Birmingham Quran Manuscript

In July 2015 the University of Birmingham announced that two parchment leaves in its Mingana Collection had been radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 CE, with 95.4 per cent probability, making them among the oldest Quranic material known. The leaves carry parts of surahs 18 to 20 in Hijazi, the sloping early Arabic book hand, with few diacritical marks and no vowel points. They had been in Birmingham since the 1920s, bound up with leaves of a different seventh-century Quran, and were separated only when Alba Fedeli, working on a doctorate about early Quranic manuscripts, noticed that the two hands did not match.

The reporting that followed frequently said something the science did not. Radiocarbon dates organic material, and what was dated here was the animal skin. The parchment cannot be younger than the writing that sits on it, so the result gives a genuine upper bound. It does not date the ink. Parchment could be prepared and stored, and skins were sometimes kept for years before use, so the writing may be appreciably later than the animal died. The honest form of the claim is that these leaves were written no earlier than the parchment was made and probably not very long after, which is still remarkable and is not the same as saying the text was written in 645.

The leaves have been exhibited in Birmingham and in Dubai since the announcement.

The leaves reached Birmingham through Alphonse Mingana, an Assyrian-born scholar who made three buying journeys to the Middle East in the 1920s funded by Edward Cadbury of the chocolate firm. Mingana bought in quantity, in Mosul, in Cairo and elsewhere, and what he assembled became the Mingana Collection: several thousand Middle Eastern manuscripts in Syriac, Arabic and other languages, some of them of the first importance and many of them, inevitably, catalogued at speed.

The two Quran leaves were among the latter. They had been bound together with leaves of a different seventh-century Quran, in a similar early hand, and were treated as one manuscript. They sat that way for about ninety years, in an open collection at a British university, fully accessible to anyone who asked. The identification came in the 2010s, from a doctoral student working systematically through the early Quranic material, who saw that the two sets of leaves were not written by the same hand.

That is the part of this story worth keeping. The find was not made in a desert or a sealed cave. It was made in a catalogue, by looking again at something that had already been looked at, and it is a reminder that a collection which has been held for a century is not thereby a collection that has been read.