Manuscripts

"That fragment was “among the earliest written textual evidence of the Islamic holy book known to survive.”"

"We have now in our collection what must be one of the oldest Qurans in the world. It might not be the oldest. But if the dating we’ve been given is at all reliable then we’ve got fragments from a Quran that will have been copied by somebody who either knew the Prophet Mohammed himself, or knew somebody who had known him."

"These portions must have been in a form that is very close to the form of the Qur’an read today, supporting the view that the text has undergone little or no alteration and that it can be dated to a point very close to the time it was believed to be revealed."

"It provided tantalizing clues to help settle a scholarly dispute about whether the holy text was actually written down at the time of the prophet, or compiled years later after being passed down by word of mouth. The discovery also offered a joyful moment for a faith that has struggled with internal divisions and external pressures."

"We know now that these two folios, in a beautiful and surprisingly legible Hijazi hand, almost certainly date from the time of the first three caliphs."

"He doubted that the manuscript found in Birmingham was as old as the researchers claimed, noting that its Arabic script included dots and separated chapters—features that were introduced later. He also said that dating the skin on which the text was written did not prove when it was written. Manuscript skins were sometimes washed clean and reused later."

"You’re dating the parchment. You’re not dating the ink. You’re making the assumption that the parchment or vellum was used within years of it being made, which is probably a reasonable assumption, but it’s not watertight."

"It is not possible to ascertain that the parchments were written close to the time of the Prophet….The university should have examined the ink not the hide on which it was written."

"The manuscript might possibly be from the time of Othman Bin Affan who became Caliph many years after the death of the Prophet”... “During the time of the Prophet (pbuh), the Quran was not organised or put in its present day form. Also, there were no colours used.” But there are colors in the Birmingham fragments. Al Sharif explains: “One of these is the red-colour separation between the Bismillah and the two Surahs of Mariam and Taha. It was not customary during the Prophet’s time to separate between the Surahs. This copy seems to be organised in [an] order which was not so during the time of the Prophet."

"Radiocarbon analysis has dated the parchment on which the text is written to the period between AD 568 and 645 with 95.4 percent accuracy."

"As the Prophet Mohammed lived from AD 570 to 632, this means that at the very latest the fragment was produced no more than 13 years after his death."

"The early dating “gives more ground to what have been peripheral views of the Quran’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."

"Sringaverapura is a site on the bank of the Ganga, not far upstream of Allahabad. Birch leaf fragments have been identified in its Black-and-Red Ware level dated around 800 BC at the site. The nearest source of birch leaf (Betula utilis or bhurja patra) is the Himalayas, possibly Garhwal hills. What is the point in importing these leaves to Srinagaverapura unless they were used for writing? This is certainly a piece of hard circumstantial evidence in favour of pre-Asokan existence of writing in early historic India."

"One of the main reasons why such hard proof or hard circumstantial proof is missing from ancient Indian studies is that our writings were generally inscribed on palm leaves or birch leaves and such writings have not survived. We seldom wrote on perish- able materials like clay which, once burnt, became well-nigh imperishable. This is how so much of the ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian literature has survived whereas the surviving Indus civilisation corpus of writing is amazingly incomplete. This must be the reason why the administrative archives of ancient India have not survived. Some inscriptions do, in fact, imply that there were administrative store houses of documents. That the Indians preferred to record most of the things of their lives on palm leaves has been known even as late as the late nineteenth century when the Indian census recorders of the period returned their ‘proformas’ incised on palm leaves."

"Only those who have experienced it know how precisely exacting it is. Old palm-leaf manuscripts resemble dried firewood. They are in the danger of breaking apart the moment one touches it. They have to be separated with extraordinary delicateness, care and caution. After this begins the process of reading them. The palm-leaves must first be coated with the juice of leafy greens. It only then that the alphabets will show themselves in black strokes. This is followed by the trouble of unchaining the shackles of the Mōḍi script. This is perhaps the greatest difficulty — it is not easily understood by the people of our era [late 19th century - early or mid 20th century]. Verses written on palm-leaves are not split into neatly ordered feet [Pāda or lines in metrical poetry]. In fact, even different poems are not separated from one another. The whole inscription or poetical work is written like a single sentence from start to finish akin to a chain. Indeed, at the minimum, it takes more than half a day to read just one side of a palm-leaf manuscript... Mere scholarship is insufficient to undertake this kind of work. The person needs extraordinary levels of enthusiasm and a superhuman standards of patience."