shah, have questioned whether the script's developed style fits comfortably within that early range and noted radiocarbon dating's inherent decades-wide uncertainty for parchment, so the parchment's age and the text's precise date of writing are not necessarily the same question.